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The Mancubus chokes on the heart for a second before exploding into a bloody mist accompanied by gooey body parts and flesh.
The first chainsaw kill
Doom’s chainsaw and BFG (which we sadly didn’t see in action) are oddly not in the weapon wheel. Id realized players would need to switch to them quickly, so the chainsaw is drawn when the player hits down on the directional pad, and the BFG is immediately wielded by press the X button (on an Xbox One controller).
The chainsaw is not immediately available for play and is found in the game’s second level, jammed halfway into the corpse of a fallen UAC trooper. Your character extracts it from the body and is given the chance to immediately reap its rewards by using it against a horde of Possessed – zombified UAC personnel.
The chainsaw is the one weapon that strikes fear into the demon forces, and always delivers a one-hit kill. Some Possessed we encountered tried to block the chainsaw’s spinning blade by raising their hands up over their heads. Their efforts proved fruitless and just lead to more gruesome deaths, as the chainsaw cuts through their arms head and torso like a hot knife through butter. The blood and guts accompanying these gruesome acts are exaggerated, but again, quickly realized, allowing the player to grind through a horde of enemies in little time.
Hot swapping weapons
The only time Doom slows down for a second is when the player dives into the weapon wheel, which slows time to a crawl much like V.A.T.S. does in Fallout 4. This brief moment of respite gives a glimpse at the immediate threats ahead, but can break the combat rhythm you may have been rocking. To avoid breaking the flow, the player can hot swap between weapons by tapping right bumper and the wheel location of the desired weapon. The weapon is switched in the blink of an eye and keeps the carnage going.
Creating a chain reaction
As calculated as you want your attacks to be, sometimes unpredictable things happen. You’ll find these moments often occur when targeting the Possessed Engineer enemy type. This former UAC welder wears an explosive container that starts on fire when shot, and eventually explodes. If the canister is on fire and the trooper is knocked back into a pile of red explosive barrels, mayhem is unleashed. We used this technique to down a swarm of enemies, but also sustained a fair bit of damage in the process. Again, you have to keep each enemy type in mind when orchestrating your attack plans.
Developing your own play style
Game Informer’s crew of Matt Bertz, Wade Wojcik, and I all played Doom in different ways. We also saw Hugo Martin, id Software’s art and creative director, play through the game using an upgrade path that favored speed. The upgrades he chose allowed his character to mantle faster, switch weapons faster, swap mods faster, and glory kill faster. He also used a speed boost that stacks. He showed us how this configuration played out in a new stage called Lazarus Facility. This UAC research lab is surprisingly bright for a Doom game, almost looking like a Cerberus lab from Mass Effect 2, with white walls, state-of-the-art technology, and vibrant florescent lighting raining down on it all.
Id wasn’t willing to show off the upgrade systems or even talk about them at length during our time in the studio, but from what we saw in this playthrough, it looks like players will have a heavy hand in sculpting the character they want from a functionality standpoint.
Locating the hidden plasma rifle
Doom isn’t all about combat. When the demon legion isn’t trying to sever your head from torso, exploration takes center stage. The UAC environments are densely populated with high technology and containers in various states of disarray.
Each new area or bulkhead brings up exploration options. You’ll stumble upon locked doors requiring key cards (just like the old Dooms), and if you are thorough in your investigation, you'll find hidden areas tucked off to the side or occupying vertical spaces. I found a series of crates I could ascend, leading to a full armor pickup. Another series of vertical maneuvers gives way to the plasma rifle, which can also be obtained later in the game, but can be added now for eagle-eyed players. Marty Stratton, Doom’s game director and executive producer, says secrets like this are in great abundance and should give players plenty of reason to veer off the critical path to explore.
Grabbing a demon token in multiplayer
Controlling hero characters in multiplayer is usually an exhilarating experience, and Doom doesn’t disappoint in this regard with the demon token, an item that appears in the environment and turns the player into a monster that can rampage until it's downed by the opposing force. In the multiplayer matches I played, I grabbed the demon token twice, and used it to turn into a Revenant (a giant skeleton-like beast capable of raining death from shoulder-mounted rocket launchers), and the Baron of Hell, another towering icon of Doom’s past that can quickly rack up kills. The Baron has two attacks: a melee swipe that can damage or grab enemies, and an AOE ground pound that delivers radial damage. Both of these demons aren't just nuisances for the opposition, but potential game-changers that can even the odds of a match.
Achieving the last kill in a Clan Arena match
Doom’s version of the popular Last Man Standing multiplayer mode is called Clan Arena. The first team to achieve five wins in this rapid-fire mode wins. Die once and you are out, and are relegated to the role of switching camera feeds to watch your squad mates. This mode gives players full health, armor, and ammo, but there are no pick-ups or demon tokens to grab. While players can be downed quickly with charged snipe attacks (which are difficult to achieve given the game’s speed), this mode more so embraces duels, circle strafing, and picking away at your enemy's health. In almost every one of our rounds and matches, the final duel with the last man standing on a team was intense and fun to watch. Nabbing that last kill to give your team a victory feels damn good.
Building a SnapMap level in under 30 minutes
After completing our single-player and multiplayer sessions, we were whisked away to a conference room to get our hands on Doom’s SnapMap, the mod tools id is co-developing with Escalation Studios. Both Stratton and Escalation’s president and co-founder Tom Mustaine tell us that they didn’t want to do mods in a traditional way this time. Stratton even says that he drew inspiration from Garage Band. Next, we’re thrown into a series of tutorials that walk us through SnapMap’s controls and systems. The tools are easy to use, and as clichéd as this may sound, creating a playable area is as easy as snapping Legos together.
The modular pieces can be assembled quickly, and SnapMap has a clear visual language for letting you know when objects are intersecting or are not connecting. Various camera angles and zooms make this process a breeze. Placing objects and A.I. in the environments is just as easy. The tutorial even has a fun little moment where the player is asked to place explosive barrels around enemies. You know what happens next.
SnapMap offers simple systems for almost everything – from changing how much health an enemy has to making a terminal open a door or spawn a legion of beasts. If you’re making a four-player multiplayer map, you can even assign the A.I. in the environment to the four different teams.
We flew through the tutorials, and in under an hour were playing through our own single-player map filled with hallways, weapons, health drops, and enemies around every bend.
SnapMap doesn’t offer the high level of customization that previous Dooms did, but it does open the door for everyone to be able to make maps and levels. Id says SnapMap publishing and playing is as fast as loading a level. The only download that takes place is an instruction file, as players already have all of the content they'll be accessing.
Return to our hub throughout the month for more information on the single-player campaign, arena multiplayer, and the SnapMap creation engine. You can access the hub by clicking on the banner below.We recently popped down to Brighton for the day. We had a week off work with no real plans so we decided to spend a day eating all the Vegan food, wandering aimlessly up and down the sweet streets and sitting on the beach watching the seagulls.
PUREZZA PIZZA
We kicked off proceedings at Purezza Pizza which was recommended to me by my lovely Instagram friend Lizzie.
I had the Hawaain beauty in the top picture – cheeze, tomato, pineapple and seitan salami with added jalapeños and YES that is a stuffed crust!
Tom had the Fumosa – Tomato & Smokey BBQ Base, Cheese, Champignon and Chestnut Mushrooms, Smoked Tofu & Seitan Salami
The staff were really friendly, I loved the decor (check out that ceiling!) and they’re a dog friendly restaurant too (sadly I couldn’t quite sneak a pic of the gorgeous little mongrel at the other table). I want to go back!!
BISON BEER CRAFTHOUSE
Next stop was Bison Beer Crafthouse to pick up some beach beers and to fall in love with their decor.
BOHO GELATO
I was suprised to find that Boho Gelato weren’t an all Vegan joint. We had a choice of 6 out of 18 flavours.
I had the After Dinner Mint and Tom had the Cookies & Cream. Of the 6 flavours these were the only 2 that actually appealed to us, the rest were fruity offerings.
DEADWAX SOCIAL
We happened upon this bar totally by accident as rain interfered with our sitting on the beach til we were ready to eat again plans. It looks pretty small from the outside but it kept going back and back once we got inside.
I really liked the vibe in here and the music was amazing. They were mainly playing Mark Ronson’s Version and I was mainly chair dancing up a storm.
BEELZEBAB AT THE HOPE AND RUIN
This was our second Beelzebab visit (you can read about our first trip here). The decor in here is so cool, it’s all vintage, exposed brick, with bric a brac dotted all over the walls.
I had the seitan kebab meat with chips, Tom had a Tofu Dog with seitan kebab meat on top and we shared a portion of battered n deep fried gherkins and breaded n deep fried olives.
GLAZED
Before we rolled ourselves on to the train back to London we marched over to Glazed (another Lizzie recommendation) to try some of their Vegan doughnuts and my little heart broke when we found they were closed. Next time.One of America's premier spy planes, the SR-71 Blackbirds, had a final fling with the history books today, setting a transcontinental speed record before retiring to a museum home.
The black, dagger-shaped aircraft, which like the rest of the fleet is being retired by the Air Force because of budget cuts, flashed from coast to coast in 68 minutes 17 seconds, arriving at Dulles International Airport outside Washington to the cheers of hundreds of onlookers.
The old record was 3 hours 38 minutes, set in 1963 by a Boeing 707.
Refueling Over Pacific
The Blackbird took a running start, refueling over the Pacific Ocean at 60,000 feet before heading east from the California coastline and crossing its finish line near Salisbury, Md. The plane then refueled before cruising in to Dulles Airport.
The flight also set three other speed records certified by the National Aeronautic Association: 2,153.24 miles per hour between Los Angeles and Washington; 2,242.48 m.p.h. between St. Louis and Cincinnati, and 2,200.94 m.p.h. between Kansas City, Mo., and Washington. Sonic booms were reported in communities along the flight path as the plane completed its race across the continent.
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Two men were aboard: Lieut. Col. Ed Yeilding, the pilot, and Lieut. Col. J. T. Vida, the reconnaissance systems officer.
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Against overcast skies at Dulles, the plane ended its flight by dipping as low as 200 feet above the runway as it whistled past an official greeting gate, balls of fire trailing its huge engines as the pilot suddenly pointed the pencil-shaped fuselage toward the heavens.
It was one of the few public displays of a Blackbird. And despite the rush to publicize this final run, most details of the plane's design and capabilities are still top-secret. The Air Force will not even say how many Blackbirds exist.Zookeepers said on Friday that they plan to move Tori away from visitors who regularly throw lit cigarettes into her cage so they can watch and photograph her puffing away and flicking ashes on the ground.
The primate mimics human behavior, holding cigarettes casually between her fingers while taking long drags and blowing bursts of smoke out her nostrils to the delight of visitors.
Taru Jurug Zoo director Lili Krisdianto said the move was aimed to protect four endangered orangutans at the 14-hectare (35-acre) zoo in the Central Java town of Solo.
Results of a medical test are expected Saturday to determine how much Tori's smoking has affected her health, said Hardi Baktiantoro of the Borneo-based Center for Orangutan Protection, which is helping to coordinate the intervention. A mesh cover will initially be placed over Tori's cage, and later she will be moved to a small island away from the public, he said.
Several Indonesian zoos have come under scrutiny following animal deaths, including a giraffe that died in the long-troubled Surabaya Zoo in March with an 18-kilogram (40-pound) ball of plastic in its stomach after years of ingesting trash thrown into its enclosure by visitors.JAMMU: The BJP on Sunday said that the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution continues to be part of the party's core ideology and it will work in that direction whenever it garners the required numbers in Parliament."As far as the abrogation of Article 370 is concerned, it continues to be part of the core ideology of BJP, but right now we don't have enough numbers in Parliament to do away with it... but in future when we have the required numbers we will work towards its removal," BJP national spokesman Sambit Patra told reporters here on Sunday.Repealing Article 370, which grants special status to the state of Jammu & Kashmir, would require a two-thirds majority in Parliament as the Constitution would have to be amended.Patra said the BJP and PDP are ideologically different but both the parties came together to provide a stable government to the people of the state and for the sake of development."People here want development, the coalition has provided a historic opportunity, respecting the mandate of the people of all the three regions, now it should become a successful experiment for the sake of good governance and development," he said.Patra said "small controversies" do crop up when the coalition partners have differences in their core ideology but the Jammu & Kashmir government was being guided by the common minimum programme agreed upon by the two parties in the form of agenda for alliance.Accusing the Congress of running a disinformation campaign against the Narendra Modi government, the BJP spokesman said it was during the UPA tenure that major corporations were being benefited whereas the current government was working for the welfare of the poor."The UPA government, led by Congress, gave away coal blocks and spectrum to benefit these corporate houses, but the current government has benefited by selling the same to these corporate and the money is being used for the welfare of the poor," he said."Our stand is clear on this and we maintain that he should not be given a passport. The Congress has never been in favour of the separatists and national security is our primary concern," she said.The Congress leader alleged that incidents of cross border ceasefire violations have increased since the new government took over at the Centre."Where has that 56-inch chest gone which used to claim that we will give a befitting reply to the Pakistan side? Now you see that the incidents of cross border firing have seen a remarkable increase in the past one year," she said.Commenting on the recent remarks of Union minister of state for parliamentary affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi that "the people who want to eat beef must go to Pakistan", she said that it was "very unfortunate"."They won elections on the issue of development, but now they have taken a U-turn on every such issue, be it the black money or others... This government is a total failure... Now they want to decide what the people of the country should eat, what they should wear and what they should watch... This is really unfortunate," she said.Accusing BJP of cheating the people of Jammu region, Ojha said that the people in Jammu who voted for the party were now feeling disenchanted."Be it the issue of AIIMS, or the artificial lake, the people of Jammu have been duped by the BJP who has compromised on everything just to be in power with the PDP," she said.New Delhi: Known for his performances on the 'akhada', ace Indian wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt on Monday took everyone by surprise as he posted a patriotic poem on Twitter.
The Olympic medalist took to Twitter to react to the controversy that erupted last week at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) over holding an event on the campus against the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.
During the event, anti-India slogans were alleged to have been raised, while denouncing the hanging of Guru.
Subsequently, JNU Students' Union president Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested on sedition charges, following complaints by BJP MP Maheish Girri and ABVP.
Yogeshwar's thoughts were praised by his fans and here are a few reactions:
@DuttYogi we r proud of u bhai and the tight slap to the politicians who are supporting them and stands with them in antinational activities — Ankit Lakra (@imlakraankit) February 15, 2016
Yogi bhai rocks, true hero & son of soil!!! Proud of you bro!!! https://t.co/dx0tWxjMpY — Hemant Hooda (@hemanthooda) February 15, 2016
Mother Nation must be very proud over having son like @DuttYogi. https://t.co/gSnD3iZNo6 — Prafulla C Tiwari (@PrafullaCTiwari) February 15, 2016U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. and his wife, former Detroit City Council President Monica Conyers, have filed for divorce.
Wayne County Circuit Court records indicate she filed for divorce on Sept. 3 and he counter-sued on Sept. 21. The court documents offer few details on the cause, nor do they have to under Michigan’s no-fault laws.
Monica Conyers’ filing cites “a breakdown of marriage relationship to the extent that the objects of matrimony have been destroyed. There remains no reasonable likelihood the marriage can be preserved.”
When asked about the divorce, John Conyers told The Detroit News: “Umm, no. I’ll let you talk to her.” The Detroit Democrat and longest-serving member of Congress did not answer questions about the proceedings.
Royal Oak divorce attorney Daniel Findling confirmed he’s representing Monica Conyers but said, “It’s uncertain the direction the case is going to take in terms of whether the parties are going to divorce or seek other alternatives.
“We are working collaboratively with the other counsel to try to reach a resolution, which may or may not end in the termination of marriage,” Findling said. “It’s something we are still working through. There is nothing definite other than the filing.”
Speaking generally, Findling said “divorces are filed for a variety of reasons,” but he wouldn’t speak specifically about motives in this case.
The filing by 51-year-old Monica Conyers seeks spousal support and attorney fees. John Conyers, 86, is represented by Farmington Hills attorney Arnold E. Reed, who once represented former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. A message was left seeking comment.
A court officer has ordered a financial status quo and barred any transfer of assets or property.
Negative net worth
An analysis published in January by the Center for Responsive Politics determined the congressman is the fourth poorest member in Congress at an estimated worth of negative $187,500.
He has had a projected negative net worth since 2010, according to the center. In 2013, the center found that John Conyers had no assets, but was still on the hook for paying off a mortgage of $50,000 to $100,000, a personal loan of $10,000 to $15,000 and a student loan of at least $100,000.
The couple married June 4, 1990, after Monica Conyers went to Washington, D.C., to serve as a Lyndon B. Johnson intern and attend the University of the District of Columbia School of Law.
They have two grown sons. Over the years, the relationship has caused trouble for John Conyers, who was elected in 1965 and is the dean of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Monica Conyers was elected to the council largely on her family name in 2005 and served one rocky term. She feuded regularly with council members, including a dust-up that went viral on the Internet with council President Ken Cockrel Jr. in which she repeatedly called him “Shrek” and implored him to “do it baby.”
She pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2010 and was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for accepting money in exchange for her vote on a $1 billion sludge-hauling deal.
Out in 2013
Conyers was released in 2013 and for the past several months has worked for Neighborhood Legal Services in Detroit.
She has kept a low profile, occasionally appearing with her husband at events such as this year’s funeral of UAW Vice President General Holiefield.
Once the host of her own cable talk show, Conyers has stayed out of the headlines for the past few years.
There were a few exceptions.
Last year, John Conyers Jr. had to amend financial disclosure forms required by all U.S. House members after initially failing to include Monica Conyers’ $50,000 debt to retailer Neiman Marcus. He initially said she didn’t believe the debts needed to be disclosed.
This year, Monica Conyers sued a McDonald’s restaurant inside Detroit Metropolitan Airport for $25,000.
The suit claimed she cut her finger on a chair while en route to a swearing-in ceremony for her husband. The suit claimed the chair wasn’t properly assembled and she was severely injured.
The congressman has had his own problems. He almost didn’t make last year’s primary ballot because of disqualified petition signatures until a federal judge intervened.
jkurth@detroitnews.com
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/1L9dPEMThreatening graffiti featuring Nazi symbols has been sprayed on to the front of a centre for asylum seekers in Denmark.
The graffiti, which read 'this is the first warning', was sprayed across the front of the building alongside a swastika, with a minivan belonging to the centre also set on fire.
The spray painting also featured the letter DNSB, an abbreviation for Denmark's National Socialist Movement.
The asylum centre in Lyngbygaard in Denmark which was vandalised with Nazi graffiti sprayed over it
The spray painting also featured the letter DNSB, an abbreviation for Denmark's National Socialist Movement
The vandalism of the centre in Lyngbygaard comes amid a rise of attacks on migrants across Europe.
The centre hosts 120 asylum seekers and according to the Local, it is the third such attack on the facility in recent months.
In the previous incidents DNSB was also spray-painted on the building.
The first two attacks were written off as pranks but now police are investigating whether they were all politically motivated.
The incident comes just days after two drunken men broke into a refugee housing block and set fire to it in Leipzig.
Meanwhile German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that the migrant crisis could become a bigger challenge for the European Union than the Greek economy.
As well as being vandalised, the culprits also torched and destroyed the centre's minibus
It came as she addressed the issue of asylum seekers as she condemned a recent surge in attacks on refugee shelters in Europe.
Nearly a quarter of a million have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe this year, according to the International Organisation for Migration.It’s been a mere three weeks since we officially introduced this brand-new website to the Diablo III community, leading up to the much-anticipated game launch. Well, friends, the community site has leveled up and now offers you a host of new features and information.
Firstly, you’ll want to make sure you check out the expanded Game section. Most notably you’ll see a new button called “What’s New in Diablo III?” Whether you’ve been intently following news of the game over the years, or it’s your first time visiting the community site, this section will get you well acquainted with the Diablo series and where the third installment fits in its evolution. Be sure to check out the comprehensive review of Runestones, followers, crafting/artisans, and more in the “What’s New in Diablo III?” section.
The Game guide also includes everything you need to know about the hero classes available to you in Diablo III, encompassing a deluge of information on active skills, passive skills, and key class features, as well as screenshots, gameplay videos, artwork, lore, unique equipment breakdowns, armor progression previews, and resource overviews. Feel free to leave comments at the bottom of each class page to let us know what you think.
Until you get your mittens on a freshly baked copy of Diablo III, you’ll want to make use of the class Skill Calculator. You can use this calculator to explore unique builds for your favored class by selecting active skills, Runestones, and passive skills. If you think you’ve found the deadliest combination for your class, be sure to export your build and spread the word! This feature will allow you to share your creations with your Facebook friends and Twitter followers with the click of a button, or anywhere else on the web you’d like by copying the unique URL.
We hope this expanded set of community site features helps whet your appetite for Diablo III’s gameplay and story. And for those of you anxiously awaiting a beta invite, explore the new website content carefully, as you may even find a sneak peek of some non-beta content. Let us know what you think by visiting the Website Features forum and stay tuned for additional expansions of the Diablo III community site. We have a lot more in store for you, including an in-depth look at items and artisans, coming soon!The Android SDK is strictly for Java Programmers -- however, the Native Development Kit cracks the door to let some "C" inside
Java Only, please
The supported and prescribed manner of creating Android applications is via the Android SDK and that means writing your applications in Java.
But what if you have a large body of code already written in C and you want to take leverage that investment for your Android efforts? Should you port your code to Java? Porting your code may be the right answer, but before you start refactoring your code into Java, you should have a look at the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).
Introduced around the release of Android version 1.5, the Android NDK permits developers to write code in “C” that is then callable from Android applications written in Java. The plumbing between the environments is known as the Java Native Interface, or JNI.
JNI has been around for years as a means to permit Java developers to access vendor SDKs or other available C code. Early on, the majority of software vendors’ SDKs were provided as C language static or dynamic libraries — however, this didn’t do Java programmers much good.
The solution to providing the functionality of those SDKs to Java applications was to write a “wrapper” dll in C. The wrapper implemented the Java Native Interface and then proxies calls to the third-party dll. Over time as Java became more popular, some thoughtful vendors began shipping their libraries Java-ready by providing their own JNI wrappers. Today Android developers can leverage C code with JNI with the help of the NDK.
Using the NDK
The Android NDK is a separate download from the Android development site. The NDK is supported on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows, however Windows users need to install Cygwin in order to run the tools properly.
After downloading the NDK, you need to run a script found in the build subdirectory named host-setup.sh. Before running the script you need to set the environment variable named ANDROID_NDK_ROOT to point to your installation of the NDK. For example, on my machine I perform this with:
export ANDROID_NDK_ROOT=~/Software/android/ndkpath
Running this script does basically two things:
It first verifies that your build tools are compatible and that your paths are properly setup for the C and C++ compilers, and the linker. It also locates the pre-built libraries shipped with the NDK which are specific to the Android environment.
./host-setup.sh Detecting host toolchain. CC : compiler check ok (gcc) LD : linker check ok (gcc) CXX : C++ compiler check ok (g++) Generate : out/host/config.mk Toolchain : Checking for arm-eabi-4.2.1 prebuilt binaries Host setup complete. Please read docs/OVERVIEW.TXT if you don't know what to do.
The script also writes out a file named config.mk into a directory named $ANDROID_NDK_ROOT/build/out/host. This file is used by the build tools.
# This file was autogenerated by host-setup.sh. Do not edit! HOST_OS := darwin HOST_ARCH := x86 HOST_TAG := darwin-x86 HOST_CC := gcc HOST_CFLAGS := HOST_CXX := g++ HOST_CXXFLAGS := HOST_LD := gcc HOST_LDFLAGS := HOST_AR := ar HOST_ARFLAGS :=
Without this file, you cannot build NDK applications. Note that when running the script on my machine, I had to tweak the output directory location for the config.mk file to be written as there was an error in host-setup.sh. I was testing with version 1.5 of the NDK, so it is likely fixed in the latest release (1.6).
The NDK ships with two sample applications to exercise the NDK: a simple “Hello World” application named hello-jni and another project which demonstrates the use of both a static and a dynamic library. In addition to the “C” language components of these projects, the NDK also ships with sample Android Java applications to demonstrate loading and invoking the JNI code.
The NDK has a somewhat sophisticated build environment with a series of make files and make file “snippets” throughout the NDK installation. According to the documentation of the NDK, this build environment is very similar to the core Android source code base.
After getting the hello-jni code to compile, build and run successfully, I thought it would be worth the exercise to build one from scratch — or at least a healthy “cut, paste and modify” version of my own. So I created a simple application and JNI library to perform two basic tasks, each implemented as functions in a C source file. The first function just returns a string and the second increments a passed-in integer, returning the new value as an integer. Of course using JNI for such a task is not worth the effort, but once this is working, more sophisticated tasks are within our reach. Let’s have a quick look.
Building a JNI app
We’ll start by building our JNI C code, implementing the two methods of interest. Here is the C code.
#include <string.h> #include <jni.h> jstring Java_com_msi_linuxmagazine_jnisample_LMJNI_stringFromJNI( JNIEnv* env, jobject thiz ) { return (*env)->NewStringUTF(env, "Hello from Linux Magazine!"); } jint Java_com_msi_linuxmagazine_jnisample_LMJNI_incrementFromJNI(JNIEnv* env,jobject thiz,jint innumber) { return innumber + 1; }
Note the funny-looking function names! The methods are named according to the following pattern:
Java_<the fully qualified Java name space with “.” replaced with “_”>_methodname
In our Java code shown below, the Java package name is com.msi.linuxmagazine.jnisample and the class name is LMJNI. Therefore the function prefix is: “Java_com_msi_linuxmagazine_jnisample_LMJNI_”
Once the code is written, we also need a couple of Makefile snippets to grease the skids in the build process. The first file named Android.mk is required to compile the C code.
LOCAL_PATH := $(call my-dir) include $(CLEAR_VARS) LOCAL_MODULE := linuxmagazine LOCAL_SRC_FILES := linuxmagazine.c include $(BUILD_SHARED_LIBRARY)
The Java application is stored beneath the ANDROID_NDK_ROOT in a directory named apps. This directory contains a file named Application.mk which tells the NDK where to save the created JNI library file: liblinuxmagazine.so. The Android code is in a sub-directory named project. Here is the contents of the Application.mk file:
APP_PROJECT_PATH := $(call my-dir)/project APP_MODULES := linuxmagazine
To build the JNI code, change directory to the base of your NDK installation and run make, along with the specific target we want the build system to compile:
cd $ANDROID_NDK_ROOT make APP=linuxmagaine V=1
The V=1 makes the output verbose.
To perform a rebuild, add a -B option to the command line above. Here is what the verbose output looks like:
Android NDK: Building for application 'linuxmagazine' Compile thumb : linuxmagazine <= sources/samples/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.c build/prebuilt/darwin-x86/arm-eabi-4.2.1/bin/arm-eabi-gcc -Ibuild/platforms/android-1.5/arch-arm/usr/include -march=armv5te -mtune=xscale -msoft-float -fpic -mthumb-interwork -ffunction-sections -funwind-tables -fstack-protector -fno-short-enums -D__ARM_ARCH_5__ -D__ARM_ARCH_5T__ -D__ARM_ARCH_5E__ -D__ARM_ARCH_5TE__ -Isources/samples/linuxmagazine -DANDROID -O2 -DNDEBUG -g -c -MMD -MP -MF out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/objs/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.o.d.tmp sources/samples/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.c -o out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/objs/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.o build/core/mkdeps.sh out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/objs/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.o out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/objs/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.o.d.tmp out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/objs/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.o.d SharedLibrary : liblinuxmagazine.so build/prebuilt/darwin-x86/arm-eabi-4.2.1/bin/arm-eabi-gcc -nostdlib -Wl,-soname,liblinuxmagazine.so -Wl,-shared,-Bsymbolic out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/objs/linuxmagazine/linuxmagazine.o -Wl,--whole-archive -Wl,--no-whole-archive build/platforms/android-1.5/arch-arm/usr/lib/libc.so build/platforms/android-1.5/arch-arm/usr/lib/libstdc++.so build/platforms/android-1.5/arch-arm/usr/lib/libm.so -Wl,--no-undefined -Wl,-rpath-link=build/platforms/android-1.5/arch-arm/usr/lib /Users/fableson/Software/android/android-ndk-1.5_r1/build/prebuilt/darwin-x86/arm-eabi-4.2.1/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-eabi/4.2.1/interwork/libgcc.a -o out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/liblinuxmagazine.so Install : liblinuxmagazine.so => apps/linuxmagazine/project/libs/armeabi mkdir -p apps/linuxmagazine/project/libs/armeabi install -p out/apps/linuxmagazine/android-1.5-arm/liblinuxmagazine.so apps/linuxmagazine/project/libs/armeabi/liblinuxmagazine.so build/prebuilt/darwin-x86/arm-eabi-4.2.1/bin/arm-eabi-strip --strip-debug apps/linuxmagazine/project/libs/armeabi/liblinuxmagazine.so
That was fun — now we have our liblinuxmagazine.so sitting in $ANDROID_NDK_ROOT/apps/linuxmagazine/libs/armeabi.
Now let’s create our Android Java application to exercise our JNI code.
The application has two TextView (edit box) fields and two buttons, organized into pairs. The first pair is used to exercise the “get a string” JNI function and the second is used for the “increment a number” function. This image shows the user interface of the application before the buttons are clicked.
Before running JNI code
Now, let’s look at the code for this Java application:
package com.msi.linuxmagazine.jnisample; import android.app.Activity; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.View; import android.widget.TextView; import android.widget.Button; public class LMJNI extends Activity { /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); Button btnGetString = (Button) this.findViewById(R.id.btnGetString); btnGetString.setOnClickListener(new Button.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { TextView label = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.TheLabel); label.setText(stringFromJNI()); // calling a JNI function here! } }); Button btnAddNumber = (Button) this.findViewById(R.id.btnAddNumber); btnAddNumber.setOnClickListener(new Button.OnClickListener(){ public void onClick(View v) { TextView numberField = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.number); int operand = Integer.parseInt(numberField.getText().toString()); int answer = incrementFromJNI(operand); // calling a JNI |
ildade em pessoa. pic.twitter.com/eROnX294Pp — Philipe Coutinho (@Phil_Coutinho) May 10, 2014
The dinner with the team. Celebrating an amazing season. Thanks very much for your support always and… http://t.co/R9RbHHeygF — José enrique (@Jesanchez3) May 11, 2014
a shame not to win the league, back to the year to #UCL pic.twitter.com/xdAGvrm2wH — Iago Aspas Juncal (@aspas10) May 11, 2014
We end the season on a high! Next year @ChampionsLeague and #WeGoAgain in @premierleague thanks for your support throughout! #YNWA — Simon Mignolet (@SMignolet) May 11, 2014
Me and the legend Cafu pic.twitter.com/wyKASxybiC — jon flanagan (@jon_flan93) May 10, 2014
Really enjoyed today. Thank you very much everybody!!:) ynwa. pic.twitter.com/4uGKgviPlt — Daniel Agger (@DanielAgger) May 11, 2014
Thanks to all of you for this exceptional and very enriching year here in Liverpool. Special thanks for the supporters! #YNWA — Mamadou Sakho (@mamadousakho3) May 12, 2014
the support the team has had this season has been incredible thank you to everyone — Victor Moses (@VictorMoses) May 11, 2014Keen to try a twist on your morning brew? Try the 'Bulletproof' coffee, a strong espresso with coconut oil, unsalted butter and a hint of natural vanilla.
A new butter coffee craze sweeping the globe has arrived in New Zealand but caffeine aficionados are divided on the drink dubbed bulletproof, while a nutritionist warns of the health risks.
For those who don't know, bulletproof coffee or a fat black is the hip new thing with the paleo crowd and the clean-eating campaigners. It was invented, or adopted, by American health entrepreneur Dave Asprey who turned it into a business.
Apparently yak butter and coffee has been a thing in Tibet for a very long time.
Since his initial recipe, the concept has evolved and every cafe doing it has their own signature twist.
Some say it makes you feel full for longer, gives you a bigger caffeine kick and is "high performance coffee".
Others say it contains unnecessary fats and is not a good choice.
At Pure Cafe Co on Bealey Ave in Christchurch, the ingredients are simple: a double shot of coffee, 2 tablespoons of organic extra virgin coconut oil, 1 tablespoon of organic butter, hot water and natural vanilla. It all goes in a blender and into a coffee cup and will cost you $6.
Pure manager and barista Kate Grange says it's geared more towards active people. It contains saturated fats and you wouldn't want to be drinking it if you aren't fit and healthy.
Grange has tried it herself and says it gives her a longer lasting energy boost.
So, what is it really like?
While waiting for my Pure bulletproof brew, I'm imagining a gluggy, fatty mess in a cup. What they serve up is far from it.
The addition of hot water helps thin the mixture to a light smoothie-style consistency. It's foamy and light, and smells delicious - that's the coconut and vanilla kicking in.
It's served lukewarm and the first sip goes down easily. It's a little bit sweet, with the espresso taste lingering on the back of the tongue.
The coconut oil leaves your lips feeling moisturised.
Fitness enthusiast and clean eater Hayleigh McDonald-Tooley, a bulletproof tasting guinea pig, loves her first bulletproof and would consider it as a regular morning pick me up.
It fits her clean eating lifestyle and she likes the taste.
All in all, it's completely drinkable and certainly delivers a caffeine punch. I wouldn't drink it every day, but it could be a winner on those tough days after a hard workout.
In Whangarei, The Press Cafe added fat blacks to the menu about two weeks ago, and owner Ana Luiten says she sells at least one a day, mostly to people interested in the novelty value.
Luiten's recipe involves mixing a teaspoon of butter and a teaspoon of coconut oil into hot water before pouring over a double espresso shot.
The finished product tastes like a long black but smells like coconut, she says.
"It leaves a slight oily texture in your mouth."
The $3.50 fat blacks were added to the menu not for their flavour but because she believed it was healthy, she said.
"It's sort of an up and go."
But Otago University Professor Jim Mann says the fatty concoction is not healthy nor will it provide slow-release energy throughout the day.
"It has no merit whatsoever," Mann says.
"Butter is the one single saturated fat that is unequivocally not good for the population as a whole."
Coconut is a slightly more healthy saturated fat than butter, but is still not a source of slow-release energy, he said.
"To claim any health benefits whatsoever including slow-release energy is as close to non-science as possible."
There is no evidence to suggest that high-fat diets or paleo diets are of any benefit in the long term, though it may help with short-term weight loss, Mann says.
New Zealand Speciality Coffee Association executive director Aymon McQuade said adding butter and coconut oil to coffee would "massively raise the cholesterol" levels.
He would be surprised if the trend takes off in New Zealand cafes.
"As a coffee enthusiast I would say it's more of a fad than something that's likely to stick for very long," McQuade said.
Mixing fat with high quality beans undermined all the work which had gone into producing a good cup of coffee, he says.By Damodar MallRitu Agarwal, a banker in Delhi, was on her way to London for an extended training trip. At the swanky new airport in Delhi, she stood in the check-in queue of the airline, and found something pushing against the back of her legs. When she looked back, she found the passenger behind her gesturing her to move forward, his baggage trolley nudging her ahead. Ritu found that there was a gap between her and the person in front, and the passenger behind her was urging her to close the gap. Ritu is a frequent international traveler because of her job, and nowhere is she prodded like this when she's in a queue. She moved ahead and all was well yet again. No more prodding.Try this experiment anywhere in India -In a supermarket billing queue, keep a polite distance of about a foot and a half between your trolley and the shopper in front of you. Now count the number of ways in which fellow shoppers close the gap. See how someone simply comes along and steps right into the space in front. Just as you're sending the interloper to the back of the queue, you experience the slight but firm nudge on your lower calf from the trolley behind you. When you turn back, the person with the trolley will make a gentle gesture for you to move forward. If you continue to resist the myriad ways in which people try to force you into closing the gap, it will soon be used by people as a corridor for ‘cutting’ across to the other side.Some time back, on my request, Piyul Mukherjee and her Proact consumer research team repeated this very curious experiment on queues of all kinds in urban India — at bus stops, train stations, airports, colleges, temples, fancy buffet counters in five star hotels, farmhouse marriage parties, and multiplexes. The findings were illuminating and near identical. The conclusion of the study read as follows: ‘If you leave a space measuring more than your forearm — from the tip of your finger to your elbow — between you and the person just ahead of you in a queue, in India, such a gap is just not feasible to sustain. It shall get bridged or occupied within five minutes.’ We called this the ‘Elbow Push Factor’.It’s interesting that the elbow push factor rule applies with equal validity across income and social strata. Most of us wouldn’t agree. We’ve been brought up on Western notions of politeness and what constitutes civic behaviour. We are taught to give room, be patient and respect the personal space of a couple of feet around others.But the forearm rule tells us that our collective behaviour is at complete variance with these notions of urban privacy. While we have `learnt' to respect privacy, our inherent attitude towards it is somewhat different. For Indians, personal space isn't defined in physical terms. We see nothing wrong or disrespectful or invasive in jostling each other around. Intellectually we might find such behaviour distasteful, but nonetheless it is part of our ethos and so cannot be dismissed.Quite simply, this is how we are.But do designers of public spaces adequately take into account our 'need' for a little bit of crowding? That sounds funny. Are we really in need of crowding? How can anyone want to get crowded!?The explanation isn't too difficult to find. Culturally, we have always had a bias towards the collective. Our instincts of family, community, chawl, and mohalla are still deep-rooted. Even our gods are not individual heroes, but 'family people', unlike in the west. In an overcrowded country like India, we are natural, instinctive, benign intruders into each others' lives. We see nothing wrong or uncouth in developing intimacy with another person, even a total stranger.We easily pick up conversations with strangers while waiting for our flight to board, or to be served at a fast food restaurant, or even when we are sitting in a library. We are comfortable in crowded areas -weddings or marketplaces. So why should we balk at slight nudges in queues?With crowding comes competition. For as long as we remember, we have had to compete for everything -for money, goods, space, and comfort.Need a bus? Push for a seat. Need college admission? Good luck with getting it! There are ten applicants jostling for each seat. Need to see your favourite god? Darshan queues at the temple can be 24 hours long. Less than a quarter of a century ago, you had to fight to get milk from a milk booth because of shortage. We have been competing with fellow shoppers, travelers, students, and devotees for getting just a little ahead. In that mindset, 'wasting' precious queue space just does not gel with our instincts. A gap in the queue is a potential competitive risk that makes us uncomfortable.Some western retail pundits talk about the 'butt-brush factor'. That is, people don't like getting jostled or bumped into, especially from behind. They get put off and reduce or completely give up purchasing when they encounter the 'buttbrush factor' in a store. Ironically, in India, retailers who have taken this as gospel truth and worked hard to offer immunity from the buttbrush find themselves struggling with inadequate numbers of customers. In the Indian scheme, luxurious and spacious layouts are decoded as wasteful and therefore expensive by average customers! Indeed the colloquial speak in Hindi for spacious stores is not'shaant' (quiet or peaceful), but'soona' (forlorn, empty).Excerpted from 'Supermarketwala: Secrets to Winning Consumer India' by Damodar Mall with permission from Random House IndiaMost soldiers who take their own lives today have no history of deployment. They’ve never seen combat, never been to war.
Nobody really knows why.
And although the military’s suicide problem flared during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so far it doesn’t seem to be ending with them.
About 53 percent of those who died by suicide in the military in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, had no history of deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, according (pdf) to the Defense Department. And nearly 85 percent of military members who took their lives had no direct combat history, meaning they may have been deployed but not seen action.
Thinking about Suicide?
Call 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) for free, confidential help for veterans and active-duty service members. Also text 838255 or chat
Grieving a Loved One?
Call 1-800-959-8277 The TAPS line is manned 24/7, or get help Call 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) for free, confidential help for veterans and active-duty service members. Also text 838255 or chat online Call 1-800-959-8277 The TAPS line is manned 24/7, or get help online
“So we’re dealing with broader societal issues,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a June speech. “Substance abuse, financial distress and relationship problems — the risk factors for suicide — also reflect problems … that will endure beyond war.”
While suicide has increased across all branches of the military over the last decade, the Army has seen the most significant spikes.
According to figures released last week, there were 303 suicides in the Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve so far this year. Of these, 93 deaths are still under investigation. Last year, the Army had 283 suicides.
Causes of suicide are complex and unique to each individual, so there’s no simple reason why service members are taking their lives in greater numbers now.
But findings by experts who have studied the problem in the military offer some insight into what military leaders now recognize as one of their greatest challenges.
The Stresses of War
The military’s suicide problem seems to be rooted partly in the strain of war. The U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan for 11 years, most of them while also battling a protracted insurgency in Iraq. Deployments for many service members were extended, sometimes up to 15 months.
That stress has increased the burden on all service members, regardless of whether they’ve been deployed, said Craig Bryan, a psychology professor and associate director of the National Center of Veterans’ Studies at the University of Utah, where he studies the link between military stress and suicide.
Confirmed 2012 Under Investigation Total 2012 Total 2011 Army (includes Guard and Reserve) 210 93 303 283
2012 2011 Navy
(includes Reserves) 62 59 Marines 46 32 Air Force
(includes Guard and Reserves) 71 70 Coast Guard
(includes Reserves) 6 7 *Data reported by each military branch as of December 2012
He’s conducting a three-year study, now nearly completed, to try to better understand the root cause of suicide in the military. One thing he noticed: stress levels across the military began rising in 2004, even among those who hadn’t deployed, along with the suicide rate.
“Even if I’m not deployed, if everyone else at my base is, there are less people around to do the same jobs,” Bryan said. “I have more work that I have to accomplish. If I’m not deploying … everyone else is going and I’m left behind, I’m not pulling my weight.”
A unit’s deployment history can be as important as that of an individual soldier’s in determining whether that person is at risk for suicide, said Dr. Elspeth Ritchie, previously the Army’s top psychiatrist and now the chief clinical officer for the District of Columbia’s mental health department.
Ritchie studied the past 10 years of suicides in the Army, and found that bases that suffered the most suicides tended to be those where units were deploying rapidly, she said.
It wasn’t just because soldiers were seeing more combat, she said. Returning soldiers have less time or energy to connect with new recruits or those who haven’t deployed.
The elevated pace also leaves commanders with less time to form personal relationships with the soldiers in their charge, meaning they’re less likely to spot troubled troops until it’s too late.
“These sergeants will tell me, ‘We’re moving so fast, I don’t have time, I don’t know my men and women,'” Ritchie said. “The sergeants who in the past took care of the new kids are so busy preparing for the next (deployment), there just isn’t the same sense of cohesion that we used to have.”
That loss of cohesion can leave soldiers who aren’t being deployed feeling disconnected and without a sense of purpose — one of the risk factors for suicide — in positions where firearms are in easy reach. Most military suicides involve guns, either service weapons or personal firearms.
What the Military’s Doing Now
The Pentagon has been spending millions to figure out why service members are taking their lives in greater numbers now. Suicide prevention has become a “top priority” for the military, Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said in an email. “Our most valuable resource within the department is our people. We are committed to taking care of our people, and that includes doing everything possible to prevent suicides in the military.”
The military has launched a $50 million study of mental health — the largest it has ever done — to better understand the risks and factors that lead to suicide, to be completed in 2014. It’s also spending about $17 million on a team of researchers to come up with solutions unique to the military.
In the meantime, it has increased the number of behavioral health care providers by 35 percent over the past three years, both in primary care settings and embedded in units deployed to the front lines. The goal: to make sure every service member is screened for depression or suicidal thoughts, even when they’re just getting routine physical check-ups. The military has also expanded its crisis hotline to Europe, and plans to open one in Japan soon. (The number is 1-800-273-8255.)
The military has unfurled a host of suicide prevention programs and initiatives.
Service members are encouraged to look out for their “battle buddies” when it comes to mental health, using, in true military fashion, acronyms. For the Army, Navy and Air Force, it’s ACE: Ask your buddy if he’s having suicidal thoughts, Care about your buddy, and Escort your buddy to a health-care provider if they might harm themselves. It’s being taught across the military as one of the best practices for suicide prevention. The Marines also have NLMB: Never Leave a Marine Behind.
The military has also started to “talk about” finding ways to restrict quick access to weapons for those troops who might be at risk, such as gun locks, and better tracking of service members’ personal weapons, said Rajeev Ramchand, a RAND analyst who conducted a 2011 analysis of the military’s suicide prevention efforts.
Suicide’s Lingering Stigma
The military culture, rooted in resilience, has struggled to deal with the problem.
Gen. Peter Chiarelli, at the time the Army’s second-in-command, said the stigma of suicide is “especially pronounced in the military,” in a report (pdf) released earlier this year assessing the health of the Army.
“Acknowledging a problem, particularly anything associated with an individual’s mental health, is frequently perceived as admitting weakness or failure,” he wrote, and noted “the perception among Leaders and Soldiers that help-seeking behavior will either be detrimental to their career (e.g., prejudicial to promotion or selection to leadership positions) or that it will reduce their social status among their peers.”
The military has found that only about half of service members who need help seek treatment, Chiarelli said.
People within and outside the military who are working to end suicide say that it’s up to the commanders to challenge those perceptions. Chiarelli, for example, had been a strong advocate for combating the stigma before he retired earlier this year. (He is now the chief executive of One Mind for Research, a nonprofit group dedicated to curing brain disorders.)
But in May, a blunt blog post by Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, the commander of Fort Bliss, Texas, summed up the sentiment that some victims’ advocates say remains pervasive in the military.
“I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act,” Pittard wrote, in comments that have since been scrubbed from the website. “I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us.”
Pittard’s remarks surprised advocates because the major general had worked hard to reduce suicide in the military. But the day he pounded out that blog post, he had just returned from a memorial service for a soldier who had killed himself in front of his six-year-old daughters. Pittard later retracted his remarks, saying that they were “hurtful” and “not in line with the Army’s guidance regarding sensitivity to suicide.” “With my deepest sincerity and respect towards those whom I have offended, I retract that statement,” he said.
Still, that blog post “throws us back years,” said Kim Ruocco, who directs suicide outreach for survivors at the nonprofit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS. “When you say someone’s a malingerer, dropping their pack, it’s a weak thing to do — it completely sets everybody back.”
Ruocco’s own husband, a major in the Marines, took his life after a deployment in Iraq, where he had flown 70 combat missions. Before he died, she said, he worried that if his commanders knew he was struggling, they would think he wasn’t strong enough to go back to war.
That stigma can work even harder on those who haven’t deployed, according to Bryan and Ritchie: Those who have never been deployed might feel even more ashamed to admit to being depressed, for fear that others might think they’d never be tough enough to go.
No Simple Answers Melinda Pickerel doesn’t know why her son took his life, but not being deployed might have been one of the stressors that overwhelmed him. Either way, his story underscores the difficulties in finding any one solution for the military’s suicide problem. Charles Parsons, who was known to his family as Adam, was a smart young man who enlisted in the Navy right after graduating from high school, in 1998, at age 19, Pickerel said. He served on the U.S.S. Maryland, a ballistic missile submarine, for three years, and married a woman he’d fallen in love with shortly before he’d gone to boot camp. Then life became more difficult. Parsons’ wife was diagnosed with a mental illness. His younger brother, a Navy security officer, was deployed to Iraq. Parsons, who was never deployed, was moved to a different job as an electronics technician on Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia — a move he considered a demotion. A week before his death, Parsons reported to work unshaven and unkempt. He was ordered to report the next day to the captain in his dress uniform for a reprimand. The next day, Parsons reported for duty as scheduled. He went home a few hours later to change into his dress blues. He said goodbye to his wife and left the house. He never reported to the captain. Parsons’ body was found in the trunk of his car outside his home in January 2007. He’d shot himself. He was 27, and he left no note. His mother said the Navy was supportive after Parsons’ death, even if officials didn’t have any answers, either. “He sunk into a depression and it just got so bad that nobody, none of his co-workers recognized,” she said. “He hid it very well.”
Listen to a radio segment produced in collaboration with this story from PRI’s The World.The cleric’s brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, and his elderly mother died in the firefight. After the siege was over, Mr. Aziz was charged with murder, abduction, arson and terrorism. Yet within a couple of years, the mosque and Mr. Aziz were back in business.
Malik Riaz Hussain, a sympathetic property tycoon, provided a temporary home for hundreds of madrasa students and spent at least $150,000 on refurbishing the bullet-pocked mosque. He attributed his generosity to pragmatism rather than to religious conviction.
“I have huge interests in Islamabad and Rawalpindi,” the businessman, who has close ties to the military, told The New York Times in a 2010 interview. “Bad law and order is bad for my business.”
The city provided land worth millions of dollars in central Islamabad for the rebuilding of Jamia Hafsa, a women’s madrasa that was bulldozed after the 2007 siege. The madrasa, whose construction is not complete, is home to the Osama bin Laden library.
But it is the courts that have been most indulgent toward Mr. Aziz and his followers. Over the past year, judges have dismissed all of the 27 criminal charges against Mr. Aziz, who at times has used the courtroom as a pulpit to call for the imposition of Shariah law.
Instead, the court’s attention has mostly focused on Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former military ruler. A judicial inquest determined that General Musharraf, not Mr. Aziz, was responsible for the deaths during the siege of the Red Mosque, even though armed jihadis from banned militant groups had joined the students inside.
In October, a senior judge, prompted by Mr. Aziz’s lawyers, charged General Musharraf for his role in the siege and placed him under house arrest. In recent weeks the Martyrs Foundation, a group that represents the families of students who died in the siege, petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent General Musharraf from leaving Pakistan until the completion of his treason trial, underway now.It's not unusual for a newly-revealed video game to disappear for eight months. It's not weird to be amazed by a game and then neither see nor hear anything about it for a while.
The silence around Star Wars 1313, LucasArts' seemingly next-gen game that wowed onlookers at last June's E3 show, is nevertheless unusual. The game's disappearance, our sources say, has hidden the latest in some tumultuous turns in the game's development—turns that, frustratingly, cloud the future of what could be an amazing game.
Three unrelated sources familiar with game development at LucasArts have all told us that development on the game has been frozen or put on hold since the Disney company's November acquisition of Star Wars creator George Lucas' media empire. That freeze has caused a game that was slated for a late 2013 release on next-gen platforms to potentially miss this year's E3 and to slide into next year.
LucasArts won't talk about the status of 1313, other than to assure us, when we asked, that it's not cancelled. "LucasArts has been working diligently to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities that the new Star Wars movies present," a company spokesperson told us, when we inquired about the status of the game. "Star Wars 1313 continues production."
We don't need Bothan spies to tell us that 1313 was shaping up to at the very least look amazing. But we've heard from our sources that there was and is a lot more to be excited about this game than its next-gen lighting tech. Our sources are not authorized to speak on the record about new games like 1313, but they have proven reliable about a range of gaming industry topics in the past.
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The game was conceived in 2009, we've been told privately, as a tie-in to a planned live-action Star Wars TV show. The show was set to take place between the prequel Star Wars trilogy and the classic one, as was the game. The game was called Underworld, according to one of our sources, and was, like the show, going to be for an adult audience. The 1313 title, after all, refers to the seedy underworld on the planet Coruscant, where crime, violence, drugs and other seedier elements exist. That underworld would be the setting for the show and the game.
In what will surely drive fans of great Star Wars games a bit mad, Underworld/1313 was, we're told, originally going to be an open-world role-playing game similar to the beloved BioWare title Knights of the Old Republic but with episodic character updates delivered regularly over DLC. Story arcs would go to some dark places, touching on terrorism, the dealings of crime families and prostitution.
We're told that the game was scaled back in 2010 after budgetary concerns put the TV show on hold. The game was re-written with a new story that was disconnected from the TV-show material. And this is where what our sources say gets even more interesting. LucasArts supposedly was set to reinvent itself in 2011 under then-studio-president Paul Meegan, attempting to make Star Wars-style games in popular genres. There would be a Star Wars riff on FarmVille and a Call of Duty-style first-person shooter codenamed Trigger. 1313 was switched from codename Underworld to codename Hive and given platforming elements, similar to Sony's hit series Uncharted. A LucasArts rep declined to comment about any of this.
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1313 was, we're told, originally going to be an open-world role-playing game similar to the beloved BioWare title Knights of the Old Republic.
Development on the game began to proceed quite well going into either 2011 or 2012 when George Lucas himself apparently saw the game. One source mentions that Lucas "loved" the game and encouraged the developers to weave stories and characters from the TV scripts. The game's storylines would answer such questions as "Who is Boba Fett?", "Why was Han working for Jabba?" and "Who were the Bothan spies?" Lucas' requests were not to be ignored, that source says, leaving the developers of the re-named 1313 with a game that had backing from the man in charge but without a concrete story or characters. A new story was still in the works when the game was shown at E3 2012.
The game dazzled at E3 and then, as any observers have noticed, went dark.
One likely venue for 1313's re-emergence was last week's PlayStation 4 event. There, finally, LucasArts could stop being coy and admit the game was next-gen. But 1313 was not shown at Sony's PS4 event, though LucasArts was listed as a developer for the Holiday 2013 console.
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For weeks we've heard from multiple sources that the Disney purchase of LucasFilm (which includes LucasArts) has reoriented the company's gaming division. The focus is on the new trilogy, not on material that is unrelated to the planned JJ Abrams-directed Star Wars: Episode VII. 1313's developers may still be fervently plugging away, for all we know. As LucasArts says, the game "continues production." But it sounds from our sources like it's not currently moving forward in any official capacity.
Gamers routinely root for whichever game might be the next great Star Wars adventure. Sometimes, they're left with the disappointment of a bad game or a cancelled game. Sure, they can't all be Rogue Squadrons and X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighters and KOTORs. But after the debacle of last spring's clunky Kinect Star Wars and the oddly skimpy The Force Unleashed II before it—or even the scuttled Battlefront III—1313 restored hope of something terrific to play in the Star Wars universe.
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Kinect Star Wars: The Kotaku Review If you know how to use the Internet, you will have little trouble finding people who will tell you… Read more Read
Brimming with potential, 1313 is not a game Star Wars fans would want to see left behind. It seems that, if you want this game to be made, now would be a good time to let Disney know.
As we find out more, we'll let you know.
UPDATE: Here's one other bit of odd 1313 news for you..
Last week's episode of the animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, was set in... the same location as the game, level 1313 underworld on the planet Coruscant. See for yourself on the official StarWars.com slideshow for the episode. Specifically, slide... 13:
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A tease? A vestige of some part of this saga that is no longer planned? We know as much as you do.A Wisconsin man who was pronounced dead by paramedics after collapsing at his Milwaukee apartment began to move his limbs and breathe just before he was going to be taken to the morgue.
Thomas Sancomb's girlfriend had not been able to reach him for two days so she called police Tuesday asking for an officer to check on him at his home in a high-rise building.
A fire department officer entered the 46-year-old's apartment with the building manager and found the man collapsed at the end of his bed, according to the heavily redacted report from the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner.
Thomas Sancomb (far right) was pronounced dead by paramedics after collapsing at his Milwaukee apartment
About 50 minutes later, Sancomb had'spontaneous respirations' and began moving his left arm and right leg
The officer called 911 and paramedics from the Milwaukee Fire Department arrived and found Sancomb 'cold to the touch and in rigor' and did not attempt to resuscitate him, the report said.
Sancomb was pronounced dead at 2.10pm at the apartment, forensic investigator Genevieve Penn wrote in the report.
Penn then called Sancomb's brother, John Sancomb, to inform him of the death and an autopsy to determine the cause of death was requested.
A transport team arrived to take the body to the morgue, but at about 3pm Sancomb had some'spontaneous respirations' and began moving his left arm and right leg,
No pulse was evident, but Penn summoned paramedics back to the apartment and called the family.
Sancomb's pulse returned and he was taken to Columbia St. Mary's Hospital, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit.
His diagnosis at the hospital was redacted from the report.
The Milwaukee Fire Department is investigating the incident, WISN reported.
Assistant Chief Gerard Washington said: 'We're doing an internal investigation to make sure that everything we did followed protocol.
'It's an active investigation, so I can't comment in detail.'
Hospital spokesman Evan Solochek said no information could be disclosed because of federal privacy laws.
Sancomb's brother told the medical examiner that his sibling had a drink and a cigar every once in a while but did not use street drugs.
He told The Associated Press that his brother is improving every day and was concerned he wasn't walking well when he last saw him two weeks ago.
'Thomas' health is the most important thing we're focusing on right now,' he said, declining to talk further about the incident.
The medical examiner's office declined to comment on the case.
The Milwaukee Police Department only said officers responded to a welfare check and found the man unresponsive in a bedroom.There’s a market for buying handmade baby goods with Bitcoin, and at least one innovative mom-and-pop shop has swooped in to fill that need.
Cozee Baby's model shows off his parents' product line.
For the United Kingdom’s Cozee Baby, business is booming. Since Kasia Styczynska and her software developer husband, Maciej began accepting the popular cryptocurrency, Maciej said Bitcoin payments are second only to PayPal.
In a world where even world governments aren’t sure what to make of Bitcoin, navigating the world of digital payments was at first difficult for such a small family shop. It took a lot of time and effort not just for the couple, but for customers who were sometimes unfamiliar with Bitcoin. Still, Styczynska was quick to say “it pays off very quickly.”
“We perceive Bitcoin as an innovation and hoping that more and more people will be conversant with Bitcoin payments every day requiring less and less time on our side to support it,” he said.
Bitcoin’s Allure for Small Business
The Styczynskas are part of a tiny but growing trend of small businesses that accept Bitcoin. SpendBitcoins and the Bitcoin Yellow Pages list hundreds of local shops that name Bitcoin as an accepted payment method. By popular request, the unofficial Bitcoin wiki includes a tutorial about how small businesses can implement a Bitcoin payment system.
According to Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the major draw comes down to revenue.
“Bitcoin can be cheaper and faster over commercial payments than PayPal. It’s cheaper than Visa or MasterCard. If you’re a small business merchant and want to accept electronic payments, you first have to apply to join the network—and yes, there’s an application fee. If you get accepted, each swipe of any credit card you take costs you 0.25 cents. In addition, you have to return three to six percent of the sales total to the credit card company. That’s a lot off the bottom line, especially for a small business.
“With Bitcoin, you don’t need permission to start accepting it. And fees [which go to Bitcoin miners, to help run the network] are less than one percent.”
While a complicated new currency isn’t set to help out big box stores, to small businesses that hang their livelihood on the bottom line, any way to retain more of a profit is likely worth a shot.
Hanna-Made Soaps.
For Ashley Hanna of Hanna-Made Soaps, it came down to reaching more people, more cheaply, no matter where her buyers were coming from.
“Bitcoin is advantageous in that it is one exchange rate all over the world—not like when you pay for something online in the US with a credit card from Canada, get your statement and it’s that much more of a charge for the exchange rate,” she said. “Bitcoin can be sent to your wallet basically instantaneously, no holds, no fees.”
Bitcoin Trending
One part of the appeal of Bitcoin, to be sure, is using cutting-edge technology to stand out from the crowd. All of the small businesses I spoke to were enthusiastic about the attention becoming a Bitcoin vendor had been getting them.
For Michelle Larson-Sadler of Conscious Cookery, right now it’s less about profit than hype.
“I am still waiting for my first customer [that pays in Bitcoin], but the interest is growing week by week,” she said.
Conscious Cookery is a sustainable foods shop that uses Bitcoin as a marketing draw. Larson-Sadler said she got interested in Bitcoin through her husband, an IT operations analyst. He configured her website to accept the currency. Starting this November, the pair will also accept Bitcoin in person at the local farmer’s market using smart phones.
“It’s obvious that the United States dollar has become weaker and weaker as a player in the global economy and people are searching for options other than paying with dollars and cents,” she said. “I feel that we are on the edge of something really new as the economy continues its sluggish trend.”
When Boris |
better circumstances,” she says.
The Scottish index survey highlighted stark differences.
In 2009, 347 out of every 100,000 people in Scotland spent time in hospital because of heart attacks and angina, but the numbers for Glasgow stood at 456, while Shetland Islanders were half as likely to go to hospital.
The worst rate (significantly higher than Scotland) is seen in North Barlanark and Easterhouse South, within east Glasgow, while similarly disturbing rates are found in districts in North Lanarkshire and Inverclyde.
Besides, perhaps, spurring the Scottish government and local councils to do more for pregnant mothers in districts such as Parkhead, the researchers believe tests could be created to check methylation levels to identify those most at risk of ill-health.
For John Dickie, head of the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, the epigenetic research is a call to arms, in that it offers “startling evidence” of the damage that poverty does to children even before they are born.
“We have long known,” Dickie says, “that children born to mothers in poverty are more likely to have significantly lower birth weight and suffer associated risks to their health, that lack of a decent income means too many mothers struggle to afford the diet that would give their babies the best start in life and that those born into poverty are more likely to die at childbirth or infancy. “That the damage may be inflicted even further back in the life-cycle, therefore, should not come as a surprise but should be no less shocking.” He adds that poverty causes “extreme stress and physical damage”.
Last month, Child Poverty Action Group produced a map illustrating the crisis, showing that one in three children in Glasgow is living in poverty, while in some districts, the figure run to one in every two.
For campaigners such as Dickie, the findings by the University of Glasgow fuel their belief that more must be done. However, the British government – which sets welfare rates for all of the UK despite devolution – is, he says, determined to cut the payments to “prospective and existing parents alike”.
“Unless we see action, future generations will continue to have their life-chances compromised whether genetically, as they develop in the womb, or as children born into a society still scarred by poverty and inequality,” he argues.Great news, “Grand Theft Auto 5” fans. Rockstar Games’ action-adventure title will not be delayed as feared, but is still set to launch on Jan. 27 for the PC. It's a game that PC players have long been waiting for, following its release in September on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 systems.
Rumors of the delay surfaced when Valve Software removed the Jan. 27 date from its Steam listing, but Rockstar has assured players the game will reach the platform on the intended release date.
“'GTA V' will be coming to PC on Jan. 27,” the developer promised Saturday in a post on its Rockstar forums. “We have not announced any changes to this date at this time.”
“GTA 5" launched in September 2013 for the Xbox 360 and PS3, an open world action game developed by Rockstar North of Scotland and published by Rockstar Games.
“GTA 5” received highly favorable reviews and was the 15th installment in the “GTA” series and the first game since 2008’s “GTA IV.” Following its release, the game received Game of the Year honors at the 2013 Golden Joystick Awards.
Within just 24 hours of its launch date, “GTA 5” generated more than $800 million in revenue, which equates to selling about 11.21 million copies. The title surpassed $1 billion in sales after just three days on shelves. The game launched for the eighth-generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles one year later, in September 2014.Dollar Shave Club Review + Giveaway – December 2015
Dollar Shave Club is a monthly subscription box for affordable razors, men’s grooming products and personal products. Dollar Shave Club subscribers can customize their monthly Dollar Shave Club shaving box by selecting the razor blades and other items you would like in your box. Dollar Shave Club monthly razor deliveries start as low as $1 a month. With today’s Dollar Shave Club review, we’re unboxing our latest Dollar Shave Club shave box.
Although Dollar Shave Club originally launched as a razor blade subscription for men, women can use Dollar Shave Club razors as well. Dollar Shave Club includes colorful product cards that describe each of the products included in your monthly Dollar Shave Club box.
Here’s a first look inside our Dollar Shave Club shave box.
Inside the Dollar Shave Club Box
Here are the razors and grooming products in our Dollar Shave Club Box.
Dollar Shave Club The Executive Razor
This 6 blade razor has a sturdy handle, pivot head, Aloe, Vitamin E, and lavender lubricating strip and a special trimming edge. Dollar Shave Club The 4X Razor
Great for both men and women, this 4 blade stainless steel razor has a 90-degree pivot head to provide a close shave for face, legs, armpits, or anything else. Dr. Carver’s Easy Shave Butter
Apply before shaving to help condition skin and soften hair for smooth shaving. Dr. Carver’s Miracle Repair Serum
Repair irritation or redness with this soothing repair serum. Dr. Carver’s Post Shave Daily All-In-One Moisture
Soothe, moisturize and restore your skin post-shave with this calming moisturizer. One Wipe Charlies Flushable Moist Wipes
Infused with aloe vera and chamomile this wipes can be used to gently and effectively wipe clean.
Dollar Shave Club Review Wrap-Up
Dollar Shave Club makes it easy for both men and women to get a close, smooth shave at an affordable price. The razors have sturdy, easy to grip handles and a rotating head that helps the razor glide over your skin. The Dr. Carer’s shaving products are great pre- and post-shave products that will help soothe and calm your face or skin.
If you’re looking for an affordable holiday gift this season, Dollar Shave Club makes a great gift for men and women.
Dollar Shave Club Giveaway
Enter our Dollar Shave Club Giveaway for your chance to win a Dollar Shave Club shave box worth $40 + a Dollar Shave Club shirt!
Find Subscription Boxes – Dollar Shave Club Giveaway© Provided by IBT Media (UK) Intel Helmet
Intel has unveiled a pair of smart glasses that can help wearers see inside objects. The set of glasses with X-ray-like vision, co-developed by virtual reality firm Daqri, was launched at CES in Las Vegas.
The smart glasses have been built into a helmet specifically designed for industrial use. Daqri's smart helmet would allow workers to look inside the working of objects such as pipes and other machinery, while also providing them with relevant information such as diagrams, maps, and problem areas that need to be fixed.
The smart helmet, which has been tested by some Fortune 100 companies across aerospace, construction, oil and gas industries, aims to maximise the safety, productivity and well-being of workers in a variety of industrial settings.
The device's technology is powered by Intel's latest core processor, the 6th Gen Core m7 processor, and Real Sense camera technology, which was launched in 2014. It also utilises Daqri's computer vision and tracking system, as well as 360-degree sensor array technology.
"The Daqri Smart Helmet is a great example of integrating advanced human-machine interface into existing devices to make something smart and solve a potential problem," managing director of Intel's internet of things strategy office, Bridget Karlin, was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
"Intel is transforming industry with its advanced technologies," said Daqri founder and CEO Brian Mullins. "Intel powers some of the world's most impressive products and, with the addition of its latest processor and RealSense technology into DAQRI Smart Helmet, we introduce the most advanced human-machine interface to the market," he said.
The smart helmet will be available for purchase in the first quarter of 2016.Email service developed a side business after it was acquired by Slice in 2014 – selling aggregated data about users to apps they were unsubscribing from
The chief executive of email unsubscription service Unroll.me has said he is “heartbroken” that users felt betrayed by the fact that his company monetises the contents of their inbox by selling their data to companies such as Uber.
Founded in 2011, the free web service allows users to unsubscribe en masse from mailing lists, newsletters and other email annoyances. To do so, it requires access to the users’ inboxes, and permission from them to scan the data for unsubscribe links.
But following an acquisition by shopping app Slice in 2014, Unroll.me developed a side-business: selling aggregated data about users to the very apps they were unsubscribing from.
The revelation came as part of a New York Times story about Uber, which was one of Slice’s big data arm Slice Intelligence’s customers: the cab app wanted to find out information about the corporate health of its key US rival, Lyft. The data Slice sells is anonymised – customer’s names are not attached – and it covers both Uber and Lyft ride receipts, but the company won’t confirm or deny its customer list.
Following the story, Unroll.me’s CEO and co-founder Jojo Hedaya wrote a corporate blogpost in which he expressed contrition. But while he said it was “heartbreaking”, he was not talking about the sale of customer data: instead, he said he felt bad “to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetise our free service”.
He added: “the reality is most of us – myself included – don’t take the time to thoroughly review” terms of service agreements or privacy policies.In nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court in 2009, President Barack Obama said he was deeply impressed with her "extraordinary journey." And his decision was almost as historic as his own election. Sotomayor, who grew up in a New York housing project as the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, became the first Latin American justice in the 225-year history of the court, and only the third woman to serve on the high court.
Sotomayor describes her path to the top in her memoirs, "My Beloved World," which will appear in German bookstores later this month ("Meine Geliebte Welt"; C.H. Beck, München; 334 pages; 19.95). With disarming openness, she writes of her father, who died of alcoholism, of her mother who worked long hours in a hospital and of the strict nuns at her school who suggested that she limit her aspirations to that of being a mother and housewife. And she describes how she was later able to conquer one male bastion after the other, first at Ivy League universities Princeton and Yale and later as a lawyer and judge in New York.
SPIEGEL: I just noticed the little sign hanging from your door handle: "Well-behaved women rarely make history." Is this your life's motto?
Sotomayor : You know, it's almost a life motto. If you read the book, you know I'm very law abiding. But I make it very clear that, like all people, there are exceptions. I like driving fast. I'm a pure New Yorker and I jaywalk. None of us is perfect. Sometimes you have to do the unexpected.
SPIEGEL: You have done many things in your life that no one would have expected from you. The little girl whose parents hardly spoke English now has the final say in all legal issues in the country. How did you come so far?
Sotomayor : I think adversity. That determination that I have in myself, both to work hard and to succeed, came from adversity, from managing it, from maybe not overcoming it because I still manage my diabetes. I couldn't overcome my father's alcoholism. But I was able to find ways to escape the sadness in our house that were positive -- for example, I found books. And that was not only a wonderful escape, but also the launching pad for my future. It helped me imagine a world bigger than the one I was in.
SPIEGEL: Your story sounds like the cliché of the American dream: Even when all the odds are against you, if you work really hard, if you persist and don't give up, you can make it to the very top. Do you believe this is true?
Sotomayor : (Laughs): Well, I'm living proof of it. No, seriously, as I say in my book, not everyone can make it to the top. The top doesn't have many people. And so if you think that working hard is going to make you reach all your dreams, you might live your life disappointed. But if you work hard and you have a dream, you're going to arrive further than you started. You're going to learn something in the process.
SPIEGEL: You had role models in your own family. Your mother worked all day as a nurse to support you and your brother. Then there was your grandmother, whom you call the matriarch of the clan. How did these women influence you?
Sotomayor : I never doubted, unlike some of my female friends when I was growing up, that I had to have an occupation. My mother was more worried about my going to college than she was about my brother. She just assumed he would go to college, which was a good assumption because boys went to college and a lot of girls didn't. But after my father died, she said to me: I did not expect to be alone. But I'm glad that I have a profession where I can support you. I want you always to be able to support yourself. Watching my mother raise us gave me a sense of independence that makes me equally comfortable being married, as I was, or being engaged. But when I don't have a partner, like now, I don't feel incomplete. I hope that I will meet someone again, but I think there is some comfort in liking yourself enough to be comfortable in your own world.
SPIEGEL: In your book, you address the end of your marriage. When you separated after seven years, your husband told you that he was always proud of your success, but that it was difficult for him to keep up with you and that he felt that you didn't really need him.
Sotomayor : When he first said that to me, I thought he meant "need" in the sense of dependency.
SPIEGEL: In the sense of him being the provider?
Sotomayor : Exactly. If he meant that, I knew that he was right, that was not the role I wanted for him. But now that I'm older and thinking about it more, there is something in a relationship where you have to make the other person feel important. You have to make sure that they understand that they serve an important part of your own identity.
SPIEGEL: Could it be that many men are just not ready for women like you?
Sotomayor : I think they're growing that way. There are more men these days who have found a way to let their wives shine. I know of many couples now where the woman is pursuing her career and the man is raising their children.
SPIEGEL: As a student at Princeton, you told your family that the role of women was nothing but a cultural construct. Do you still believe that?
Sotomayor : Oh, that's a philosophical question with no answer. My colleague, Justice Stephen Breyer, told us about a lecture that he attended or an article he read where someone said that discrimination on the basis of gender will take longer to correct than discrimination based on race because there is a physical difference between men and women that you cannot deny, and that that difference will in itself always create an inequality. I can't say that it's all cultural. I think it's more complex than I thought back then.
SPIEGEL: When you arrived at Princeton, they had only recently begun admitting women and there were not many Latin American students. Princeton had a reputation for being a northern bastion for white men from the South. What was it like to study in that environment?
Sotomayor : I was the only woman in a Roman law class. And the professor was a more senior professor. He must have been teaching the course for 20 or 30 years, and he taught the course (from) notes that he must have had for years. As he went through his lecture, he would reach a point where he would suddenly stop, look at me, and then skip the joke he was about to tell, which was clearly, he recognized, a sexist joke. I will never forget that. There were still all-male clubs at Princeton, and there were clearly men who preferred to belong to those all-male clubs rather than to the co-ed clubs. And there were professors who had taught all males, like this one, who were just more comfortable with teaching men. But as with the beginning of any social experiment, there were people who were trying very hard to make it work, who supported me.
SPIEGEL: Affirmative action also helped you back then. In Germany, there is a heated debate right now over a comparable instrument: that of mandating quotas for women in management. What do you think of that idea?
Sotomayor : In the United States, certain segments of society played with quotas for a number of years. What ended up happening is that the larger population got angry. And the Supreme Court ultimately said that quotas were not acceptable under the US Constitution. I think that some of it is driven by the American concept that success should always be based on merit. The problem with that concept, I think, as most people know, is that success is not always about merit.
SPIEGEL: Being a woman of Latin American descent, you were an exception not only at Princeton, but also at the law firms and the courts where you worked later on. You had a reputation of being a "tough cookie" and of arguing like a man. Did you consciously try to adopt male behavior?
Sotomayor : No, that's just who I am. I have a style that is Sonia, and it is more assertive than many women are, or even some men. And it's a style that has held me generally in good stead. There's nothing wrong with being a little bit quieter than me or more timid than me, but if you're doing it all of the time and not waiting for the moments where you need to be more assertive and take greater control, then you won't be successful. And I don't think I would have been successful if I didn't know how to soften myself and tone it down at important moments.
SPIEGEL: What role do you think your life experiences play in your decision-making at the Supreme Court?
Sotomayor : Life experiences play a role in every judge's judging because we are creatures of our experience. Forget about race, gender or poverty; think about legal experience. Prosecutors have a view of the criminal justice system. Defense attorneys have another. We're known as a very pro-prosecution court on many issues. Well, there are no defense attorneys on our court. So how does this influence us? I think your experience makes you more sensitive to certain arguments people are making and perhaps a little less receptive to arguments the other side is making. That's why we have nine judges and not one making these decisions in the hope that pooling our experiences help us find a better balance.
SPIEGEL: You have achieved everything there is professionally; you will be a Supreme Court justice for the rest of your life. Do you love the work you're doing as much as you thought you would?
Sotomayor : I enjoy it, but I had not anticipated how difficult it would be. When the Supreme Court takes a case, it's because there is a disagreement among the courts below. It means that the issues are not clear under existing law. All of that lack of clarity is usually around issues that are important to the society -- like Obamacare, same-sex marriage -- and every decision we make is final. Every time we decide, even when I'm in the majority and I think we're right, you know that there's a loser. There is another side who is going to feel something negative about what has happened. And that makes this job harder. Once we decide, there is no more hope.Happy Thanksgiving, yurt fans. I was hoping to find a Thanksgiving yurt somewhere that I could post for the holiday, but if you’ve ever googled yurt, most of the stuff that comes up is advertisements for yurts. So no dice.
Instead, today we’ll salute a yurt hero. Last year 12-year old Max Wallack won the 2009 “Trash to Treasure” design contest by designing the “Home Dome,” a homeless shelter made from plastic, wire, and packing peanuts. Does the design look familiar? That’s because it’s based on a yurt.
From Treehugger: “When I was six,” Max said, “I won an invention contest that included a trip to Chicago. While there, I saw homeless people living on streets, and beneath highways and underpasses. I felt very sorry for these people, and ever since then, felt that my goal and obligation was to find a way to help them. My invention improves the living conditions for homeless people, refugees, or disaster victims by giving them easy-to-assemble shelter.”
Max Wallack, yurt hero, we’re thankful for you.July 29th 2012: Fight for Space has reached it's minimum funding level of $65,000.
If we can reach $100,000: We can work towards bringing this film to the masses in a theatrical release and more broadcast networks. A higher funding level also means that we will be able to interview more people, visit more locations, shoot this film on better cameras, bring in additional and talented artists, designers, cinematographers, photographers, and researchers.
OUR PROJECT
"Fight for Space" is a feature length documentary film that explores the current state and future of the U.S. space program. Since the Apollo era of the 1960s, NASA's budget has been shrinking and our ambitions in space have been decreasing. We are producing a documentary that will examine the reasons why our space program is not all it can be. We are also going to show that space IS worth the time, money, and energy that it needs, not for only exploration and scientific reasons but for economic, planetary security, and cultural reasons as well. We will also be covering the great scientific achievements that NASA is making right now, and we will be examining the new commercial space enterprise by companies like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Bigelow, and more. Many problems have occurred in just the past 10 years that have lead to the consistent underfunding of NASA, the cancellation of multiple space systems, and the decline of America's role in space.
We are not producing your average space documentary where we show restored footage from the moon landings and CGI galaxy renderings. We are covering the real political and economic issues of the recent past, today, and tomorrow. We are covering both sides of the argument and we promise to produce a fair and objective film.
The fact is, the United States as a nation has lost our edge in space, not just as a leader but even as a participant. We want to know the real reasons behind why we are in this scientific slump and what we can do about it. We are asking hard questions to the people that know what is going on and we will not stop until we receive real answers and real solutions to these problems. We are also speaking with everyday citizens off the street, so we can discover how the American public feels about space exploration. In our democracy, all voices must be heard.
Watch our coverage of Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson's keynote speech at the National Space Symposium:
WHAT WE HAVE DONE SO FAR:
We have taken the first step and made an initial investment out of our own pocket to travel to many locations and interview the top experts in space policy, astronomy, engineering, astrophysics, the sciences, and space exploration.
We visited The National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, CO where we interviewed: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Robert Zubrin, Bill Nye, Leroy Chaio, and more. We have visited SETIcon in Santa Clara, CA where we spoke with some of the top minds in astronomy. We have traveled to Huntington Beach to interview Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a key figure on the house space committee. We have interviewed scientists, engineers, politicians, teachers, students, astronauts, astronomers, and many more.
As you can see in our trailer above and our listing below we have already interviewed many noted individuals in the space industry field. With your help we can travel to new locations, obtain more exciting footage, and interview additional people from NASA, commercial enterprise such as SpaceX, the US Government, as well as scientists, engineers, educators, and more. We have been invited to rocket launches by some of the top commercial space organizations and will be able to capture some amazing footage of these events. Only with your support can we succeed.
We have received an official letter of interest from PBS for this film and if we receive enough financing, our film will be broadcasted to millions of households all over the world.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
You can be involved with the making of this insightful and inspiring film. With your help we can bring awareness to this issue and come closer to making our space program a priority for this country once again.
We need your help to finish this film. The fact is that we simply do not have enough money to produce this feature length film. By donating to this project, you are helping to ensure that the message will make it to the people and in a big way. We intend to distribute this film as many ways as we can. We will distribute it online, DVD, Blu-Ray, and hopefully broadcast television.
Please, support our film by donating above and share this project with your friends, family, and anyone you know who cares about space exploration or cares about the future economic and national security of this country.
In order for this project to be successful we are counting on you to share this project on as many social media platforms as you can. We urge the use of Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, E-Mails, phone calls, or just tell people about us! We have 30 days to complete this campaign, please post daily or weekly about our project so all your friends know about us! However you communicate, please share this project with all!
LINKS
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/FightForSpace
Website: http://www.fightforspace.com
HD Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSYEdougccY&feature=player_embedded
WE NEED FUNDING FOR
Travel Expenses
Camera & Gear Rentals
Crew Expenses
Motion Graphics
Original Musical Score (Composed by Star Trek TNG composer Ron Jones)
Music Licensing
Video Footage Licensing
Marketing
Post Processing for Video
Audio Mixing & Mastering
Broadcast Distribution
If we don't reach our goal then we receive nothing, no rewards will be sent, and you will not be charged, you are only charged if we meet or exceed our goal. We must reach or exceed our goal or this film will not be made. The level of support we receive will directly reflect on the nation's desire for an ambitious space program.
WHAT HAPPENS IF WE GO OVER OUR GOAL
We are asking for the bare minimum amount of money we need to finish this film. If we can exceed our goal then we will use those funds to create an even better and more comprehensive documentary. We will be able to use better equipment, travel to more locations, and interview people that we may have not been able to before. In addition to that we will be able to provide higher quality rewards and give back more to you.
EDUCATION
The United States is rated 23rd in Science. Fight for Space will focus heavily on the need to boost the study of science in our schools. If we don’t reinvest in this essential curricula, we risk America’s health and security. A strong space program will help drive our nation's children to study science and engineering which will help usher in a new generation of dreamers. With this, we won't be 23rd in anything.
We are interviewing educators from the elementary school level to the astrophysics level so that we may explore all levels of science education. We will learn how our kids are being taught in the science classroom, what is exciting them, and what is turning them away.
FALLING BEHIND
China's space program is rapidly catching up with us and will surpass us soon at its current rate. In a short amount of time they have launched 4 crewed spacecrafts to orbit and recently launched and docked with their own space station. China has many more ambitious goals for the future including a moon expedition and a mission to Mars. Attention from the mainstream media was limited and did not truly describe the implications of this event. What are they up to, how does this affect us? We are going to find out.
Although we are now allies with Russia, our former space race competitor, Russia has no problem with having ambitious goals of their own. In May of 2012 they stated that they will put a permanent colony on the moon. Media coverage of this announcement was almost unheard of except within those that closely follow space news. Vladimir Popovkin, head of the Russian space agency was quoted saying "We're not talking about repeating what mankind achieved 40 years ago." Clearly Russia has something rather large planned.
Interesting? You bet it is! Why has this been ignored, and what kind of an effect will it have on the national culture of this country?
THE ECONOMY
When interviewing individuals off the street we often hear the answer "we must fix problems here on earth before we go into space." Here's the problem: we will always have problems here on earth. If we wait to solve all of our problems here first, we will never reach the full human potential. We must be allowed to explore, discover, and innovate for the better of all mankind.
We are fighting for a strong space program because government handouts, tax rebates, more teachers, or new job programs are not a permanent fix. These are band-aids. We will be able to close this wound permanently if we create a mood and culture that compels the American public to want to innovate and be better tomorrow than they were yesterday. Continue to look ahead, look forward, and we can accomplish anything.
WHAT WE ARE DOING FOR YOU
Aside from the fact that we will be producing a film that examines our nation's space program in a way never done before, we have put together a comprehensive set of rewards for our donors.
We are offering DVDs, Blu-Ray, Wrist Bands, T-Shirts, Posters, behind the scenes footage, extended interviews, a documentary about the making of this film, and an original score by Star Trek, The Next Generation & Family Guy composer Ron Jones.
** Disclaimer: Original score by Ron Jones is dependent on final contract. Mr. Jones has agreed to score the film, however there may be issues out of the control of both parties that could cause unforeseen complications. If this occurs a replacement composer will be found to produce a score of equal quality.
International Backers: Please add $15 for shipping anywhere outside the USA.Amy Adams will star in “Sharp Objects,” the television adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, Variety has confirmed. She has also signed on to exec produce the potential series.
Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyers Club,” “Wild”) has been tapped to direct the drama, which has Marti Noxon on board as showrunner and writer, alongside Flynn who’s attached as a writer and exec producer. Blumhouse Productions’ Jason Blum and Charles Layton are also exec producers. Entertainment One is the studio.
Insiders tell Variety that eOne has taken the project out on multiple pitch meetings this week to cable networks and streaming platforms.
“Sharp Objects” follows a reporter (played by Adams) who has to cover the murder of two preteen girls in her hometown following a brief stint in a psych hospital.
The project marks Adams’ first starring role for the small screen, though before shooting up to super-stardom, the Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated actress had small roles on “The Office,” “Smallville” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” She is repped by WME and Brillstein Entertainment.
For Vallée, the series will follow another TV project for the director, who’s directing HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” which stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley. Noxon, who penned the pilot script based on Flynn’s novel, is highly in demand lately as the co-creator of Lifetime’s critically acclaimed “UnReal” and creator of Bravo’s “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce.”
Flynn’s other novel “Gone Girl” was of course adapted for a feature, which starred Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck.
“Sharp Objects” will also be co-exec produced by Nathan Ross, and at Blumhouse, the project is being overseen by head of TV Jessica Rhoades.Get the biggest Everton 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
Even Roberto Martinez admits this remarkable statistic surprised him.
The Everton manager covets the data which is rife in football now thanks to the rise of the analyst, but still relishes the occasional bolt from the blue.
And that's why he was shocked but pleased to see that only Bournemouth midfielder Andy Surman, 29, has covered more ground this season than 35 -year-old Gareth Barry.
"I think that it's a very interesting stat because I don't think that many people, when you watch Gareth play, would come up with that statistic," said the Catalan.
"But it's not just the amount of running that Gareth does - he is clever with his tactical positioning, the way he covers other players and the way he reads the game.
"At the age of 35 to have the physicality to do that is impressive."
Everton will have to make do without their influential midfielder for the next two games, after he was suspended for picking up his second red card of the campaign in last Saturday's FA Cup quarter final win over Chelsea.
But ever the indefatigable optimist, Martinez says the Blues will use that enforced absence to make sure Barry can rest his over-worked legs and return fresh for the run-in.
"Of course we are going to miss him," he said.
"We only have two players who have been ever present in the Premier League this season and he is one of them.
"Clearly these two games he's going to be missed. But there's an international break in the middle and we are going to use it to regenerate him, give him a proper break and make sure he's as strong as possible for the end of the season.
"I am sure we will reap the rewards from that. "The video will start in 8 Cancel
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When it comes to reactions, no one does it better than Matthew McConaughey.
The second teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been received well across the globe.
There have been a variety of reactions to J.J. Abrams' next instalment with grown men crying at the sight of Harrison Ford, but the above reaction could be the best.
Compiled by YouTuber oskararnarson, it depicts the star from Interstellar giving another Oscar-worthy performance... only to the Star Wars trailer.
Read more:
(Image: Universal/ Disney)
One YouTube viewer posted:"This is goddamn perfect! Matthew Mcconaughey's reaction to Star Wars trailer(sic)."
Another added: "This is EXACTLY how I felt when I first watched the trailer. RIGHT IN THE FEELS!!!(sic)"
While one viewer said: "This was almost my same reaction after I saw the new Star Wars trailer."
(Image: Universal/ Disney)
Read more:
poll loading Did you cry seeing Harrison Ford or at any other point of The Force Awakens second trailer? 0+ VOTES SO FAR Yes, yes I did! NO WAY Not telling I'm still crying
Meanwhile, producer Kathleen Kennedy said Harrison Ford was so "amazing" that he managed to carry out the crash landing in front of two doctors.
Speaking the Star Wars Celebration event in Anaheim, she added: "I gotta say the amazing thing about Harrison he is the only person who can make an emergency landing on a golf course in front of two doctors.
"He is home and resting and getting well as quickly as he can. I knew when we launch this movie Han Solo will be actively involved in what we are doing.”
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now
The star was released from hospital late last month after suffering painful injuries in the crash.
The impact left him with a huge gash on his head "the size of a pancake", according to an eyewitness, and alleged broken bones in his pelvis as well as his ankle.By Cactopus
Birds of a feather carry together. Xayah and Rakan are available now.
To celebrate, we're running a DOUBLE IP WEEKEND from 17:01 April 21 to 16:59 April 24 AEST. We've also created two unique summoner icons which will only be unlockable for the first week after the vastayan duo hits the Rift.
Gift of Magic Icon
Unlike other champs, Xayah and Rakan can be gifted using IP between April 20-27! Gift Xayah or Rakan to a friend for just 6300 IP (normally 7800 IP) and unlock an exclusive Summoner Icon for yourself (also works if you gift using RP).
Blazing Feathers Icon
Earn a special summoner icon by bringing Xayah and Rakan together on the Rift. To qualify, play two games as Xayah with Rakan on your team, or as Rakan with Xayah on your team. Any completed normal, ranked, or bot game mode will count (custom games excluded).
NOTE: Both unlockable Summoner Icons can only be earned between 1:00 April 20 and 16:59 April 27 AEST. The icons will be granted within two weeks after the promotion ends.
Learn more about League's newest vastaya below:
Get the Cosmic Dusk and Dawn bundles, available from April 20, 17:01 through April 25, 16:59!
Cosmic Dusk Xayah Bundle - 1837 RP
Cosmic Dusk Xayah
Xayah
Cosmic Dawn Rakan Bundle - 1837 RP
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down to the complicated tale of the experts analyzing all of the evidence and the reasons they have for reaching these two, key conclusions (emphasis added):
There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer. Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.
The analysis of the leaked documents is lengthy and of interest, but it also lends support to the underlying theory which prompted so many people to doubt the Russia claims in the first place. I’m not sure I personally buy into this one hundred percent, but they rely on the belief that the NSA currently has programs in place which can capture any and all electronic transfers of data to and from a known source (such as the DNC servers). If the data had been nabbed by the Russians or anyone else they should have been able to pin that down in fairly short order. But a year later they have not done so. Clearly they don’t want to reveal any of their methods our sources, but there should have been a conclusion long before now.
Then we have the Julian Assange side of the story. Of course, Wikileaks has been claiming from the beginning that the material didn’t come from the Russians. Craig Murray claimed that he flew to Washington for a cloak and dagger style, clandestine meeting “in a wooded area” with a disgusted DNC staffer who personally handed off the trove of documents to him. Does that prove anything? Nope. But somebody is either lying or wrong (take your pick) and in this case, the absence of evidence might be reasonably interpreted as evidence of absence when it comes to the silence on the NSA side.
Combine that with the forensic analysis of the revealed documents in the attached report and the Russiagate story starts looking like weak tea. If the government has anything which refutes this with some level of certainty, they should cough it up soon. Otherwise this entire narrative could collapse in a pile of failed memes.My first Pokemon game was Diamond version. In fact, it was one of the first video games I ever had.
This is my finished entry for the CGcookie Pokemon-themed summer contest.
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was an awkward, fumbling newb who could barely even use the controls. It was frustrating, bizarre, and absolutely wonderfull. I was always the type of kid that enjoyed playing outside, and having a Nintendo didn't change that. But, there were still times when I would be so lost in that little pixelated world that people would have to call my name several times to get my attention.
Well over a decade later, I am still an avid Pokemon player. I've collected almost every game that has come out for the Nintendo, and I bought a 3ds just to play X and Y. And though I haven't been able to get Pokemon Go yet, but I tend to support team Instinct. But even now, grown up, with a job, living on my own and trying to figure out how to do my taxes, every time I pick up a game I feel like that little kid again, picking out my first starter.
Want to see how I make things like this? Take a look at my Youtube video documenting the shading process!
Want to support me? To see tutorials, sketches, WIP's and more, go visit my Patreon page.
If you are interested in the contest, go take a look at it here, and be sure to support the creators.I’m just going to go way out on a limb here and assert that individual liberty is a good thing. I mean, it’s not good if you long to be a dictator, but Noriega doesn’t read this site. Now that we have the obvious disclaimer out of the way, I’ll make a few more claims that will be less than popular among many. I will argue that libertarianism is incongruent with the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers that have been observed and preserved in the ethnographic record, but also that our psychology has evolved in such a way as to be sub-optimal under a libertarian arrangement. Further, I will argue that, at its inception, a group coalescing under libertarian principles mirrors the early stages of an agrarian state. Beyond that, I will speculate that the emergent reality of a libertarian organization will bear striking resemblance to the world of agrarian states in which we live (but could be much worse).
Libertarians, please hear me out. I once considered myself among your numbers, but I got over it. The reason I got over it may be the very reason you were drawn to it, or cling to it now. For some reason, there seems to be a proclivity to chant the infallible virtues of libertarianism within the paleo community. This is likely influenced by many factors. Perhaps the paleo diet attracts a disproportionate number of individuals with low Agreeableness. This isn’t an unreasonable explanation considering the community’s general rejection of conventional wisdom and opposition of mainstream nutritional advice. While I think personality may be part of it, I suggest that much of the impetus springs from flawed conceptions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors — whether in popular conception, or in the anthropological literature.
“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion… but you’re not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you’re not.” -Michael Specter (probably not originator)
As part as the certification course required to wear my kilt in the United States of America, I was forced to watch Braveheart no less than 5 zillion times. Thus, I am well versed in the emotional appeal of yelling “FREEDOOoooommm…” until the blood loss from disembowelment lowers one’s blood pressure to levels no longer capable of sustaining breath and consciousness. As this pertains to libertarianism, there are a number of assumptions that need to be addressed before identifying oneself with the political philosophy. Libertarians who haven’t put any hard-thinking into the full meaning and implications of libertarianism seem to gravitate to it because of the more superficial associations with freedom. Look, it even starts off with the Latin root for freedom, liber! Individual liberty here we come! Great! Wipe off your blue face paint.
It ain’t that easy.
<sarcasm>But! But! The government of the United States of America told me that freedom is a good thing, and it intuitively seems like a good thing, and libertarianism puts it right up there in the front for all the world to see and know and love. Hooray! I’ve finally found the political party of my dreams that will let me live with personal freedom in an environment where everyone’s freedom is enforced by…</sarcasm>
Wait… enforced? Enforced doesn’t sound like liberty. Since when does “America the Beautiful” end, “Let the fear of enforcement ring”? Who’s doing this enforcement of freedom? How did we get from ad hoc hunter-gatherer bands to enforcement? The scope of those questions is slightly bigger than this piece affords, but let’s work toward that.
I’m not saying that all libertarians are unsophisticated in their attempt to reconcile libertarianism with human-nature. For example, these are Jason’s words from a recent post on his blog, Evolving Economics…
” [Libertarianism] is the preferred arrangement given human nature and the shape of the world today.” [source]
While I respect Jason’s thinking on many matters, I don’t find that libertarianism generally makes any sincere attempt to reconcile itself with human-nature. Saying “freedom is human nature, therefore libertarianism” is not enough. In a future post, I’ll outline improvements that libertarians could easily make that would bring it more in line with human nature AND the shape of the world today. In other words, libertarianism in its current iteration is burdened with sub-optimal and sub-accurate dogma. If libertarianism was a true political philosophy, rather than an ideology, it would self-correct in the face of new understanding.
Libertarianisms’ ground-rules
There are almost as many conceptions of libertarianism as there are libertarians. Because it seems to represent the popular conception of libertarianism, this is the basic framework I’ll be referring to in this piece:
“Libertarianism is grounded in the Principle of Equal Freedom: All people are free to think, believe, and act as they choose, so long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. Of course, the devil is in the details of what constitutes “infringement,” but there are at least a dozen essentials to liberty and freedom that need shielding from encroachment: The rule of law. Property rights. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country. Freedom of speech and the press. Freedom of association. Mass education. Protection of civil liberties. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states. A potent police for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws. An effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.” – Shermer (2011) [emphasis mine]
Libertarianism is incongruent with observed hunter-gatherers
First of all, the hunter-gatherer ethnography is completely made up of bands characterized by egalitarian political organization, or at least something that looks egalitarian in practice (Boehm 2001). This egalitarianism is mainly manifest as a tenacious unwillingness of the group to be dominated by any one individual. Political upstarts are subject to corrective “leveling” mechanisms exacted at the behest of the group. These tend to take the form of non-violent (physically speaking) mechanisms of social pressure (Gray 2009) that may escalate to banishment from the group, and in some cases, killing of the offender (Boehm 2001).
Libertarianism offers no protection from hierarchical domination, and differs from agrarian state capitalism primarily in its desire to simply swap out government officials with business officials (Black 1984).
“we are at least entitled to the acknowledgement that there is nothing in the slightest unlibertarian about organization, hierarchy, leaders and followers, etc.” – Rothbard (1981) [emphasis mine]
“[Conservatives’ and libertarians’] articulation is not always harmonious but they share a common interest in consigning their conflicts to elite or expert resolution. To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst. And yet (to quote the most vociferous of radical libertarians, Professor Murray Rothbard) there is nothing un-libertarian about “organization, hierarchy, wage-work, granting of funds by libertarian millionaires, and a libertarian party.” Indeed. That is why libertarianism is just conservatism with a rationalist/positivist veneer.” – Black (1984)
“Authority is the very essence of social organization. Hence, it can not be absent from any single institutional organization.” – Malinkowski (1960)
While there may be nothing “unlibertarian” about oganization, hierarchy, and [authoritarian] contract-consecrated subservient arrangements, such principles are un-egalitarian and un-hunter-gatherer (Boehm 2001).
Referring to Shermer’s framework, at least five of the fundamental principles of libertarianism are contrary to what we observe in hunter-gatherer bands [in bold above]. I say at least because I am, for the moment, ignoring the gaping chasm between “laws” in their conception under a libertarian state (oxymoron much?), and social norms. This precludes the discussion of three further points which present further points of incongruence, though on a slightly different level. In the absence of codified laws, hunter-gatherer bands tend to shun physical punishment in favor of controlling social violations via social sanctioning mechanisms such as humor and play (Gray 2009).
I do not mean to fall into the fantasy “noble savage” trap by claiming violence does not occur among HGs. When social sanctioning of individuals remains ineffective after multiple transgressions, AND if forcing the individual out of the group does not work, then a coalition of individuals may decide to kill an individual (Boehm 2001). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors weren’t operating in a state of cerebral political enlightenment
I’m compelled to point out that the flip-side of the “noble savage” argument is also problematic. This occurs because the calculus for indexing violence among HGs involves a zillion data points consisting of songs and jokes and other social progressions levied against an individual, then all of the sudden, murder. In this way, the physical violence curve goes from flat to total violence in a way unfamiliar to our minutiae of legal gradations. Unfortunately for the fidelity of the picture, ethnocentricity leads to exclusion of things like jokes and songs from being recorded in the category of “violence”. Since hunter-gatherers have neither abstracted economic systems nor permanent land, sanctions such as fines and prisons are not available or practical options. From our perspective, this appears to result in what we might consider overly harsh punishments for social violations. Thus, HGs end up with a an apparently disproportionate level of violence because of errors in categorization of violence, and lack of alternative methods of sanctioning available to HGs.
Five Hunter-Gatherers V. Libertarian Incompatibilities
1. Property Rights.
For appropriate discussion of this principle, we must distinguish between two types of property: 1) Property made by individuals from natural resources, and 2) Property consisting of land (and the natural resources related to land).
An informal system of property rights does appear in HGs with respect to personal items such as tools. Such items tend to be fashioned from natural resources by individuals themselves. While the amount of property is almost trivial, there is some room for conversation on property rights in case #1.
However, by definition, hunter-gatherers have no ownership connection to land. The land ownership principle in libertarianism is an unfounded assumption of absolutely agrarian origins, and is completely unsupported by hunter-gatherer anthropology. Attempts to assert HG property rights must account for the fact that if a person moves several feet, the rights of the former space are immediately abandoned and flow to the new space. Thus, any ‘rights’ are more correctly described as rights of the individual’s body, which must at all times occupy some space, and not rights to the land per se.
It would be wise at this point to ask: “If not in hunter-gatherers, when do land rights arise?” We find the answer to this in what anthropologists refer to as delayed-return cultures (Woodburn 1982).
“Greater equality of wealth, power and of prestige has been achieved in certain hunting and gathering societies than in any other human societies. These societies, which have economies based on immediate rather than delayed return, are assertively egalitarian. Equality is achieved through direct, individual access to resources; through direct, individual access to means of coercion and means of mobility which limit the imposition of control; through procedures which prevent saving and accumulation and impose sharing; through mechanisms which allow goods to circulate without making people dependent upon one another. People are systematically disengaged from property and therefore from the potentiality in property for creating dependency.” – Woodburn (1982)
It is precisely at the shift from immediate-return to delayed-return societies that we see property (land in particular) rights arise.
Hunter-gatherers do not observe, and are not concerned with, land rights. HGs tend to reject land rights claimed by others (Scott 2010); point 3 below bears on this further. They do maintain personal property — to which we may ascribe some modern notion of rights — primarily in the form of tools. I do not advocate principles which would deny the right to the fruits of one’s labor, but a full analysis of this will have to wait for another day.
2. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.
We must parse this further and recognize that two claims are here implied. 1) Economic stability is sufficiently important to human individuals to warrant its optimization, and 2) Economic security is only possible through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system. The term “economic” stability carries some assumptions that make it difficult to map to HGs. For the sake of discussion, this must be roughly understood to mean biological needs, as these tend to be the only concerns of HGs. Because of the mechanism of neo-Darwinian evolution, I will take claim #1 as true. In this, I include the biological drive to signal and display mate quality.
Hunter-gatherers do achieve economic stability, but not through banking or monetary systems. This is manifest by a psychology naturally focused on being in the present, and the absence of time conceptualization (lack of worry and planning for future events). Stability is gained primarily individual (and direct) self-sufficiency, and sharing (Woodburn 1982). This sharing maybe at times be considered voluntary, yet is also motivated by signaling and social sanctioning.
3. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country.
This point implies some commonsensical, but problematic assumptions. These cascade into the incongruence of this and the remaining points about police and military. There are three issues: 1) Assumption of nationality (“the country”), and therefore, the legitimacy of a system of nation-states through which nationality may be attained, 2) The freedom to move about, 3) Infrastructure is required to enable movement, 4) It is the responsibility of the polity to provide said infrastructure. To remain withn the context of a hunter-gatherer political philosophy and libertarianism, we shall focus on issues 1 and 2.
“…we argue that the primitive state may have been a bad thing. To do so, we provide simple models of anarchy, of organized banditry, and of a state. We can think of the former as a “state of nature” and of the second as a society in which groups of raiders are relatively organized (the Vikings might be an example) but in which the settled population lack the kind of hierarchies or structures we associate with a state. By contrast, our state will have some minimal organization…” – Moselle (2001)
Nationality is a construct that has arisen directly from agrarians (Nozick 1974). It emerged out of the hunter-gatherer-incongruent concept of land rights on the small scale (Moselle 2001). Hunter-gatherers tend vehemently to reject assimilation into the nation-state system (Scott 2010), and there is more evidence of individuals attempting to escape the nation-state to join hunter-gatherer bands (Koehnline 1994) than the reverse.
The assumption of a system of nation-states may be the most ethnocentric and flimsy assumption made by libertarians attempting to formulate a political philosophy congruent with human nature. The notion of land rights is similarly poor and flimsy, but the nation-state concept builds on the land rights assumption with a mountain of other post hoc assumptions.
I already argued in favor of the freedom geographical movement in Part I of this series. However, limiting movement to one’s country of coincidental birth misses the point of that article.
4. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.
This obviously relies on point #3. Since nation-states are assumed by default, but are already an incongruent construct, we can easily refute this point by simply remembering the fallacy of the nation-state system. However, hunter-gatherer anthropology (notably, the delayed-return or sedentary bands artificially created by geographical boundaries or modern property rights that don’t represent ancestral populations) is often used to demonstrate quasi-warfare and military action amount HGs. So let’s briefly look at hunter-gatherers’ relationship to the concept of military action.
In short, attempts to construe hunter-gatherer violence as warfare is a conflation of disparate categories of violence. As already described, hunter-gatherer violence leading to death tends to be a social leveling mechanism exacted when other options fail. However, family members of those being punished do not always take kindly to having their relatives executed. Thus, there is sometimes a tendency for retribution that will increase the death toll beyond a single individual.
Another sort of violence in hunter-gatherer tribes is that which is employed in service of mating opportunities. Again, when one man kills another man, family members may participate in retributive acts. In fact, this is one powerful scenario underlying the existence social sanctioning and other leveling mechanisms used in the preceding example of violence.
Note that the motivations of the violence in both of these scenarios is related to social/reproductive matters.
War is motivated by two primary factors: 1) Land, 2) Labor to cultivate the land — generally in the form of slaves — or provide other economic incentive based on said land (Scott 2009).
It is a testament to Homer’s insight into human-nature that he spun the Trojan War into a tale about the beauty of a woman and the jealousy of the men surrounding her. He demonstrates the power of reframing the context of armed group conflict as something personal and emotional, rather than the economic practice it always is. State propagandists have been capitalizing on this strategy ever since.
In other words, hunter-gatherers do not engage in warfare. We must not be lead astray by attempts to conflate violence motivated by personal/social conflicts of group members with violence motivated by land and the coerced labor needed to bring it into productivity. This act of decontextualization is commonly employed in misconstruals of hunter-gatherer violence.
There are zero examples of paleolithic tools designed for group warfare, or individual human-on-human violence in the archaeological record. Granted, tools used for killing animals for food may also be used for killing humans. However, human opponents are very different from non-human animal opponents. Throughout the neolithic history of implements of death, we see significant divergences in killing technologies used on prey, and those used to kill other humans. This is particularly true regarding groups of humans fighting other groups of humans. The dynamics of killing change, and this distinction drives differences in weapons accordingly. Thus, if humans were engaged in group conflicts with one another during the paleolithic, it would be reasonable to expect some divergence in weapon technologies for this purpose.
Primatology. Another common misconstrual of hunter-gatherer social behavior is the unsustainable generalization of other primate behavior to humans (Boehm 2001). Chimpanzees and gorillas both exhibit strong male-dominance hierarchies. This is often taken to indicate that humans have evolved in a way that justifies dominance hierarchies. While this question is complex, a brief examination of the chimpanzee and the gorilla will build our case against human warfare in the paleolithic.
Chimpanzees and gorillas both demonstrate dominance hierarchies. However, chimp violence and gorilla violence is characterized by many differences. While many of the differences are driven by their differences in mating strategy, there are two salient differences. Chimpanzee groups tend to consist of large numbers of related males living in a relatively fixed location. Gorillas tend to live in groups with one male and are relatively nomadic. Another difference is that chimps engage in group conflict with chimpanzees from other groups. Yes, chimps engage in land/territory based resource battles that resemble agrarian state wars in humans. Again, this is a complex topic, but I wanted to plant the idea that generalization from primates is not straightforward, and certainly does not support the libertarian notion of land rights (unless you’re a chimp?). See Boehm’s 2001 work for a thorough treatment of primates and hierarchy.
5. A potent police for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state.
Unpacking this statement reveals that many of the ‘freedoms’ requiring police protection within ‘the state’ are property crimes relating to the lack of “agrarian justice” in the modern nation-state system (Paine 1797; George 1879). Removing the assumption that ownership of land is a natural right alleviates many of the structural problems related to this. This is another good example of but one emergent property of the libertarian state that mirrors the current agrarian state.
Hunter-gatherers experience high degrees of personal autonomy/freedom without any form of police protection.
Human psychology guarantees sub-optimal well-being under libertarianism
As this article has run far longer than expected, I bridge this is-ought gap and cover this in a later post.
“the primitive state tends to result in lower levels of popular welfare than exist under organized banditry or anarchy. In some cases, our state can even increase disorder and decrease total output.” – Moselle (2001) [emphasis mine]
Libertarianism yields structures that mirror agrarian states
The following is Moselle’s account of the theories of the basic agrarian state. The specification of agrarian state is my addition. This is intentional — to show that these paragraphs lose very little of their meaning when also read through the mind of those wishing to justify the libertarian state. One must only change a few words for them to hold in both instances.
“In part, historians optimistic views of the state come, in the absence of evidence, from the theories of the state they have in the back of their minds. Theories of the state might address three issues. They might seek to explain the existence of the state, perhaps by some quasihistorical account of its origin. They might give a normative account of the state; that is, seek to legitimize the authority of the state. Finally, they might discuss the consequences of the state; that is, provide a model of the state. By far the most influential theory of the state, the contractual theory, does all three of the above. In the typical contractual account, individuals live initially in a state of anarchy, and club together for protection. Economies of specialization lead to the hiring of agents to carry out this task, while economies of scale lead to the formation of (local) monopoly defense organizations. These “protective associations” can be identified as (minimal) states… Contained in these accounts, however, is also an implicit model of what the state does. Typically the state provides certain services to its citizens, especially protection and the preservation of order. In return, citizens provide payments to their king or lord, perhaps in the form of taxes or feudal dues. Different contractual theories differ in the obligations both of the state and of its citizens. How good a contractual state is for the populace depends on the terms of this contract but, even in Hobbes’s least restricted of contractual states, life is preferable to that in his picture of anarchy. Indeed, if the supposed contract is agreed to by the populace as a whole, then they cannot be worse off under the state than under anarchy: their well-being were they to reject the contract places a lower bound on their well-being were they to accept.” – Moselle (2001)
Indeed, the libertarian account of the state is just another contractual theory of the state. It attempts to explain the state’s existence, to legitimize its authority, and provide a model of the state. Shermer happily jumps into this narrative by specifying specialized functions that lead to the hiring of agents to carry out the protection of individuals and contracts by way of military, police, legislators, and adjudicators. These “economies of scale” then lead to local monopoly defense organizations. Unfortunately for the libertarian contractual account of the state, the hunter-gatherer ethnography undermines the rationale for the state’s existence, its authority, and provides alternatives to its model.
Conclusion
A synthesis of hunter-gatherer political philosophy must account for the leveling mechanism of opting-out that was prevalent throughout the paleolithic, and the distinct change in behavior and mentality historically and invariably caused by the transition from nomadism (no land rights) to sedentism (enforced land rights).
Rather than account for either of these necessities, libertarianism begins its story with neolithic agrarians, and the land ‘rights’ (read: problems) associated with them. Thus, it cannot be considered to be in alignment with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, it is possible to root the entirety of libertarian philosophy firmly in agrarian assumptions. In other words, libertarianism is NOT paleo.
I have not had time to make the connection from hunter-gatherer social conditions to human-nature in this post. Among other things, a discussion is warranted on the reasons we tend to paradoxically find the drive to egalitarianism present among already free people, while libertarian impulses primarily exist among those living under [relative] coercion with a gnawing sense of fear and uncertainty. Such a discussion is forthcoming.
And yes, I have intentionally avoided explicitly discussing the Austrian economic theory that tends to get bundled with libertarianism… for now.
Before you get all excited and go McCarthy on everyone, the reconciliation I will present in subsequent posts doesn’t end in ism, and doesn’t start with a ‘c’ or ‘m’. And… I’ll do it all without the redistribution of any person’s wealth.
I welcome your comments. Please avoid ad hominem and keep the discussion reasoned. Oh, I’m not the only one among the authoritarian-averse paleosphere who’s already jaded by another U.S. election cycle. After you’ve left a comment, maybe check out Richard’s post from a couple days ago.
References
Black, Bob (1984). “The Libertarian As Conservative“. Eris Society lecture.
Boehm, Christopher (2001). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press.
George, Henry (1879). Progress and Poverty.
Gray, Peter (2009). “Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence“. The American Journal of Play, 1(4), 476-522. [full-text PDF]
Koehnline, J. (Ed.). (1994). Gone to Croatan: The Origins of North American Dropout Culture. Autonomedia.
Malinowski, B. 1960. A scientific theory of culture. Oxford University Press.
Moselle, B. (2001). “A Model of a Predatory State“. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 17(1), 1-33. doi: 10.1093/jleo/17.1.1. [full-text PDF]
Nozick, Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books.
Paine, Thomas (1797). “Agrarian Justice“.
Rothbard, Murray (1981). “A critique of the New Libertarian Manifesto“. Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance. [online from Ludwig Von Mises Institute]
Scott, James C. (2010). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.
Shermer, Michael (2011). “Liberty and Science“. Cato Institute (Cato Unbound).
Woodburn (1982). Egalitarian Societies. Man, 1(17), 431-451. [full-text PDF]Former top Netanyahu adviser says Saudi Arabia willing to abandon PA in order to seal a deal with Israel against Iran.
A bombshell report suggests that Saudi Arabia will buck its commonly held belief that relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are key towards establishing relations with Israel and are ready to sign a deal with the Jewish state, even if the PA opposes it.
Prime Minister Netanyahu's former national security advisor Yaakov Nagel told the Telegraph that Saudi Arabia is so desperate to ink an agreement with Israel that it is prepared to move forward despite lack of a Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia's traditional position forbids negotiations with Israel until a two-state solution is implemented.
“They just have to say there is an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, they don’t care, they don’t give a damn about what will be in the agreement,” Nagel said. “They need to say there is an agreement in order to go for next steps.”
Channel 10 reported last month that Saudi Arabia told PA President Mahmoud Abbas to either accept an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal currently being advanced by the Trump administration or be forced from his position. Abbas hotly denied the remarks and a close confidant told the Times of Israel that "The Channel 10 report is fabricated, false and untrue."
Israel has long been rumored to be holding covert ties with Saudi Arabia and Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said last week that Israel enjoys warm relations with many Arab countries despite the fact that these countries officially refuse to recognize Israel's existence.
"They still do not vote with us, but I can say that we have a relationship with them," Danon told Ynet. "We are talking about a dozen Islamic countries, including the Arab countries that understand the potential of relations with Israel. The State of Israel is not the regional problem, it is the regional solution, so we are strengthening this cooperation."next Image 1 of 2
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The Connecticut teenager accused of fatally stabbing a classmate was charged as an adult Tuesday and bail was set at $3 million.
Christopher Plaskon, 16, was charged with murder and could face up to 60 years in prison for allegedly stabbing 16-year-old Maren Sanchez in a hallway of Jonathan Law High School in Milford on Friday, just hours before she was to attend the junior prom.
He was originally charged with murder as a juvenile offender and has been hospitalized under psychiatric evaluation.
Plaskon went before the Juvenile Court Tuesday in a session held at the medical facility where he is being held under an emergency commitment order. His case was transferred to an adult docket of the Connecticut Superior Court and a session was held later in the day.
He was then advised of his rights before he was charged and bail was set at $3 million, although it could be reduced at a subsequent hearing.
He will continue to receive psychiatric treatment while in the custody of the Department of Corrections, as ordered by the judge.
Plaskon will have a formal arraignment Friday, provided that he is released from emergency psychiatric hold according to an attorney for the suspect's family.
The boy’s family released a statement on Tuesday saying they join the community in mourning the victim as they struggle to understand what led to the crime.
The relatives said their hearts are "forever broken."
“Words can only fall short in conveying the depth and breadth of the raw sadness we are left with by this unimaginable tragedy. Our hearts are forever broken as we, like you, struggle to understand,” reads the statement, first published on Milford Now.
In the statement, the Plaskons say they offered their deepest sympathies to the Sanchez family. They also thanked extended family, friends and neighbors for reaching out to them in what they called their "darkest hour."
“To the Sanchez family, our deepest sympathies. Please know that you are now, and forever, in our hearts, our thoughts and our prayers. We join with the entire Milford community to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of this most vibrant and exceptional young woman,” The statement also reads.
"To our extended family, friends and neighbors and all who have reached out to us in our darkest hour with warmth, kindness, understanding and compassion, you cannot know how much it has meant to us. Thank you."
The Associated Press contributed to this reportNotice: HERE Transit is no longer available on Windows 10. If you plan to upgrade your mobile device to Windows 10, we recommend using the Windows Maps app that comes installed with Windows 10. HERE Transit makes it easier for you to get anywhere by bus, train and subway. Customize the way you use public transit and quickly compare routes, departure and arrival times and how far you need to walk for each route option. Available in over 760 cities globally, this is the only public transit app you’ll ever need. Key Features -Plan a trip in advance: compare route options, arrival and departure times, changes and walking distances -See details for each leg of your journey -Customize your walking speed, preferred walking distance, number of changes and transport modes for better personalization -Spot nearby stations with LiveSight for better orientation -Get built-in, turn-by-turn walk directions in map and list view for door-to-door guidance -See your favorites with one tap. Add and edit them with other HERE apps and on here.com -Long-tap on a station on the Nearby screen to start journey directions -Pin frequent destinations to your Start screen for easy access to transit directions -Over-the-air updates with the latest transit information LiveSight requires Windows Phones with a compassBEDFORD HEIGHTS/BOWLING GREEN, Ohio (Reuters) - The race for president focused squarely on the battle for working-class votes on Wednesday, as Republican Mitt Romney scrambled to make up ground on Democratic President Barack Obama in the crucial battleground state of Ohio.
On a day when the rivals held dueling events across the state, Romney mixed empathy for the unemployed - at one point, he said his “heart aches” for the jobless - with attacks on Obama’s trade policy toward China. Foreign trade is a sensitive subject in a state where thousands of manufacturing jobs have gone overseas.
Romney’s cause was made more urgent by a new Quinnipiac University/New York Times poll that indicated Obama led the former Massachusetts governor by 10 percentage points in Ohio and was ahead by similar margins in two other important states - Florida and Pennsylvania. Other troubling signs: Obama held nearly a 20-point lead in Florida among women, while Romney’s lead among men had dwindled to 3 points.
Ohio and Florida are politically divided states central to Romney’s hopes to amass the 270 electoral votes needed for victory in the November 6 election. Losing either state could be disastrous for the Republican, who trailed Obama in the nationwide Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll of likely voters by 49 to 43 percent.
The Quinnipiac survey suggested that Romney, who was trailing Obama by a smaller margin at the beginning of last week, had been significantly damaged by the disclosure of a secretly taped video of his remarks at a private fundraiser in May.
In the video, Romney - a former private equity executive with a fortune estimated at up to $250 million - tells wealthy donors to his |
as Ilir, cultivation in Mandi Angin, Rawas Ilir, Musi Rawas
L. domesticum var. aquaeum is distinguished by its hairy leaves, as well as the tightly packed dark yellow fruit on its bunches. The fruit tends to be small, with thin skin and little sap; the skin is difficult to remove. To be eaten, the fruit is bitten and the flesh sucked through the hole created,[2] or rubbed until the skin breaks and the seeds are retrieved. In Indonesia the fruit has several names, including kokosan, pisitan, pijetan, and bijitan.[7] The seeds are relatively large, with thin, sour flesh.
Reproduction [ edit ]
The seeds of L. parasiticum are polyembryonic, the multiple embryos resulting from apomixis.[8]
L. parasiticum is traditionally reproduced by spreading seedlings, either cultivated or collected from below the tree.[9] It has been said that new seedlings require 20 to 25 years to bear fruit, with the possibility of the quality being inferior.[9][10] However other sources quote 12 years to first production from seed and no variations. Production often varies from year to year, and depends to some extent on having a dry period to induce flowering. One example of ten trees in Costa Rica about twenty-five years old produced during five years the following weights of salable fruits: 2008: 50 kilos, 2009: 2000 kilos, 2010: 1000 kilos, 2011: 100 kilos, 2012: 1500 kilos. Experiments in the Philippines with grafting where two trees are planted close to each other and then grafted when one to two meters tall to leave twin root systems on a single main trunk have resulted in earlier and less erratic fruit production.
Another common method is by air layering. Although the process requires up to several months,[10] the new rooted tree produced is itself ready to bear fruit within two years. Trees cultivated with this method have a high death rate,[2] and the growths are less resilient.[11]
The third common way to reproduce L. parasiticum is with grafting. This results in the new trees having the same genetic characteristics as their parent, and being ready to bear fruit within 5 to 6 years. The offspring are relatively stronger than transplanted shoots.[9]
Ecology [ edit ]
L. parasiticum grows well in mixed agroforests. The plant, especially the duku variant, prefers damp, shaded areas. It can be grown in the same agroforest as durian, petai, and jengkol, as well as wood-producing trees.[2][11]
L. parasiticum is grown from low grounds up to heights of 600 metres (2,000 ft) above sea level, in areas with an average rainfall of 1,500 to 2,500 millimetres (59 to 98 in) a year. The plant can grow and blossom in latosol, yellow podzol, and alluvium.[11] The plant prefers slightly acidic soil with good drainage and rich in mulch. The langsat variant is hardier, and can weather dry seasons with a little shade and water.[2] The plant cannot handle floods.[5]
L. parasiticum generally bears fruit once a year. This period can vary between areas, but blooming is generally after the beginning of the rainy season and fruit production some four months later.
Distribution [ edit ]
Lansium parasiticum was originally native to Peninsular Malaysia. Can be found in Sulawesi and Sarawak, Northern Borneo, the name Duku is reserved for the larger-sized varieties of Langsat, near the size of golf balls, claimed sweeter and with less sap in the peel. A variety called Dokong exported to mainland Malaysia from Thailand (this variety is called 'Longkong' Thai: ลองกอง in Thailand) grows tighter in the clusters, giving it a faceted shape, and is preferred by many over the standard Langsat.
Within mainland Asia, the tree is cultivated in Thailand (Thai: ลางสาด, langsat), Cambodia, Vietnam, India, and Malaysia. Outside the region, it has also been successfully transplanted and introduced to Hawaii and Surinam. It grows well in the wetter areas (120 inches/3 meters or more annual rainfall) of Costa Rica, where it is still very rare, having been introduced decades ago by the United Fruit Company. A major hindrance to its acceptance seems to be that it is very slow in bearing, said to take 12 years or more from seed. However, air layering from mature trees, as well as grafting, are said to work well and produce much faster.[5]
Uses [ edit ]
L. parasiticum, showing the clear-white aril around the seed. Peeled, showing the clear-white aril around the seed.
L. parasiticum is cultivated mainly for its fruit, which can be eaten raw. The fruit can also be bottled in syrup.[2] The wood is hard, thick, heavy, and resilient, allowing it to be used in the construction of rural houses.[7]
Some parts of the plant are used in making traditional medicine. The bitter seeds can be pounded and mixed with water to make a deworming and ulcer medication. The bark is used to treat dysentery and malaria; the powdered bark can also be used to treat scorpion stings. The fruit's skin is used to treat diarrhea, and in the Philippines the dried skin is burned as a mosquito repellent.[2][7] The skin, especially of the langsat variety, can be dried and burned as incense.[7]
The greatest producers of Lansium parasiticum are Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. The production is mostly for internal consumption, although some is exported to Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuwait.
See also [ edit ]1. The Jockboarder: Somewhere along the line, when skateboarding reached the X-Games and longboarding rose to popularity, jocks realized they wanted a piece of the action. They wanted to look edgy and cool but they were gonna do it their way. Their way, meaning sandals, boardshorts, a college sweatshirt and the biggest most horrendous longboard they could possibly buy at Zumiez.
2. The I Used To Skate Bro: These guys come in all shapes and sizes, but their primary goal is always the same: To tell you how much they totally used to skate. It’s always this long lost hazy memory like, “damn dude, yeah when I skated, I was so hyped on Chad Maska or whatever his name was, you know the white dude with the noseslides?!” Just in case that wasn’t annoying enough, don’t be surprised when they follow up with the inevitable, “yo lemmie try your board real quick,” to see if they “still got it.”
3. The Stoner: These guys usually ride a cruiser, longboard, or some old raggity water logged piece of shit because they were too busy spending their parent’s money on more weed. The smarter ones try to avoid any confrontation with actual skaters, or are too busy riding around campus to the next “chill sesh” blasting Phish or whatever jam bands these fuckers listen to now a days.
4. The One Girl Skater: There’s always one of them: The girl that looks like she’s about to eat shit anytime she takes her foot off of the board and tries to push. To a horny young man this might seem like a dream come true, but most of these girls are either trying too hard or lesbians.
5. The Longboarder Who Thinks He’s A Skateboarder: This is the dude who thinks he can totally “get down” on your sesh. He starts by rolling up, powersliding and doing some wacky shit on all 4’s. Then he has to show you some scar from going 50 miles down the freeway without a helmet, proving how fucking gnar it was. Too bad you can’t do that on your “shortboard” bro.Mr Putin, who was re-elected as president almost a year ago, stands accused of bringing in new laws to stifle criticism of his regime and adapting existing laws to silence dissent.
"The Russian government has unleashed a crackdown on civil society unprecedented in the country's post-Soviet history," the HRW report states.
"The authorities have introduced a series of restrictive laws, harassed, intimidated and in several case imprisoned political activists, interfered in the work of NGOs and sought to cast government critics as clandestine enemies."
In a move that Amnesty described as "deliberately reminiscent of the Cold War," Mr Putin has brought in a new law which requires any organisation that receives funding from abroad to describe themselves as "foreign agents" if they are considered to be involved in undefined "political activities".
Since the start of the year, the Russian authorities have carried out more than 200 inspections of organisations campaigning to protect human rights. Amnesty's Moscow office was "inspected" by prosecutors and tax inspectors on 25 March.
The first organisation to face legal proceedings is a group named Golos – or "voice" in Russian – which played a prominent role in organising election monitoring and reporting fraud in the vote which saw Mr Putin re-elected.
In several cases the inspectors demanded to go through computers or emails. In one case, officials demanded that an organisation prove that its staff had been vaccinated for smallpox, and in another the officials asked for chest X-rays of staff to ensure they did not have tuberculosis.
"The government claims the inspections are routine, but they clearly are not," said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at HRW.
"The campaign is unprecedented in its scope and scale, and seems clearly aimed at intimidating and marginalising civil society groups. This inspection campaign can potentially be used to force some groups to end advocacy work, or to close them down."
Another law, adopted in December, essentially banned funding emanating from the United States for "political" activity by non-governmental organisations, and bans groups whose work is "directed against Russia's interests."
A third law, the treason law, expands the legal definition of treason in ways that could criminalise involvement in raising awareness of human rights.
The publication of the reports comes at a time of mounting pressure for Mr Putin.
On Wednesday – the same day the report was launched in Moscow – a high-profile critic of the president went on trial for what he said were trumped-up charges.
Alexei Navalny, 36, told a court in the city of Kirov that they should throw out the charges of stealing from a timber firm.
Mr Navalny has suggested that Mr Putin ordered the trial to stop his criticism of "swindlers and thieves" in government and sideline him as a potential presidential rival.
"The case absolutely cannot be tried in court in its current form," the anti-corruption campaigner said, after Judge Sergei Blinov ordered a recess to consider his plea to send the case back to state prosecutors.
Mr Navalny, who organised the biggest protests since Mr Putin rose to power 13 years ago, is accused of stealing 16 million roubles (£335,000) from a timber firm in Kirov that he was advising in 2009.
"It's raw, it's tendentious, there are different numbers cited everywhere, different amounts of timber are mentioned, and so on."
He also insisted his innocence would be apparent even if he was convicted.
"At the end of the trial, we will certainly win. I'm sure that a lack of guilt will be established.
"Even if it is not formally acknowledged by the court, it will be clear for everyone who attends the trial."The boys are back in town. We're on the eve of The Verge's two-year birthday, we're celebrating 100 episodes of The Vergecast, and right now we're haphazardly watching people go to work in costumes — so it must be Halloween, as well! Join us today at 1PM PT / 4PM ET / 8PM GMT (all time zones). Josh, Nilay, and Paul (yes, Paul). News, hijinks, a look back, a look forward, and even a look sideways — just like our elevators. Tell us your favorite memories, your clips, show us your costumes (bonus points if it's of The Verge crew), and we might include them in the show. Keep it locked!
Update: Special fourth guest — the Nexus 5!
Update: we're going live between 4:05PM and 4:10PM ET. Stay tuned!
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Drones and water don't get along. This tends to be a problem when you're trying to film aerial footage of, say, some rad surfers or when your battery dies above a pond. But the Splash Drone is designed specifically to solve your waterlogged quadcopter woes.
The main selling point of this semi-DIY drone isn't just the fact that it won't short out if you crash into water. The Splash Drone is fully waterproof. It even floats! It can take off from the water and land on the water. You can also plop it down in the ocean mid-flight, and thanks to a waterproof gimbal and GoPro Dive Case, you'll be able to film the little fishes under the water. That's kind of awesome.
In addition to being waterproof, the Splash Drone also has such useful features as the capability to return to base with the flip of a switch and the option to keep the camera tuned on a specific point of interest (a.k.a. Follow Me). There's also a payload release feature that would let you, for instance, deliver a beer to a friend on a boat. Sounds like pretty much the best thing ever.
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You can control the Splash Drone with a smartphone or an RC controller, and it supports a live video feed. The Splash Drone can even be rigged with an emergency flare system which, well, okay sure why not.
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The Splash Drone is currently a funded Kickstarter project, which might normally make you a little wary, but in this case the technology already exists. The hardware itself has been on sale in China for a while, and some of the components come from 3D Robotics' Open Hardware Program. You can nab a super-basic DIY kit for a handy $390—if you think you can build it—and a "ready to fly bird" for $800 that comes with all the trimmings.
Click over to Kickstarter for more details. The campaign ends April 8. [Kickstarter]
Contact the author at adam@gizmodo.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 91CF B387 7B38 148C DDD6 38D2 6CBC 1E46 1DBF 22A Look At The New Music In 1.9.2
6:48 AM Will Sterling 2 Comments
New Island Music
With Salt, we've always wanted to keep the music unobtrusive and so we originally opted to only have music play occasionally at sea. We believe that too much music can be overstimulating and actually take away from the immersion of a game. Walking around on an island listening to the birds, wind, and waves hitting the shore can really immerse you in the game, and we didn't want music to take away from that.
That being said, we do think that some island music could be beneficial in the right setting and with the right restrictions. We've decided to introduce new music for large natural islands. These islands are usually quite big and do not contain enemies. This means a good bit of time spent on these islands is pure exploration and walking across the land. We figured these islands would be a good place to introduce some light and occasional music.
I've composed specific songs for day and night time that will be able to play while you are exploring large natural islands.
Here are some of the songs you can expect to hear soon.
Day Island Examples
Night Island Examples
Soundtrack Update
We'd also like to note that we've updated the soundtrack to include the boss music in the game as well. You can stream the soundtrack in its entirety for free here. We will eventually be releasing a downloadable copy of it when the game releases.
Thanks for reading as always we'd love to hear your feedback!My Little Pony: The Movie is a 2017 animated musical fantasy film based on the television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was developed as part of the 2010 re-launch of the My Little Pony franchise by Hasbro. The film was directed by Jayson Thiessen and based on a story and screenplay co-written by Meghan McCarthy, both Friendship Is Magic veterans. The plot follows the alicorn Twilight Sparkle, her five pony friends – collectively known as the "Mane 6" – and her dragon assistant Spike embarking on a quest to save their home of Equestria from an evil conqueror, gaining new friends in the process. In addition to the show's regular voice cast reprising their roles, the film features the voices of Emily Blunt, Kristin Chenoweth, Liev Schreiber, Michael Peña, Sia, Taye Diggs, Uzo Aduba, and Zoe Saldana as new characters.
The film was produced by Allspark Pictures and DHX Media,[4][5] using traditional animation created with Toon Boom Harmony.[6] It premiered in New York City on September 24, 2017,[7] and was released on October 6, 2017 in North America through Lionsgate[8] and Canada through Entertainment One Films. The film received mixed reviews from critics and grossed over $60 million worldwide on a $6.5 million budget.
Plot [ edit ]
The ponies of Equestria prepare for their first Friendship Festival, overseen by Princess Twilight Sparkle in Canterlot. The festivities are interrupted by an invasion of monsters commanded by the broken-horned unicorn Tempest Shadow, who uses magical obsidian orbs to petrify Twilight's fellow princesses; Princess Celestia gives Princess Luna incomplete instructions to seek help from "the queen of the hippo" before they are both petrified. Twilight flees the city alongside her five pony friends – Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Applejack, and Fluttershy – and her dragon assistant, Spike. Tempest is contacted by her superior, the Storm King, who reminds her to gather all of Equestria's princesses for him to harness their magic through his mystical staff, promising to restore her horn in exchange.
Twilight's group travel to the desert city of Klugetown in search of the aforementioned "hippos". A feline con artist named Capper offers to escort the group, secretly intending to sell them to settle a debt; however, he develops a genuine friendship with them. Twilight discovers an atlas that reveals the "hippos" to be hippogriffs, exposing Capper's treachery. After the group evade a pursuing Tempest aboard a delivery airship, Tempest brings Capper to guide her to them, but he deliberately misdirects her to atone for deceiving the group.
During a lunch break, the airship's birdlike Captain Celaeno and her crew reluctantly allow the group passage, revealing themselves to be former pirates that have been forced into the Storm King's service. Rainbow Dash persuades the pirates to defy orders and take the group to the hippogriffs' kingdom on Mount Aris. In celebration, she performs a Sonic Rainboom that inadvertently gives their location away to Tempest, forcing the group to escape in a makeshift hot air balloon before Tempest destroys the ship with the pirates and Capper on board.
The group reach Mount Aris to find it deserted; while exploring the ruins, they become trapped in an underwater cavern, where they are saved from drowning by the seapony Princess Skystar and led to her undersea home of Seaquestria. Skystar identifies her kind as the hippogriffs, transformed by a magic pearl used by her mother, Queen Novo, to hide from the Storm King; Novo demonstrates by turning the ponies into seaponies and Spike into a pufferfish. When Novo denies them the pearl to use against the Storm King, Twilight desperately attempts to steal it while letting her friends unknowingly distract the seaponies. Her plan backfires when she unwittingly triggers an alarm, prompting the outraged queen to banish the entire group to the surface.
Abandoned by her friends over her actions, Twilight is kidnapped by Tempest and brought to the Storm King in Canterlot to have her magic absorbed; en route, Tempest gains Twilight's sympathy when she divulges how she lost her horn in a monster attack as a filly, which caused her own friends to shun her for her dangerously unstable magic. Meanwhile, after Spike alerts Twilight's friends to her capture, Capper, the pirates, and the hippogriff Skystar return to help them infiltrate Canterlot and mount a rescue. The Storm King retaliates by conjuring a tornado in the city with his newly empowered staff, betraying Tempest as well. Twilight saves Tempest from the tornado and reunites with her friends, who work together with her to take the staff. The Storm King hurls an obsidian orb at the group to reclaim the staff, but Tempest jumps in his way, petrifying them both. The Storm King's body falls and shatters, while the group use the staff's magic to revive Tempest, who returns the stolen magic to restore the princesses and the damaged city.
The Friendship Festival resumes, and the ponies celebrate with all of the allies Twilight's group have made on their adventure. Tempest is disheartened by her still broken horn until she is convinced by Twilight to join the party by producing a fireworks display with her magic, happily accepting the group's friendship.
Cast [ edit ]
Nicole Oliver, St. Germain, and Britt McKillip reprise their respective roles from Friendship Is Magic as alicorns Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, and Princess Cadance. St. Germain also voices Granny Smith, Applejack's grandmother, and Muffins, a cross-eyed gray pegasus. Michelle Creber and Peter New voice Apple Bloom and Big McIntosh, Applejack's younger sister and older brother, respectively. Michael Dobson voices Bulk Biceps, a muscular pegasus. Samuel Vincent voices Party Favor, a balloonist unicorn.
Adam Bengis voices Code Red, one of the Canterlot ponies. Brian Dobson voices Verko, a mole-rat crime boss in Klugetown. Max Martini, Mark Oliver, and Nicole Oliver respectively perform as three of Captain Celaeno's parrot-like crew: Boyle, first mate Mullet, and Lix Spittle. Michael Dobson, Andrew McNee, Tegan Moss, Sabrina Pitre, Rhona Rees, and Vincent all feature as assorted citizens of Canterlot. Richard Ian Cox, Michael Dobson, McNee, New, and Nicole Oliver also perform as denizens of Klugetown. Additional voices are provided by Alistair Abell, Caitlyn Bairstow, Julia Benson, Christine Chatelain, Brian Dobson, Paul Dobson, Rondel Reynoldson, Jason Simpson, Sarah Troyer, and Siobhan Williams.
Production [ edit ]
Development [ edit ]
At San Diego Comic-Con International in 2012, Friendship Is Magic head writer Meghan McCarthy commented on the possibility of a feature film based on the series, saying that it was not in her control whether or not the film would be made.[24] The film was announced on October 20, 2014, with Joe Ballarini attached as screenwriter and McCarthy as co-executive producer.[4] Hasbro Studios president Stephan Davis said of the film that "I think it gives us an opportunity to tell a bigger story, that maybe we [can't] tell on television" and that "[it's] also an opportunity to broaden the franchise".[25] The film is one of the first being produced through Hasbro Studios' self-financing film label Allspark Pictures, which also produced the live-action adaptation of Jem and the Holograms.[4] During PonyCon AU on February 22, 2015, McCarthy said that the movie would be unrelated to the Equestria Girls spin-off franchise, and that the crew was "going all out on it, to make sure it doesn't just feel like an extended episode".[26]
Series director Jayson Thiessen and McCarthy were both confirmed as the film's director and screenwriter, respectively;[27] Michael Vogel was also signed on as co-executive producer alongside McCarthy, with Hasbro executives Brian Goldner and Stephen Davis as producers.[27] Rita Hsiao and Vogel were later announced as co-writers alongside McCarthy.[28][29]
On April 30, 2016, concept artwork and other information was officially revealed at PonyRadioCon in Moscow; the panel included additional plot details such as the main characters' transformation into "sea ponies" for a portion of the film.[30]
Casting [ edit ]
The initial Lionsgate announcement listed the principal voice cast of Friendship Is Magic – Tara Strong, Ashleigh Ball, Andrea Libman, Tabitha St. Germain, and Cathy Weseluck – reprising their roles alongside actress Kristin Chenoweth as a new character.[31] On February 12, 2016, it was announced that Emily Blunt joined the voice cast.[32] By April 27, 2016, actors Michael Peña and Uzo Aduba were in negotiations to join the cast.[33] On May 16, Liev Schreiber and Taye Diggs were confirmed additions to the cast.[28] On June 20, Ashleigh Ball stated through Twitter that she had begun recording for the film's songs.[34] At San Diego Comic-Con in July 2016, singer Sia was announced to be portraying a new "pop star pony" character called Songbird Serenade.[22] On January 11, 2017, it was reported by Variety that Zoe Saldana had joined the cast.[35] Friendship Is Magic voice actress Nicole Oliver confirmed via Twitter on January 23 that she would also be a part of the film's cast,[36] reprising her role as Princess Celestia.[37]
Animation [ edit ]
On April 2, 2016, Michel Gagné joined the film as an effects animator, taking an eight-month hiatus from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse made by Sony Pictures Animation.[38][39][40][41][specify] In early October 2016, Gagné reported that Nik Gipe was hired onto the film's staff as his assistant. He also mentioned that the film was being animated using Toon Boom Harmony instead of the usual animation software Adobe Flash that is used in the television series.[6] According to art director Rebecca Dart, they wanted to keep to the look and feel of the television show, and the use of Toon Boom Harmony enabled them to add "simple yet impactful changes" to the designs for the big screen, such as depth and shadows for their eyes and ears, and the impression of heart-shaped indentations on the bottom of their hooves.[42] The production of the film ended by July 29, 2017.[43]
The production crew used simple 3D modeling in Autodesk Maya as to determine camera locations, lens, and angles, rough lighting, character and prop placement, and which way the characters would be looking and expressing. The pre-visualization crew were able to use the 3D backdrops that became more detailed throughout the film's development to integrate the simple 3D character models, and then were able to test the Toon Boom animations on top of these scenes using the placement established by Maya, helping to speed up the production.[44]
Music [ edit ]
The film's official soundtrack was released on September 22, 2017 by RCA Records.[45]
The film's songs and score were composed by Friendship Is Magic songwriter Daniel Ingram, who first announced at GalaCon 2015 that he would be collaborating with a live studio orchestra for the film.[46] On his songwriting for the film, Ingram said, "I had to challenge myself to push beyond what had been done in the TV show; to write bigger, more epic."[47] It was stated through the PonyRadioCon panel that the film would have a total of eight original songs.[30] At Hasbro's Toy Fair investor presentation on February 17, 2017, it was announced that there would be seven songs.[48] Around 5,800 pages of sheet music were created for all orchestral parts of the score.[49] Recording for the score began on June 5, 2017, and finished on June 11.[50][51] An album containing the background music scores from the film is scheduled for a November 16, 2018 release.
Sia contributed an original song to the film,[52] "Rainbow", which was released as a single on September 15, 2017.[53] A music video for the song later released by Entertainment Weekly on September 19. The video was directed by Daniel Askill and features a dance performance by Maddie Ziegler, a previous collaborator with Sia, intercut to scenes from the film.[54] Danish band Lukas Graham also contributed an original song for the film titled "Off to See the World",[55] which was used in the film's first trailer and played over the closing credits. Other artists included in the album are DNCE and CL.[56][57]
The score for the film was released on Spotify on October 7, 2017.[58]
Release [ edit ]
On August 7, 2015, Lionsgate announced that they would distribute and market the film worldwide except in China.[31][27] The film was showcased at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on May 10 along with eight other Lionsgate features to help sell the film to international distributors.[59]
My Little Pony: The Movie was originally scheduled for release in the United States on November 3, 2017,[60] but it was subsequently moved up to October 6, 2017.[8] Theatrically, the film was accompanied by a 5-minute animated short from Hasbro Studios' web series Hanazuki: Full of Treasures.[61] A private premiere screening was held in New York City on September 24, 2017, twelve days prior to the nationwide release date.[7]
Marketing [ edit ]
Numerous toys based on characters, sets, and props from the film were made by Hasbro, and a vast majority of the products was released on August 1, 2017.[62] The 2016 PonyRadioCon panel included a brief preview for some of the planned merchandise being developed for the film, including T-shirts and graphics.[30] On July 27, 2016, the My Little Pony Collectible Card Game hinted on Twitter about a new set of cards based on the film.[63] Hasbro's toyline for the film was shown and promoted at Toy Fair 2017 and various other toy conventions.[64][65][66]
Several books and comics related to the film have been announced: My Little Pony: Annual 2018, which contains "exclusive content from the My Little Pony movie" was released on August 10, 2017;[67] and a "prequel" story released on August 1.[68] On January 23, 2017, Hachette Book Group listed five different books for the film, all released on August 29, 2017.[69][70][71][72][73] Books based on the film have been showcased at BookCon 2017 on June 4, with guest appearances by Andrea Libman and Ashleigh Ball.[74] IDW Publishing released a four-issue comic book miniseries titled My Little Pony: The Movie Prequel, with the first issue released on June 28, 2017.[75] Viz Media released an art book for the film on August 29, 2017.[76] A comic adaptation based on the film by IDW was released on September 27, 2017.[77]
A teaser trailer for the film was released online on April 6, 2017,[78] and in theaters alongside Smurfs: The Lost Village the following day. The first full trailer debuted online on June 28, 2017,[79] and was released with Despicable Me 3 two days later.[80] Another trailer was released by USA Today online on September 12, 2017.[81] The same day, the official My Little Pony Facebook page hosted a live Q&A stream with two of the movie's characters, Pinkie Pie (voiced by Andrea Libman) and Twilight Sparkle (voiced by Tara Strong).[82] Another trailer was played during the season 12 finale of America's Got Talent on September 20, 2017.[83] On September 27, 2017, the official My Little Pony Facebook page hosted a live Q&A stream with art director Rebecca Dart, who drew a custom artwork of Rainbow Dash (voiced by Ashleigh Ball).[84]
On September 30, 2017, a special titled The Making of My Little Pony: The Movie aired on Discovery Family, a joint venture between Discovery Communications (now Discovery, Inc.) and Hasbro;[85] it was watched by 18,000 viewers.[86]
Home media [ edit ]
My Little Pony: The Movie was released on December 19, 2017 for digital downloads, and was later released on January 9, 2018 for DVD, Blu-ray, and On Demand.[87][88] Its special features includes a deleted scene, a music video for the song "I'm the Friend You Need", three featurettes starring the Mane Six, an exclusive Equestria Girls animated short, and the Hanazuki: Full of Treasures short bundled with the film's theatrical release.[89] However, the home media release lacks a Dolby Atmos soundtrack, and instead has a standard DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix.
A home media bundling both this film and the namesake 1986 film was released on October 16, 2018, commemorating the 35th anniversary of the My Little Pony toy line. The releases contain the same bonus features as its DVD/Blu-ray counterparts.[90]
As of April 2018, My Little Pony: The Movie had sold over 200,000 DVD copies and 160,000 Blu-Ray copies.[3]
Reception [ edit ]
Box office [ edit ]
My Little Pony: The Movie has grossed $21.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $39.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $61.3 million[3] on a production budget of $6.5 million.[91]
In the United States and Canada, the film was expected to gross between $10 million and $17 million from 2,528 theaters in its opening weekend.[92][93] It made $3 million on its first day, including $290,000 from Thursday night previews.[94] It ended up opening to $8.9 million finishing 4th at the box office behind Blade Runner 2049, The Mountain Between Us, and It.[95] Amid Amidi of Cartoon Brew stated that – despite the opening being considered a disappointment – any reasonable return from the film would be seen as positive by Hasbro because it is tied to the toy line.[96] The film dropped 54% in its second weekend, making $4.1 million and falling to 9th.[97]
Its biggest markets outside North America are China with $7.4 million, the UK with $5 million, Russia with $2.3 million, and Germany with $2.4 million.[3]
Critical response [ edit ]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 48% based on 62 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Charming and sweet, My Little Pony: The Movie will please its dedicated fanbase, even if it's unlikely to encourage non-devotees to gallop along for the ride."[98] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[99] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[94]
Katie Walsh of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Truthfully, this film feels like four episodes of a cartoon strung together, and there are times, especially during some of the latter musical numbers, where it truly drags." She also remarked on the film's animation, saying that it "embraces the flat, colorful, Saturday-morning cartoon look and feel".[100] Christy Lenore of RogerEbert.com gave the film 1.5 stars out of 4, criticizing the narrative as being "all over the place" and having "a multitude of underdeveloped, crammed-in characters", while commending the film for retaining the Friendship Is Magic television series cast and staff.[101] Josh Terry of Deseret News criticized the film, saying parents should "put their money into some new My Little Pony toys" rather than go see the movie.[102]
Gwen Ihnat of The A.V. Club gave the film a "C" grade, favoring the improved animation over the television series, but adding "you have to wonder to what use it's being put".[103] Elizabeth Weitzman of TheWrap wrote positively of the film, saying, "Like its television predecessor, is all dressed up in bubbles and cupcakes and rainbows. But it's so jam-packed with rousing girl power, it passes the Bechdel Test with (literally) flying colors."[104] Amy Nicholson of Variety called the film "at once clichéd and exceptional", praising its female characters and calling the story "emotionally wise".[105]
Accolades [ edit ]The years of St Peter’s Square looking like a building site are over. A new water feature has been unveiled in the square to mark it being fully open to the public following three years of re-development.
The square has a distinctly continental feel with a panorama of architecture you can look out on to from the Grade II listed classically-styled Central Library to the towering neo-gothic Town Hall, The Midland Hotel which was described as a “Twentieth Century Palace” when it opened in 1903, as well as the modern developments of No1 and No2 St Peters Square.
Work has included Metrolink expansion as part of the Second City Crossing, a new tram stop, the relocation of the cenotaph, development of |
was a power-play goal, and there will be many more like it for this team this season, so long as Drouin can remain healthy.
Canadiens coach Claude Julien recognizes the versatility this player possesses and why it will be a tremendous asset from the half-wall position.
“We’re not stuck just using the same plays because he has good vision and he can make those passes,” said Julien after Montreal’s 4-2 loss. “You can see that as a penalty killer, you don’t know if he’s going to throw it to the point right in the middle of the ice so that guy can get a great shot, such as [Shea Weber]. Or you don’t know if he’s going to pass it down low for Hemsky or make that pass like he did to [Pacioretty], or [Pacioretty] can also slide to the slot or down to the goal-line and back up for a quick release there, too.
“There’s a lot of different things, and if they watch a guy like Pacioretty, there’s always that cross pass to the D on the other side coming in closer to the backdoor. There’s a lot of things that I think Jonathan can see and do, and we’ll continue to work with that.”
They should.
It’s fair to say that the Canadiens haven’t had a player with the poise, vision, playmaking ability and the shot that Drouin owns since Alex Kovalev was running their power play from the same position. Over the last number of years, David Desharnais, Tomas Plekanec, Alex Galchenyuk and Pacioretty have all taken turns in that slot, but each one of them have been deficient in at least one of those key categories. It’s a big part of the reason the team hasn’t finished better than 13th on the power play over the last four seasons.
Plekanec had a good view of how Drouin operated from the half-wall on Wednesday and it brought back some memories of the dominant power play the Canadiens ran over the 4 1/4 seasons Kovalev was in Montreal.
“They are very similar, and he’s very talented,” said Plekanec of his new teammate. “He sees the right play out there and tends to make the right decision at the right time.”
It’s a common trait in players who dominate from the half-wall on the power play. Look at Nicklas Backstrom, who didn’t dress for the Capitals on Wednesday. Watch Chicago’s Patrick Kane. Or do what Drouin does and seek out some video of one of the greatest half-wall players of all time.
“I’ll go back to when I was younger, [former Detroit Red Wing Pavel] Datsyuk used to play that spot in the really good years — the Cup years (2008),” said Drouin, who has produced more than one-third of his 95 points in the NHL on the power play. “I still look at him on YouTube, what he did and his poise and how he made plays to [Nicklas] Lidstrom — those guys — [Henrik] Zetterberg. He’d probably be the one guy for the power play, where I play, I’d be looking at a lot.”
Borrowing from a player like Datsyuk, who scored 97 of his 314 goals and 330 of his 918 points in the NHL on the power play, is probably not a bad idea. Not just anyone can do that, but Drouin’s talent makes him a natural candidate.
The rest of it boils down to?
“Just patience, not trying to force too many things,” said Drouin.
Being unpredictable is another key factor.
The self-labelled “pass-first” player said being willing to shoot the puck when you’re known as a playmaker changes everything.
“I think it opens up more options,” Drouin said. “Right away, you get a puck to the net. If it’s [Weber] or me, I think the penalty killers gotta respect [those options].
“[Hemsky] told me I gotta shoot a couple at first to get things opened up. He was wide open for that pass to Max, so shooting early on on the power play will open up some things.”
There’s a lot more to Drouin’s game that will excite Canadiens fans.
On Wednesday he looked comfortable in his new role at centre, was responsible in his own end, and he won seven of nine faceoffs after losing his first six.
“When you talk about Jonathan Drouin, we’ve seen him enough in the balance that he’s such a smart player and can make things happen, and I think there’s even more to his game than he’s shown,” said Julien. “I know there’s even more to his game than he’s shown. He’s just getting into game shape like everyone else.”
But the 22-year-old from just north of Montreal already looks like a well-oiled machine on the power play, and that’s great news for a team that’s been deficient in that category for long stretches of the past few seasons.Seconds after hitting the snow head first, UC Berkeley alumnus Kevin Cheung knew it was unlike any fall he had experienced on the slopes. Unable to move any of his limbs, he lay frozen in immense pain as he waited for nearby ski patrollers to reach him.
Cheung, who graduated in 2013, was on a ski trip in March with a group of friends at Squaw Valley Ski Resort in Olympic Valley, California, when he attempted a risky front flip and over-rotated. Within 30 minutes, he was airlifted to a trauma center in Reno in preparation for surgery to stabilize and repair his fractured vertebrae.
Five months later, he is faced with both the physical and financial repercussions of the accident, which initially left him paralyzed from the neck down and now — after three surgeries — have resulted in intensive rehabilitation and uncertainty of whether his family can pay for his medical costs.
Cheung, who is currently undergoing treatment at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado, spends five to six hours per day in physical and occupational therapy sessions to improve his mobility.
But his family is now faced with tremendous medical expenses, which his father, Simon Cheung, estimates at about $800,000 since the accident. Although the family hopes to negotiate for increased coverage from their insurance company, out-of-pocket expenses have been high, and Simon Cheung says he could be forced to file bankruptcy.
Along with his father and brother, Cheung created an online fundraiser Sunday after receiving the suggestion from several other patients at Craig Hospital, which exclusively treats people with spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries. As of Wednesday night, the campaign has raised more than $4,000 toward an ultimate goal of $50,000.
“I was blown away by how many people — even those he didn’t know — who contributed,” said former UC Berkeley classmate and close friend Tom Ugarte. “It’s pretty powerful that Kevin has taken it upon himself to start this and be vulnerable about everything his family has gone through recently.”
Prior to the accident, the Cheung family was already in the midst of coping with serious hardship. In May 2014, Cheung’s younger brother Keith Cheung was a victim in the mass shooting near the UC Santa Barbara campus that killed six UCSB students. Keith Cheung is still recovering from brain damage sustained from his injuries.
“I felt such a shock after Kevin’s accident,” Simon Cheung said. “I couldn’t believe in that moment that our family could undergo any more pain.”
Kevin Cheung, who majored in environmental economics and policy, was an active member of the College Ski and Snowboard Club at UC Berkeley. After graduating, he went on to work in the renewable energy industry in San Francisco but still attended ski trips with the club.
Campus junior Lauren Rehbein, current club president, remembers Cheung’s embrace of the club’s spirit and his risk-taking on the slopes. She said club members never thought something bad would happen to Cheung, despite his willingness to take chances. Since the accident, many have discussed the need for greater safety precautions when attempting potentially dangerous tricks.
Although even the most routine daily tasks still prove challenging, Cheung keeps himself motivated during recovery with a goal of returning to his normal life, prior to the injury.
“Besides the physical challenges, the hardest part is focusing on the present instead of what’s out of my control,” he said.
Using the example of his right hand, which still has very limited function, he explained that there’s “no use” in continuing to focus on its restricted mobility and potentially limiting his progress in other areas, such as walking.
His father attributes Cheung’s continued strides in rehabilitation — for example, his progression from relying on a motorized wheelchair to being able to walk short distances with just a crutch — to his positive attitude.
“This is a challenge for him, of course, and we don’t know what will happen in the future,” Simon Cheung said. “Sometimes you’re not ready for a challenge, but you take it in the most positive way you can.”
Contact Ariel Hayat at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @ArielHayat.Some of the hardest part when it comes to any new tools, is understanding the terminology and concepts. Sometimes some instruments may strike people as being built by engineers, so you’d have to be an engineer to understand it. I still struggle with this same issue when I’m trying to understand electronics, computer programming, music theory, and modular synthesis. What’s pushing me forward is knowing that all these concepts are pretty straight forward if you’re looking at it thru the right lens.
One of my good friends will chat with me for hours about synth design, structure, and sound generation (I’m not sure if it’s against his will or not!?!?!) He’s more of a classical guitarist and purist in physical form but I’ve been slowly trying to make him realize that it’s not all about creating the biggest SUPER SAW wave synth or making the deepest sub bass for a BOMB ASS hip hop beat. I’m slowly turning him onto the dark side as I would put it him.
So anyways back to the basics.
Using my previous knowledge of playing guitar, and since my friend is a guitar player as well I was able better describe these foreign concepts to him. I set up my guitar rig, my guitar straight into an amplifier. I told him while I played this little riff that I wanted the reverb knob to move back and forth between a lot of reverb and very little reverb. While I’m playing the part I notice he’s moving the knob between 6 – 7. Just back and forth between those two until I was done playing my part.
I guess to him what’s a lot and a little reverb differs from me. So I instruct him “The next time I play my part, try moving between 3 to 9. That way it’s like HELLA reverb then almost none” My guitar part sounded so much better that time around and he agreed. He later wanted to try doing it again but moving more on time with the song so it was in sync with the beat.
I would later use that example to describe that he was performing the EXACT task of an LFO. There’s nothing more to the idea. The break down is sort of simple if you can break it down in your head piece by piece.
Structure.
Him moving between 6 – 7 or me asking him to move it between 3 – 9 would be and idea of Intensity or Depth (some manufactures use different terms but really that’s all it is.)
or (some manufactures use different terms but really that’s all it is.) His idea to move it between those two setting at the speed of the song is an example of Rate.
One of the things that really throws people off about what an LFO does is because of how much a parameter (Reverb knob or synth knob or …..Heat Setting knob on the Stove if you could figure out some awesome way of hooking that up.) They think the LFO is making all the audio change happen. Instead that it’s causing something to move back and forth that is creating all of these sounds. If you were to turn the intensity of an LFO to Maximum and it wasn’t assign to move any knob then it would make no noise. It would be like my friend making the moments of turning one of my amp knobs but not actually touching one.
So I use the same method to explain what using and LFO on the oscillator pitch. I played a single note on my guitar and had him move my tuning knob back and forth. It sounded like crap but I’m sure thru a Moog RingMod it probably would have sounded awesome….(hmmmm sh*t…. ebay…BRB!!!!)
It’s coined an LFO because it moves slow, below the human audio range (20hz – 20khz … not important and I’m probably wrong on my values…ahh well) If i ever designed a synth, to make it less confusing I would call it a “SLOW ASS WAVE” or SAW…wait that would be more confusing…. Anyways, it moves that slow because you would want to hear the subtle changes between cycles. Like with the guitar example I would want to hear the 3 setting then the 4 then the 5 so on so forth so I wouldn’t want my friend to move it too fast.
Ideas with LFO’s
There are some “extra features” that an LFO could poses but it’s really just little tricks that people have learned exploring them. Like for example you could use the LFO as an additional voice. If you move a parameter enough and really really fast you could possibly create another tone with it’s affect on whatever parameter you are moving around (This is known as an LFO going into the audio range…. past 20hz <—- remember the human hearing numbers from earlier)
Some synth patches or presets will have all these crazy LFO mappings so if you try to study their presets and try to understand what they did to make that sound, it’s really easy to get lost. I would suggest starting a synth with a blank patch (“initialize” … or whatever you want to call it) and maybe turn on a filter and assign an LFO to move it back and forth. Then see it’s effects. Or you could be a SUPER BadA$$ and move it back and forth with your mouse hahaha. However you want to do it. Assign an LFO and let your Classical Guitarist friend take a break and go smoke a cigarette.
Options
So after you read this article you looked at your favorite synth and thought to yourself, “Drake you’re a liar. My synth has a Delay knob under my LFO settings and you didn’t say anything about delay.” While yes some synths come with this feature, what you know still applies.
Using the same guitar example as I used before I would recreate this setting like this.
If i would tell my friend “Bro…bro bro.. I Love what you’re doing but at the beginning wait like 5 seconds before you starting moving the knob.” and he would be like “Bro” and I would be like “Bro” …..so on and so forth
This extra knob or feature really is just to expand the synths pallet.
Conclusion
Hope this helps and if you have any questions ask me, search the internet, watch videos, etc…
There is a huge amount of information out there than you can really learn anything if you keep looking up more and more knowledge. For example I’m pretty sure I could be an awesome car salesman if i just keep looking car models and what color they all come in and this and that and this and that. As you can tell I like to obsessively take in as much knowledge as I can about something until I accidentally learn things from it.
I remember the first time I tried to modify a synth patch on my friend’s Lead 2, I thought “There is NOOOO WAYYY I will ever understand what the hell is going on.” But it’s something you get better at the more and more you use it. So play around… make sounds that aren’t in key or would never be used in a song. Play and play and play.
Use your knowledge of LFO’s to maybe expand a sound you have programmed or working with right now.
AdvertisementsCTV Montreal
Gaetan Barrette is urging patients to not lose confidence in the health system after a medical instrument 33 centimetres long was forgotten inside a woman who had a hysterectomy at a Montreal hospital last March.
Health Minister Barrette is blaming human error on the shocking medical incident.
Sylvie Dube was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last October and underwent chemotherapy over the winter before the hysterectomy at Notre-Dame Hospital March 14.
Dube complained of pain the day after the operation -- not in the abdomen, but in a shoulder. She said her doctor and nurses at Notre-Dame Hospital told her it was normal a hysterectomy would cause pain elsewhere in her body.
But the pain continued to increase in the following weeks and Dube was given anti-inflammatory medication.
Two months later on May 22, after multiple shots of cortisone and still no relief, she went to the hospital's emergency room and was told a scan had found a metal plate.
The medical report indicated a "flexible blade," 33 centimetres long used in surgery to protect the organs, had been left inside her abdomen during her surgery in March.
This, despite a procedure by staff in the operating room counting each piece of equipment and instrument used before and after an operation.
Dube has launched a complaint with the hospital asking them to add additional checks to that procedure.
“We have professional staff, we have surgeons and all these people didn’t see this thing? It’s not a little thing,” she said.
CHUM has changed how its medical equipment is counted.
The hospital has also apologized to her and said it is investigating.
Dube hasn't decided if she will take legal action yet, but said she is relieved she's pain free and wants to focus on her health.One last reference from my CrimZon Universe roster; this time it's Majin Nuu, my original/fan character based off of the Majin from DBZ.
Her background remains the same; Bibidi finds Majin Nuu along with Majin Buu, opens her up first, and uses her for his own ambition for a short time. But he suddenly locks her away and decides to use Majin Buu for his evil plans instead - his reason why remains a mystery...that is, until I decide to tidy things with the last season outline for CrimZon Universe.
As for her outift, I've altered her old combat design by replacing her thigh high boots with shorter ones and adding an white piece of cloth wrapped above it, as well as extending her lower bikini bottom to her thigh - making them into bloomers. I've also made her a casual outfit, consisting of a simple hat, a jacket over her dress with shorts underneath and regular shoes to top it off.
Enjoy!
Nuu (c) Unknown117
DBZ (c) Akira toriyama
Made possible with Clip Studio Paint ProSexual health checks could start in pub loos
Updated
Australians are slack about getting tested for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), but a new program could mean getting checked is as easy as going to the loo on a night out.
Basil Donovan from the National Centre for HIV Epidemiology and Research has told triple j's Hack program he is about to release research showing only 4 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women aged between 16 to 25 get tested in any one year.
He says in Canada the figure is 30 per cent of 16 - 25s.
One solution could be taking the tests to where young people gather to pee: pub toilets.
While they don't have the sterile feel of a clinic, a program where health workers offer collection cups to punters in pub loos is working in the UK.
Jason Warriner, the clinical director for the UK-based Terrence Higgins Trust, says the group has been testing people in pubs, at festivals and footy matches since 2008.
"Waiting for people to come to us doesn't really work," he said.
The idea is you hand back your sample and your phone number.
Mr Warriner says it is about normalising sexual health practices and making the experience more convenient.
"The result is sent by text message, if someone has a positive result we'll give them a phone call," he said.
Kath Albury, lecturer in sexual culture from the University of NSW, thinks taking sexual health into the community is a good idea.
"Everyone's going to have to pee at some stage [and] given that so many people have chlamydia with no symptoms and they can have it for years and not know and it has such repercussions for people's fertility, I think just peeing in the cup is a really good start," she said.
Amy, 26, told triple j that she gets regular STI checks.
After a positive result she informed her sexual partners since her last check, and was surprised by their responses.
"Only one of the eight people had ever been tested before, and their ages ranged from early 20's to early 30's."
Topics: health, sexually-transmitted-diseases, sexual-health, australia, united-kingdom
First postedBack home: Local kid Keenen King will join UNLV football after leaving Washington State
Todd Jackson/Aggieactionpics
When the UNLV football program was recruiting Keenen King out of Arbor View High two years ago, they surely made an impression.
King, a three-star recruit with many Pac-12 Conference scholarship offers, ultimately picked Washington State. But in the back of his mind, UNLV was home.
“Coach Sanchez always made me feel like I had a home at UNLV no matter what,” said King, an offensive lineman.
So, when King reached out to UNLV this fall asking to join the program, the process was simple because the admiration was still mutual. King will finish the fall semester at Washington State, where he was part of the traveling team this season for a handful of games, and enroll in the spring at UNLV.
After sitting out in 2018, he will have two years of eligibility.
“I just wanted a change,” King said. “It was time to come home and play football.”
The 6-foot-4, 325-pound King was highly decorated three-year starter at Arbor View, and considered the state’s fourth overall prospect for the 2016 graduating class.
He’ll join an offensive line unit at UNLV with deep local ties. Five different locals have started games this season, including 2016 graduates Julio Garcia and Jaron Caldwell. King and Garcia were classmates and Sig Rogich Middle School, and longtime friends.
“That’s going to be pretty cool,” King said of there potentially being an all-Vegas offensive line.
Ray Brewer can be reached at 702-990-2662 or [email protected]. Follow Ray on Twitter at twitter.com/raybrewer21Linus Torvalds on C++
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds <at> linux-foundation.org> Subject: Re: [RFC] Convert builin-mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library. Newsgroups: gmane.comp.version-control.git Date: 2007-09-06 17:50:28 GMT (2 years, 14 weeks, 16 hours and 36 minutes ago) On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Dmitry Kakurin wrote: > > When I first looked at Git source code two things struck me as odd: > 1. Pure C as opposed to C++. No idea why. Please don't talk about portability, > it's BS. *YOU* are full of bullshit. C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C. In other words: the choice of C is the only sane choice. I know Miles Bader jokingly said "to piss you off", but it's actually true. I've come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really *would* prefer to piss off, so that he doesn't come and screw up any project I'm involved with. C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other total and utter crap, that may "help" you program, but causes: - infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny) - inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app. In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap. So I'm sorry, but for something like git, where efficiency was a primary objective, the "advantages" of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage. If you want a VCS that is written in C++, go play with Monotone. Really. They use a "real database". They use "nice object-oriented libraries". They use "nice C++ abstractions". And quite frankly, as a result of all these design decisions that sound so appealing to some CS people, the end result is a horrible and unmaintainable mess. But I'm sure you'd like it more than git. LinusForget the squeezed middle, most of the music we love at The Quietus is from the fucked bottom. Yet with the music business coin situation still appalling, our albums of the year list 2015 proves the underground is alive and screaming
Earlier this year, trade body UK Music published Measuring Music 2015, a report into the contribution that artists, record labels, live events, festivals and so on make to our economy. It revealed that the British music industry makes a £4.1 billion contribution every year, with both exports and revenue from live music rising 17%. Last month, Adele broke records all over the world as 25 became the fastest-selling UK album of all time, and shifted 3.8 million copies in the US in the first week of release. Culture secretary John Whittingdale MP crowed that “Our artists continue to dominate the global charts - and shows from the Royal Ballet and Rod Stewart to the LSO and Status Quo, sell out concerts across the globe... UK Music’s Measuring Music is extremely useful in describing the economic impact of commercial music." Reading the above, perception might well be that everything is all chocolate boxes and roses, or 'flowers and candles' to use the old music business euphemism for hiding drugs on expenses.
With illegal consumption of music and the low revenues from streaming services still clobbering record sales, the music business is seeing an inequality that reflects wider society, with an increasing number of rich artists at the top, and everyone else struggling. If the larger of the independent labels and moderately-successful artists who the Quietus covers are, to borrow from Ed Milliband, the "squeezed middle", then everyone else is pretty much the 'fucked bottom'. I doubt very many people responsible for The Quietus' albums of the year 2015 are able to make a living from what they do (though one imagines Enya isn't too troubled if her castle requires a new roof) yet still they keep fighting on.
Over the past seven and a half years of The Quietus' existence we've seen some remarkable changes in the way music is purchased, distributed and consumed. Aside from grime's impact across the Atlantic, it increasingly feels as if the gap between underground and mainstream is opening ever further. I mean, surely the BBC fell asleep while compiling their unfathomably boring list of artists who'll be soundtracking the nation's shoe shops in 2016? What's frustrating is that this all means the mainstream media is focussing on an increasingly narrow range of artists. It's so much harder for anything to break through unless it's part of a recongnisable, pre-existing trend. It might be tempting to sneer at the collapse of NME into a free mag that now has a build 'em up and knock 'em down hype page devoted to things like Berocca vitamin pills and coffee machines, but even in its dying days it had a function in bringing leftfield artists to a wider audience.
Yet this isn't a reason to disheartened. If there's a motto or a theme to this list then I suppose it's that 2015 has really felt as if there's an increasingly committed, angry, politicised and determined yet disparate group of musicians, artists, record label staff, live promoters, PR people, filmmakers and music fans determined not to let the prevailing hurricanes bowl them over. From gig to dancefloor and at festival after festival (from Raw Power in Tufnell Park to CTM in Berlin and Siberia to the fields of Supernormal to the streets of Cairo, Tilburg for Incubate and Krakow at Unsound) we at tQHQ were all struck by how the world is packed with musical communities that are thriving and, what's more, wanting to grow. These are, mercifully, not times for parochialism, indie mithering, and wanting to stay in easy, cosseted scenes. The underground is having an absolutely rude and ribald time of it at the moment, and this list reflects that. Yet it's not in rude and ribald financial shape. You might well have noticed that we at The Quietus started asking for donations from those who want to support what we do, and help us pay our writers. We are part of that fucked bottom too, which is why if you feel inspired by our list of the finest albums released in the United Kingdom and beyond, we'd urge you to purchase them either from the Norman Records link helpfully provided, or via your local independent record shop. Most of all, we hope you enjoy listening to these 100 records as much as we have. Fuck Culture Secretary John Whittingdale MP and fuck Status Quo - the value of music to our nation cannot be measured in money but instead the pounding of our bursting souls. Now then, anyone for some Pissgrave? - Luke Turner
This chart was voted for by Christian Eede, Sophie Coletta, Laurie Tuffrey, Luke Turner and John Doran. Thanks to Mat Colegate and Karl Smith
100. Pissgrave - Suicide Euphoria
(Profound Lore)
"Perhaps what is most shocking here is that an album titled something as ludicrous as Suicide Euphoria, made by a band with a name as wilfully stupid as Pissgrave, is actually, y’know, good! I call it the Shitfucker paradox – unlike virtual novelty acts such as Torsofuck, I Shit On Your Face and Anal Vomit, the abusively expeditive velocity of Pissgrave’s death/grind is oozing with both technical nous and strangulating riffery. And vocals that sound like a St. Bernard getting sucked into a woodchipper." Toby Cook
Read our review of Suicide Euphoria here
99. RSS B0YS - HDDN
(Mik Musik)
"The RSS B0ys are a quick fuck on a dirty gas station-toilet with some anonymous stranger." Sonja Matuszczyk
98. Eugene The Oceanographer - The Tigers Of Mount Paektu
(self-released)
97. Checkpoint 303 - The Iqrit Files
(KKV)
"The Iqrit Files tells the story of the brutal clearance of 400 Palestinian villages by Israeli forces 70 years ago, using the example of just one, Iqrit, which lies to the north of Galilee. The album is a thrilling and hard-hitting collage of tough Tackhead/ Meat Beat Manifesto-style beats, field recordings of Palestinian singers and speech sourced from newsreels." John Doran for the Guardian
96. Guapo - Obscure Knowledge
(Cuneiform)
"Obscure Knowledge is a return to the multi-section extended pieces of yore, 43 minutes of music split into three parts. But unlike Five Suns and Black Oni, it feels like a more organically developed piece, with themes and motifs that recur throughout. And while both Magma and King Crimson are still relevant reference points in Guapo world, they truly have become one of those groups that only really sound like themselves. They even give the impression they're having fun on Obscure Knowledge, albeit serious fun." Joe Banks
Available from Norman Records
Read our review of Obscure Knowledge here
95. Rizan Said - King Of Keyboard
(Annihaya)
94. Roots Manuva - Bleeds
(Big Dada)
"Bleeds is completely built around Roots Manuva's personal conception of faith. But it is not the navel-gazing, Jesus-praising, kum ba yah kind; this is faith with its eyes turned outwards, the kind that overturns tables in temples and rages against injustice and inhumanity. This is a white-hot sword aimed at those wardens of the world who claim to be our saviours, abetted by the false prophet'sloganeers and the nouveau-rebellists, trained to take the bait of big business', (as they are condemned on the biblically huge 'Cargo')." Josh Gray
Available from Norman Records
Read our review of Bleeds here
93. The Necks - Vertigo
(ReR Megacorp/Northern Spy)
"The latest album from Australian trio The Necks is very clearly a studio creation, where the group's improvisations have been carefully edited into an unfolding 43 minute narrative. In its use of pedal points and post-production, certain comparisons can be drawn with the approach of Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero on In A Silent Way and the proto-ambient dirge of Get Up With It's 'He Loved Him Madly'." Stewart Smith
Available from Norman Records
Read our review of Vertigo here
92. Lightning Bolt - Fantasy Empire
(Thrill Jockey)
"Compared to the likes of Earthly Delights, Fantasy Empire has a weird sense of cohesion and structure to it and the likes of opener 'The Metal East' and the pulsating agitated-dirge of 'Mythmaster' adds a richer, deeper variety of texture than found on Hypermagic Mountain but 'Horsepower' still sounds like drummer Brian Chippendale falling down the stairs, frantically grappling with Japanese avant-drum genius Stomu Yamash'ta, whilst Brian Gibson's bass riffs gallop at lunatic speed in a direction seemingly of their own choosing." Toby Cook
Available from Norman Records
Read our review of Fantasy Empire here
91. John Foxx - London Overgrown
(Metamatic)
"London Overgrown is a contemplative, beautifully orchestrated album — as lush and heartbreaking as his 2009 album with Robin Guthrie, Mirrorball, but evoking the quiet return of wildness found in Patrick Keiler’s film, Robinson In Ruins. It would make the perfect soundtrack for a wander along the tracks, or watching the still-unfinished landscapes speed past the window of an Overground train." Emily Bick
Available from Norman Records
Read John Foxx and Iain Sinclair in conversation here
90. Jute Gyte - Ship Of Theseus
(self-released)
89. Real Lies - Real Life
(Marathon)
"Two songs off the album ‘Deeper’ and ‘North Circular’ were written in a bedroom where if you looked out of the window you could see 1,000 yards of very calm water, with massive, massive tower blocks at the other end. And in our front room we had what was essentially a nightclub in our front room but if you looked out of the window you would see birdspotters who had come from all over the UK to see rare hawks." Tom Watson
Available from Norman Records
Read our interview with Real Lies here
88. Claude Speed - Sun Czar Temple
(Planet Mu)
Available from Norman Records
87. Paper Dollhouse - Aeonflower
(Bird)
"Make no mistake, this is deeply creepy music." Ben Graham
Available from Norman Records
Read our review of Aeonflower here
86. Milo - So The Flies Don’t Come
(Ruby Yacht)
"First and foremost, this is poetry. And like any good chapbook, So The Flies Don't Come benefits from close examination and repeat consumption." Gary Suarez
Read our review of So The Flies Don't Come here
85. Terakaft - Alone
(Out Here)
"Alone marks the group's first release since Kel Tamasheq in 2012, and the time away seems to have invigorated the group, whose fired up return is marked by guitars ringing with menacing fuzz and upbeat percussion aimed at dancefloors." Richie Troughton
Read our review of Alone here
84. Charlatans - Modern Nature
(BMG)
"The Charlatans find themselves regrouping and consolidating their skills both as musicians and as a tight personal unit. In doing so, the band have delivered a wonderfully cohesive set of songs, and in the process have ensured that Modern Nature is their best release in many a moon." Julian Marszalek
Available from Norman Records
Read our review of Modern Nature here
83. Master Musicians Of Bukake - Further West Quad Cult
(Important)
Available from Norman Records
82. Cornered Yet Climbing featuring Kelly Jayne Jones - Fevered Realities
(Tombed Visions)
"This tape from Cornered Yet Climbing is built from the same stuff that made Gnod’s sprawling opus Infinity Machines such a brutally sprawling triumph. Tombed Visions’ head honcho and Gnod’s own sax man David McLean duetted with drummer Pascal Nichols under the Cornered Yet Climbing name before, but the pair are augmented here by fellow Manchester sound artist, Kelly Jayne Jones. She wields a whole host of concrète clatter and found object noises (including scraped house bricks) alongside some stunning flute playing, and Nichols has never played with more understated power." Tristan Bath
81. Dawn Richard - Blackheart
(Our Dawn)
"Blackheart is a deeply personal convulsion of emotion following a tumultuous personal and professional year for Richard; |
walter wrote after season 1. pity.
Quoting: SmuRidley
ZFT = Zerstorung durch Fortschritte der Technologie = Destruction Through The Advancement Of Technology
The book was written by both Walter and Walternate, each one having a version in their own Universe.
In the Prime Universe, Walter's ZFT manuscript became an unpublished manifesto with followers like David Robert Jones trying to fulfill it.
In the Alternate Universe, Walternate's ZFT manuscript was published and became one of the best selling books of all time.
Both books became more or less true throughout Seasons 2 and 3 as cross overs between Universes increased in frequency. ZFT = Zerstorung durch Fortschritte der Technologie = Destruction Through The Advancement Of TechnologyThe book was written by both Walter and Walternate, each one having a version in their own Universe.In the Prime Universe, Walter's ZFT manuscript became an unpublished manifesto with followers like David Robert Jones trying to fulfill it.In the Alternate Universe, Walternate's ZFT manuscript was published and became one of the best selling books of all time.Both books became more or less true throughout Seasons 2 and 3 as cross overs between Universes increased in frequency.
Anonymous Coward
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05/09/2011 06:29 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained At the end, the "head" observers mention how Peter couldn't be remembered because he never existed.
Guess who is going to start getting flashes and begin remembering Peter...
More then likely because the cortexephan, Olivias brain will not be affected in the same way.
She can travel between universes, she'll remember Peter, then that will become a problem for the observers... new story plot
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 1320105
Olivia may likely have flashes of him but since Peter was a integral part of Walter's life in the other timeline, I wouldn't be surprised if Peter starts showing up in his dreams.
I also wouldn't rule out Astrid having flashes too. She's had subtle crush on him for a while in the original timeline.(Beginning with Over There Part II - Season 2 - when Astrid gives Peter homemade pie to welcome him home). Olivia may likely have flashes of him but since Peter was a integral part of Walter's life in the other timeline, I wouldn't be surprised if Peter starts showing up in his dreams.I also wouldn't rule out Astrid having flashes too. She's had subtle crush on him for a while in the original timeline.(Beginning with Over There Part II - Season 2 - when Astrid gives Peter homemade pie to welcome him home).
Diablo Jin
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05/09/2011 06:49 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained So who or what are the observers? Are they aliens? I noticed in one of the first episodes the observers turned up. One of them was eating a really overly spiced sandwich, it is said that waiting spicy foods in excess can increase some sort of psychic link with parallel universes, there was a threa here about it and what de ja vu is! In a nutshell are they interdimensional travelling humans or something different?
LOVE FRINGE!
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05/10/2011 01:05 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained I really hope the show doesn't end- it has been the best show I've ever followed. And Peter needs to be a part of it. We are involved with his romance across dimensions.
Let's not forget there is still a MAJOR plot point that hasn't been answered- Olivia's involvement with the machine.
What is her power/ability pertaining to the machine?
As soon as Olivia starts to remember Peter bc of her ability to cross dimensions/ time - I'm sure she will opt to make sure Peter is still conceived.
Here's my second question:
Just because there wasn't a rif in dimensions- doesn't mean that Walter wouldn't have a child on his own accord? He was still married in both sides- to the same lady. Maybe Peter would have been conceived without birth defects because he would have been naturally conceived. Thus Josh Jackson would have been Walters natural born son not just machine-conceived. I really hope the show doesn't end- it has been the best show I've ever followed. And Peter needs to be a part of it. We are involved with his romance across dimensions.Let's not forget there is still a MAJOR plot point that hasn't been answered- Olivia's involvement with the machine.What is her power/ability pertaining to the machine?As soon as Olivia starts to remember Peter bc of her ability to cross dimensions/ time - I'm sure she will opt to make sure Peter is still conceived.Here's my second question:Just because there wasn't a rif in dimensions- doesn't mean that Walter wouldn't have a child on his own accord? He was still married in both sides- to the same lady. Maybe Peter would have been conceived without birth defects because he would have been naturally conceived. Thus Josh Jackson would have been Walters natural born son not just machine-conceived.
fringie
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05/10/2011 08:16 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained ""Peter Ex Machina
Peter in the Prime Universe and his double in the Alternate universe were programmed creations of the machine to correct the imbalance between both Universes caused by Walter and William Bell's experiments.
Peter entered both Universes via conception and birth at the same time Walter and William Bell in the Prime Universe were pulling objects from the Alternate Universe during their interdimensional experiments at Harvard.""
If peter didnt enter the universes until birth at the same time walter and william were pulling objects from the other universe, how is it possible that he created the punched holes in the universe before he was born? i thought the machine created him to correct what walter and william had done.
2342
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05/13/2011 12:26 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained FRINGE SEASON 3 FINALE EXPLAINED
by
First Person
The following is an explanation of the finale for Season 3 of FRINGE for those who don't follow the show or were totally confused when Peter disappeared.
The Original Machine And The First People
The Machine was originally designed to heal the damage done to both Universes as the result of Walter Bishop's and William Bell's interdimensional experiments at Harvard in the 1970's where they pulled objects from the Alternate Universe.
In an original timeline, the Machine was created in the future by William Bell and/or Walter Bishop to repair the damage they had done to both Universes. The First People were none other than William Bell and Walter Bishop on the "first" timeline before the machine was created.
Programming the Past
The machine was programmed to create an event or series of events in the past that would stop Walter from continuing his interdimensional experiments before he damaged both Universes beyond repair.
The Insurance Policy And Many Worlds
As an insurance policy, the machine was also sent 250 Million years into the past as a safeguard in case the programmed events failed to undo the damage caused by Walter and Bell.
In accordance with the Many Worlds Interpretation Of Quantum Mechanics, time branches off into multiple timelines(The Road Not Taken - Season 1) in every instance where a choice is made.
By sending the Machine 250 Million years into the distant past, the machine could be re-assembled in the recent past on any timeline. Since an innumerable number of time lines branched off from the moment the machine arrived in the distant past, there are multitudes of Machines existing within multitudes of timelines. As the Observer told Walter in the Season 1 finale; "There is more than one of everything."
Peter Ex Machina
Peter in the Prime Universe and his double in the Alternate universe were programmed creations of the machine to correct the imbalance between both Universes caused by Walter and William Bell's experiments.
Peter entered both Universes via conception and birth at the same time Walter and William Bell in the Prime Universe were pulling objects from the Alternate Universe during their interdimensional experiments at Harvard.
Peter's Genetic Defects Caused By The Machine
Since both Peters were artificially created by the machine, both had genetic defects from childbirth which got progressively worse until both Peters were gravely ill in their respective Universes.
Original Solution
When the Peter of the Prime Universe died in 1985, the original solution was the death of the Alternate Peter in the Alternate Universe. The death of both Peters was meant to emotionally dishearten and demoralize both Walter and Walternate into giving up their endeavors and pursue some other line of work.
Walter Interferes With The Machine In 1985
When Walter crossed over to the Alternate Universe in 1985 and took the Alternate Peter in order to cure him, his refusal to emotionally "let go of Peter" interfered with the functioning of the machine and magnified the imbalance between Universes originally caused by Walter and Bell's experiments.
The Boy Is Important
After Walter crossed back into the Prime Universe with Peter at Reiden Lake, both of them fell through the ice and nearly drowned.
Walter and Peter were saved by the Observer for a simple reason; since Peter was created by the machine, he was the only one who could interact with it in at a future moment and repair all the damage caused by Walter.
This is why the Observer told Walter; "The boy is important".(Peter - Season 2)
Insurance Policy Implemented
With the magnification of the imbalance between Universes, the Observers made sure Walter and Walternate knew of the existence of the machine in both Universes in order to heal the massive damage caused by Walter's kidnapping of Peter from the Alternate Universe.
Balance And Imbalance
At the very end of the finale, Peter told Walter and Walternate that he punched holes in both Universes in the past to create balance between them(i.e. the bridge). Peter was the current representation of imbalance because he was taken from the Other Side when the original Peter died.
Erasure From Both Universes And Branching New Timelines
It's likely Peter punched the holes in both Universes around the time Walter and Bell were performing their experiments in the 1970's but at a time just before Peter was conceived and born in both Universes.
Peter's efforts canceled out the initial imbalance originally caused by Walter and Bell's experiments. At this point, new time lines branched off from the main time lines of each Universe before Peter was born in either Universe. The existence of the new time lines nullified the need for the machine to artificially create Peter in both Universes to restore balance. Therefore in each of those new time lines, Peter was never born.
As a result, Peter erased himself from the new time lines of both Universes when he created balance between them.
How Peter Vanished
The brief appearance of Peter on the bridge between the new time lines was the result of residual overlap of the original time lines of both Universes intersecting with the bridge. This was caused by the residual energy remaining inside the machine as it powered down.
As the overlap from the original Universes pulled away from the bridge and snapped back to their original time lines, Peter disappeared into nothingness.
The current moment of time on the bridge instantaneously became the culmination of history from both of the new time lines where Peter never existed.
Cause of the War Between Universes Changed
When Peter erased himself from the new time lines of both Universes, the cause for the war between the Universes changed from Peter's abduction to Walter and Bell's experiments.
The Cortexiphan trials still took place with Olivia as one of the subjects but she never met Peter Bishop either as a child(Subject 13 - Season 3) or as an adult(from The Pilot - Season 1 to The Day We Died - Season 3).
The experiments carried out by Walter and Bell in the Prime Universe continued into the 1980's including cross-overs to the Alternate Universe either by Olivia during the Cortexiphan experiments or by Walter and Bell.
These events gradually made things worse in the Alternate Universe until it culminated in the war between Universes and the animosity we saw in the room between Walter and Walternate at the end of the finale.
Peter Never Existed And Served His Purpose
The Observer on Liberty Island in the new version of the Present said Peter "never existed and served his purpose". He didn't have to exist. Peter was a function of the machine on the original time lines and wasn't necessary to restore balance on the new time lines.
Conclusion
The bridge between Universes at the end of the Season 3 finale is a link between two new time lines, one from the Prime Universe and one from the Alternate Universe. Peter never existed in either time line.
Quoting: First Person 1242565
Excellent!
www.youtube.com/clandestinetimelord Excellent!
Anonymous Coward
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05/13/2011 01:08 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained If the machine created the illness, perhaps there are two peters now in the corrected universe. Our Peter, who is rewritten back into the red universe and doesn't know anything of fringe for now, and the new peter that was the original blue universe peter who we know nothing about.
2342
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05/13/2011 02:48 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained FRINGE SEASON 3 FINALE EXPLAINED
by
First Person
The following is an explanation of the finale for Season 3 of FRINGE for those who don't follow the show or were totally confused when Peter disappeared.
The Original Machine And The First People
The Machine was originally designed to heal the damage done to both Universes as the result of Walter Bishop's and William Bell's interdimensional experiments at Harvard in the 1970's where they pulled objects from the Alternate Universe.
In an original timeline, the Machine was created in the future by William Bell and/or Walter Bishop to repair the damage they had done to both Universes. The First People were none other than William Bell and Walter Bishop on the "first" timeline before the machine was created.
Programming the Past
The machine was programmed to create an event or series of events in the past that would stop Walter from continuing his interdimensional experiments before he damaged both Universes beyond repair.
The Insurance Policy And Many Worlds
As an insurance policy, the machine was also sent 250 Million years into the past as a safeguard in case the programmed events failed to undo the damage caused by Walter and Bell.
In accordance with the Many Worlds Interpretation Of Quantum Mechanics, time branches off into multiple timelines(The Road Not Taken - Season 1) in every instance where a choice is made.
By sending the Machine 250 Million years into the distant past, the machine could be re-assembled in the recent past on any timeline. Since an innumerable number of time lines branched off from the moment the machine arrived in the distant past, there are multitudes of Machines existing within multitudes of timelines. As the Observer told Walter in the Season 1 finale; "There is more than one of everything."
Peter Ex Machina
Peter in the Prime Universe and his double in the Alternate universe were programmed creations of the machine to correct the imbalance between both Universes caused by Walter and William Bell's experiments.
Peter entered both Universes via conception and birth at the same time Walter and William Bell in the Prime Universe were pulling objects from the Alternate Universe during their interdimensional experiments at Harvard.
Peter's Genetic Defects Caused By The Machine
Since both Peters were artificially created by the machine, both had genetic defects from childbirth which got progressively worse until both Peters were gravely ill in their respective Universes.
Original Solution
When the Peter of the Prime Universe died in 1985, the original solution was the death of the Alternate Peter in the Alternate Universe. The death of both Peters was meant to emotionally dishearten and demoralize both Walter and Walternate into giving up their endeavors and pursue some other line of work.
Walter Interferes With The Machine In 1985
When Walter crossed over to the Alternate Universe in 1985 and took the Alternate Peter in order to cure him, his refusal to emotionally "let go of Peter" interfered with the functioning of the machine and magnified the imbalance between Universes originally caused by Walter and Bell's experiments.
The Boy Is Important
After Walter crossed back into the Prime Universe with Peter at Reiden Lake, both of them fell through the ice and nearly drowned.
Walter and Peter were saved by the Observer for a simple reason; since Peter was created by the machine, he was the only one who could interact with it in at a future moment and repair all the damage caused by Walter.
This is why the Observer told Walter; "The boy is important".(Peter - Season 2)
Insurance Policy Implemented
With the magnification of the imbalance between Universes, the Observers made sure Walter and Walternate knew of the existence of the machine in both Universes in order to heal the massive damage caused by Walter's kidnapping of Peter from the Alternate Universe.
Balance And Imbalance
At the very end of the finale, Peter told Walter and Walternate that he punched holes in both Universes in the past to create balance between them(i.e. the bridge). Peter was the current representation of imbalance because he was taken from the Other Side when the original Peter died.
Erasure From Both Universes And Branching New Timelines
It's likely Peter punched the holes in both Universes around the time Walter and Bell were performing their experiments in the 1970's but at a time just before Peter was conceived and born in both Universes.
Peter's efforts canceled out the initial imbalance originally caused by Walter and Bell's experiments. At this point, new time lines branched off from the main time lines of each Universe before Peter was born in either Universe. The existence of the new time lines nullified the need for the machine to artificially create Peter in both Universes to restore balance. Therefore in each of those new time lines, Peter was never born.
As a result, Peter erased himself from the new time lines of both Universes when he created balance between them.
How Peter Vanished
The brief appearance of Peter on the bridge between the new time lines was the result of residual overlap of the original time lines of both Universes intersecting with the bridge. This was caused by the residual energy remaining inside the machine as it powered down.
As the overlap from the original Universes pulled away from the bridge and snapped back to their original time lines, Peter disappeared into nothingness.
The current moment of time on the bridge instantaneously became the culmination of history from both of the new time lines where Peter never existed.
Cause of the War Between Universes Changed
When Peter erased himself from the new time lines of both Universes, the cause for the war between the Universes changed from Peter's abduction to Walter and Bell's experiments.
The Cortexiphan trials still took place with Olivia as one of the subjects but she never met Peter Bishop either as a child(Subject 13 - Season 3) or as an adult(from The Pilot - Season 1 to The Day We Died - Season 3).
The experiments carried out by Walter and Bell in the Prime Universe continued into the 1980's including cross-overs to the Alternate Universe either by Olivia during the Cortexiphan experiments or by Walter and Bell.
These events gradually made things worse in the Alternate Universe until it culminated in the war between Universes and the animosity we saw in the room between Walter and Walternate at the end of the finale.
Peter Never Existed And Served His Purpose
The Observer on Liberty Island in the new version of the Present said Peter "never existed and served his purpose". He didn't have to exist. Peter was a function of the machine on the original time lines and wasn't necessary to restore balance on the new time lines.
Conclusion
The bridge between Universes at the end of the Season 3 finale is a link between two new time lines, one from the Prime Universe and one from the Alternate Universe. Peter never existed in either time line.
Quoting: First Person 1242565
Could you explain the meaning of the Event of September 11 2021?
Thanks!
The Finale of Fringe gave me goosebumps and your interpretation was fantastic!
5 Stars!
www.youtube.com/clandestinetimelord Could you explain the meaning of the Event of September 11 2021?Thanks!The Finale of Fringe gave me goosebumps and your interpretation was fantastic!5 Stars!
Anonymous Coward
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05/13/2011 02:53 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained So who or what are the observers? Are they aliens? I noticed in one of the first episodes the observers turned up. One of them was eating a really overly spiced sandwich, it is said that waiting spicy foods in excess can increase some sort of psychic link with parallel universes, there was a threa here about it and what de ja vu is! In a nutshell are they interdimensional travelling humans or something different?
Quoting: Diablo Jin
The Observers are a rip off of The Watchers from Marvel Comics. The Observers are a rip off of The Watchers from Marvel Comics.
ArmedonLSD
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05/13/2011 03:00 PM
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Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, outside of soccer - Dogma (1999) what i don't understand is in the finale we see walternate kill Olivia. But in the LSD cartoon ep there was some shading charcter in the back of her mind. When pressed on the characters I.D., Olivia says it was the person who would kill her
Anonymous Coward
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05/13/2011 03:17 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained Could you explain the meaning of the Event of September 11 2021?
Thanks!
The Finale of Fringe gave me goosebumps and your interpretation was fantastic!
5 Stars!
Quoting: 2342
I think that was just the show's way of showing us that a) we're on our earth (the twin towers didn't fall over there) and b) we're in the year 2021.
They did a laughable job of sticking extra hair in front of Peter's ears to try to make it look like he had a receding hairline. Especially his right side. lol I think that was just the show's way of showing us that a) we're on our earth (the twin towers didn't fall over there) and b) we're in the year 2021.They did a laughable job of sticking extra hair in front of Peter's ears to try to make it look like he had a receding hairline. Especially his right side. lol
Anonymous Coward
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05/13/2011 03:18 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained Could you explain the meaning of the Event of September 11 2021?
Thanks!
The Finale of Fringe gave me goosebumps and your interpretation was fantastic!
5 Stars!
Quoting: 2342
I think that was just the show's way of showing us that a) we're on our earth (the twin towers didn't fall over there) and b) we're in the year 2021.
They did a laughable job of sticking extra hair in front of Peter's ears to try to make it look like he had a receding hairline. Especially his right side. lol
I think that was just the show's way of showing us that a) we're on our earth (the twin towers didn't fall over there) and b) we're in the year 2021.They did a laughable job of sticking extra hair in front of Peter's ears to try to make it look like he had a receding hairline. Especially his right side. lol Quoting: Anonymous Coward 1380637
Oh, forgot. The 2021 was the date the memorial was laid. Oh, forgot. The 2021 was the date the memorial was laid.
Anonymous Coward
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08/02/2011 10:21 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained Here is my interpretation :-)
I believe that it's Walternate that built the machine in the first place... (He knows where are the part and how it works)... To win the war early, he send the machine back in the past... but first he made sure that only his universe will be able to use this weapon... and he makes it "fit" for his son Peter (since Peter only survives in his world)...
Poor Walternate, an observer change his plan (in the new timeline) by distracting him just when he could save his son... you know the rest... Peter change universe and actually use the machine against Walternate... which lead to Walter realizing that one universe cannot live without the other so he sent back the machine in the past (as did Walternate previously) but this time he also sent Peter's future consciousness... And this time Peter do not make the same mistake... he changes the future... he connects the two universes with a "corridor" then convince everyone to work together... the moment he suceed (convincing them) creates the time paradox... if they don't continue the war, then the machine will never be built... and so Peter will never be involved (although he can still be alive)... So to solve the time paradox (or just a part of it) the machine AND Peter have to disappear from everyone consciousness...
But then if Peter never did it, how are the universes connected in everyone consciousness? I hope this part of the paradox will come in season 4...
Anonymous Coward
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08/16/2011 03:57 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained "Peter told Walter and Walternate that he punched holes in both Universes in the past to create balance between them."
Can someone please explain how "creating holes in past" will create balance? I didn't understand that part.
Sneaker20000
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08/16/2011 05:35 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained "Peter told Walter and Walternate that he punched holes in both Universes in the past to create balance between them."
Can someone please explain how "creating holes in past" will create balance? I didn't understand that part.
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 1507009
^ Now I know the answer for the above mentioned question. ^ Now I know the answer for the above mentioned question.
ConfusedFringie
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FRINGE Season 3 Finale Explained That was a brilliant explanation! Thank you very much, First Person!
Unfortunately, I can see that you, First Person, wrote this when Season 3 ended. Now, as season 4 has come to an end too, we've found out that Peter did exist in this new time line.
He existed in both universes, but he never made it beyond the lake, because in this new time line September didn't save him from drawning.
If Peter had never been born, your explanation would remain perfect. Now that you know that about Peter, how do you make sense of it? How can you explain that he needed to be erased? If he was born in this time line, then he couldn't have been artificially created by the machine, could he? I believe it was Walter who created the machine according to Peter because, after all, he was the one who invented the machine.
I could really use some help in this department and I would be very thankful if you could share your thoughts about this, because of the brilliance of your previous explanation! Thank you!Around €35m has already been spent in preparation for the proposed National Children's Hospital at the Mater site in Dublin, permission for which was turned down by An Bord Pleanála.
The National Paediatric Hospital Development Board was told by the Health Minister today to prepare plans to deal with the'scale and height' problems raised by An Bord Pleanála as a matter of urgency.
The Board says it will now examine options for re-configuring the project within the space available to meet the An Bord Pleanála objections.
The plan was rejected by a majority of three to one of An Bord Pleanála.
Construction of the €650m hospital was due to be completed by 2016 and it would have been the biggest building project in the State.
An Bord Pleanála said the development would result in "a dominant, visually incongruous structure and would have a profound negative impact on the appearance and visual amenity of the city skyline".
The board said the development would be inconsistent with and adversely affect the existing scale and character of the historic city.
It also said the proposed development, as configured, would constitute overdevelopment of the Mater Hospital site.
The New Hospital Development Board has expressed disappointment and will meet early next week to discuss the ruling.
Professor Brendan Drumm, who is a member of the board, said a move to a greenfield site would not deliver the best care for children.
The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland's faculty of Paediatrics has said that it is extremely disappointed at today's decision by An Bord Pleanála.
The Board of the faculty of paediatrics has said, that any delay in building a National Paediatric Hospital will have direct consequences for the quality of care for sick children in Ireland.
Children in Hospital Ireland said the decision would have a profound, negative impact on the delivery of healthcare for sick children in the greater Dublin area.
However, the move was welcomed by the CEO and founder of the Jack & Jill Children's Foundation.
Jonathan Irwin said the Mater was always the wrong site to accommodate the needs of a modern children's hospital and said urgent debate is needed to choose the right location.
Govt to consider other options
Taoiseach Enda Kenny said that the building of a National Children's Hospital remains an absolute priority for Government.
Mr Kenny said Dr Frank Dolphin, former Chairperson of the Health Service Executive, is to head up a review group to look at the implications of the decision by An Bord Pleanála.
The Taoiseach said the committee would report back to Government within a matter of weeks.
Speaking on the RTE’s 6.01, Minister for Health James Reilly said he did not want to pre-empt what the report would say, but he did would not rule out a smaller facility being built on the Mater site.
Dr Reilly said he wanted a new hospital in place during the term of the Government.
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore conceded an alternative site might now have to be looked at.
Mr Gilmore was speaking in the Dáil where Fianna Fáil's Éamon Ó Cuív called for the Strategic Infrastructure Act to be amended so the hospital could go ahead.
Eamon Gilmore said the Government had identified funding for the project and would build the complex, but would now have to consider other options.
Independent TD Finian McGrath said children are paying the price for the gross incompetence of others.
He also asked the Tánaiste to give a commitment that the planned cystic fibrosis wing at St Vincent's Hospital will be completed.Bret Easton Ellis,
“…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing….”1 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 01/04/2010 Obama's ATF, in tandem with the DoJ, arranged for thousands of heavy assault rifles to make their way into the hands of Mexican narco warlords, setting the stage for a mass slaughter of Mexicans (more than 300 to date). The Washington Times
2 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 28/06/2011 The Obama Administration fired the ATF whistleblower who exposed the Fast and Furious scandal. Fox News
3 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 07/12/2011 Documents reveal Obama's ATF used "Fast and Furious" as part of a campaign for more gun control. CBS News
4 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 15/12/2011 More than 1,000 guns from Obama's "Fast and Furious" program remain lost. The Washington Times
5 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 25/09/2013 The DoJ's internal watchdog says the ATF let a confidential informant keep as much as $5.2 million from illicit cigarette sales. CBS News
6 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 25/09/2013 The DoJ's internal watchdog says the ATF somehow "lost track" of 420 million cigarettes CBS News
7 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 09/12/2013 Obama's ATF used mentally disabled teens to run drug-and-gun stings. Reason
8 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 04/08/2015 Guns from Obama's "Fast and Furious" programs were used in the killings of at least two Americans, and probably more. National Review Online
9 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 20/09/2015 Obama's ATF is using its resources to threaten the makers of kombucha, a fermented tea with trace amounts of alcohol. The Denver Post
10 AmeriCorps 10/07/2009 After AmeriCorps' Inspector General uncovered corruption in the office of an Obama ally, Sacramento's major Kevin Johnson, Obama fired the IG. The Washington Times
11 AmeriCorps 10/07/2009 In firing AmeriCorps' IG for doing his job too effectively, Obama broke a law that he as a senator sponsored. The Washington Examiner
12 Amtrak 31/05/2010 After Amtrak's inspector general uncovered waste, fraud, and abuse within Amtrak, Obama fired him. The Washington Times
13 Barack Obama White House 11/09/2001 As recounted in his autobiography, Obama reacted to 9/11 by worrying it might dampen his political career on account of his middle name. The Audacity of Hope
14 Barack Obama White House 09/05/2008 While campaigning, Obama said he had visited "57 states" in America, and had two more to go before seeing them all. Snopes
15 Barack Obama White House 09/12/2008 Before he was even in office, Obama was enmeshed in scandal. He was accused of consorting with then-Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich over who would get his Senate seat, although he denied making contact with the governor's office. However a witness says this wasn't true, and Obama was pushing for Valerie Jarrett. TIME
16 Barack Obama White House 18/03/2009 When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the White House, Obama gave him a bunch of DVDs as a gift (worse: they were in the wrong format). The Daily Telegraph
17 Barack Obama White House 24/03/2009 Despite running on a promise to go through the budget "line by line" to cut wasteful spending, Obama quadrupled the deficit in his first year of office. The Heritage Foundation
18 Barack Obama White House 07/04/2009 Obama seemed to think Austrians speak "Austrian" The Washington Post
19 Barack Obama White House 15/04/2009 When one of his staffers referred to the pope as a "discredited leader," Obama refused to say if he agreed. CNS News
20 Barack Obama White House 17/04/2009 After enduring hours of anti-American speeches from crackpot South American leaders at the 2009 Summit of the Americas conference, Obama said... nothing. Bloomberg
21 Barack Obama White House 19/04/2009 When the Grateful Dead was in D.C. for a show, Obama made sure they paid him a secret visit in the Oval Office. The Washington Post
22 Barack Obama White House 19/04/2009 After Iran convicted an American journalist in a sham trial, the Obama White House was mute. Yahoo News
23 Barack Obama White House 09/07/2009 Breaking a decades long precedent, Obama happily met with then-Libya dictator Muammar G |
had provided a file to John - "Did I, and what did the file contain?". I denied all, and made no comment. It was at this time that George Magazine called me as well - I think it was the editor Richard, though I am not completely certain. He told me the story was "dead" and the magazine was folding. He also told me that all evidence went with John - and that their offices had been burgled. You are right of course, it doesn't make sense that there were not any backup files - apparently they were taken as well. Again, this was a time of EXTREME CONCERN for me and my family - and I don't remember a lot of the specific details clearly. I don't mind telling you that I indeed feared for my life for at least a month. Please understand that I don't believe I am paranoid - but when one verifies that ones phones have indeed been tapped, it makes one a bit concerned. All my best to you my friend. Keep searching for all truth. (We need a copy of the Inquirer story.) True Ott The " Las Vegas " Files are Examined In 1995, I was going through my safe and file cabinets, and came across the sealed, manila envelope that had been placed in my trust by my financial planning client a decade earlier. I had completely forgotten about it. I called his home to see what he wanted me to do with it. His wife informed me that Mr. C. had suffered a stroke a year earlier, and was confined to a nursing home. He was in his 70's now, and was not doing very well. In short, she didn't know anything about the "file" and suggested that I could just dispose of it. I tossed it into the trash bin, but then thought that I should at least see what all the fuss was about. In many ways, I wish I had never opened it. It was a true "Pandora's Box", and I was shocked to read its contents. It was "file #5" of a group of 7 files called the "Gemstone" files. I don't know what the other six files contained, but this one was a literal ball-buster. It was the FULL STORY of the CIA-planned and executed contract "hit" of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, president of the United States. It was full of very complete specifics, including such things as photostats of cancelled checks, travel vouchers, orders on CIA letterhead, personnel "lists" of participants, disposition of witnesses and evidence, etc. The problem was, I recognized the names of many of the key men who participated in the assassination, as well as the massive cover-up that followed. These were not all Jewish organized crime bosses, some were men linked to my LDS church authorities and some were nationally prominent politicians in my beloved Republican Party! The file was extremely damning towards George HW Bush, who in 1963 was the CIA head in Dallas. The obvious involvement of the FBI and Dallas PD, and their subsequent squelching of information as outlined in the file made me physically sick. There was no person in Federal Law Enforcement that I could trust with this information, that is, IF IT WAS INDEED LEGITIMATE! At first, I refused to believe it could be legitimate at all. My paradigm of perception refused to believe it could possibly be factual. However, I could not understand WHY my "client" would have such a file, and WHY would he want it sent to Beverly Hills CA, as well as a notice sent to Hank Greenspan of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, if my client happened to "die suspiciously?" Like I said, it was a definite "pandora's box", one that I soon realized was too big for me. I kept thinking I ought to shred its contents, but I couldn't bring myself to do so. The File Goes Home to John John. During the summer of 1998, I was involved in actively protesting the expansion of Circle 4 Farm's gigantic hog factory farm into Iron County. My grass-roots citizen's organization CRSA (Citizens for Responsible and Sustainable Agriculture) had received a bit of national notoriety, with a number of AP wire stories circulating the nation. One such story caught the eye of a publication called George Magazine. The editor and staff contacted me and scheduled an appointment to meet and review my story. The editor of George Magazine flew into Cedar City in his private plane to meet me, and shoot a photo spread. We spent the entire day, a Saturday, together. At the end of the day, at a local steak house, we sat down for a concluding meal. Over salad, I had to confess to the editor that I had never even heard of, much less read a copy of George Magazine until he had called me. He reached into his briefcase and produced a copy. Looking at it, I was surprised to see that it was owned and founded by John Kennedy Jr. I asked him about "John, and his politics." I was told that John was a real "champion of the under-dog" and that was why they were producing the story on CRSA and me. I commented: "I believe that my image of John is like most Americans. The enduring image of little `John-John' courageously stepping forward and giving his best salute as the caisson carrying his father's body slowly rolled by. Tell me, does John accept the `official Warren Commission' account of the assassination, or does he think there was more to it? At this late date, does it even matter?" The editor nodded and said: "Of course he doesn't accept the Warren Commission, but there is not a lot he, or anyone else can do about it! And I guarantee you, it DOES INDEED matter, at least to him. It is one of his major goals in life to find out the Truth!" I replied: "Has he ever heard of something called the `Gemstone Files'?" With that, the air became electrified. The editor laid down his salad fork and said: "What do YOU know about the `Gemstone'?" "Oh, it just might be that I have a copy of file # 5. Does that interest you?" I casually volunteered. "You can't be serious! Are you serious? Don't kid about something like that! Where did you get it?" he almost screamed. The dinner was immediately over, even though our steaks were just coming in from the kitchen. We had them placed into containers to take with us. The editor had to SEE the infamous Gemstone immediately. He couldn't wait until the meal was finished. It was late on a Saturday night in Cedar City, Utah. I handed him the file, and he offered to compensate me for it. I refused. I asked him only one thing in return; if the information proved out to be genuine, that I needed to know. I just wanted justice to be served, and the guilty parties prosecuted. I was awakened the next morning at 5:00. John's editor explained that he had been up all night reading the file. He had called John directly, and he was told to fly it immediately back to John. John had again offered to compensate me up to $10,000 for the lead. He felt it was that good. I politely refused, and gently reminded him of my earlier request. I just wanted to know if the information was genuine. To me, that would be payment enough. The rest of 1998 went by quickly. The national political stage was being set. It looked like George W. Bush was seeking to secure the nomination to run against Al Gore. On the 5th of July, 1999, my home phone rang. Joan answered it and said: "True, it's for you." As I answered it, a very polite masculine voice on the other end said: "Hello, True Ott, do you have a moment to speak? This is John Kennedy calling!" I immediately asked him to hold while I went to the privacy of my home office to take his call. After a few minutes of small talk, he told me: "Well, I understand that you want to know what I think of your file. I want you to know that I have spent over six figures in private investigators to verify its contents. I can say to you without hesitation that its contents are indeed factual. As a matter of fact, because of this file, a federal grand jury will be convening within the next few weeks. It is my opinion, as well as my attorneys, that this federal grand jury will pass down an indictment against George Herbert Walker Bush for conspiracy to commit murder against my father, and will also indict others as the evidence unfolds. If George W. thinks he can run for dogcatcher after this grand jury convenes and his father indicted, he is sorely mistaken." I was thrilled, yet deeply saddened by John's disclosures to me. I asked him how he felt about what he was about to do. Did he understand that it would shake American politics, especially the Republican Party to its very foundation? He replied: "Yes, I do realize the gravity of the story and my accusations, but the guilty must be brought to justice." I pressed: "But Mr. Kennedy, how do YOU feel?" The phone went silent for a minute or two. Then John replied: "I feel like a mighty weight has been lifted from my shoulders. For the first time in my life, I feel empowered. I feel my Father's spirit beside me on this, and finally, I can exorcise a few demons from my life." He was definitely emotional, and very close to tears. I knew that I was. I was a part of American history. I had helped a brother's search for truth. I warned him to be careful, that such actions were potentially very dangerous. He agreed, and said that he was "taking every precaution." Then, in a quiet voice, he asked me for my banking information. He wished to wire $50K to my account. I told him thanks, but no thanks. "Give it to charity," I said, "I don't think it right to accept money for such terrible information. I am totally satisfied knowing that the file went to the very person that needed it the very most! Above all, John, please BE CAREFUL!" John Kennedy Jr. thanked me profusely, and said that he wished there were more people in America like True Ott. He said that some day, he would somehow return the favor. I liked that. It was good to have made a friend such as John Kennedy. A little over two weeks later, on July 16, 1999, John Kennedy Jr., along with his wife and her sister, were killed in a plane crash en route to Hyannisport for a family wedding. My new friend was gone, and the guilty involved in BOTH murders have still not been punished. I know the truth, however. There is no doubt whatsoever, why John was killed. It was NOT an accident! ----- Original Message ----- From: John Hankey To: A True Ott PhD Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 5:12 PM Subject: Re: Dr. Steven Jones Hey True! I appreciate your willingness to correspond on this difficult stuff. You raised a couple of issues. I'm not trying to do better than John. I'm not him. I'm not in the same game or the same league. I am trying to do the best I know how. Which for me at this moment is telling the most important truth the best way I know how. Which, among other things, means telling the story as clearly and as persuasively as I can. I think your part of the story is powerful, important, and fascinating. But my experience in telling it to others is that, without the file, it is not credible. Another issue, it seems to me, is that if John died for trying to tell that story, to avenge his death I would like to give the fullest meaning to his life. That means presenting that file. I think my video shows that it is not necessary to have the file to tell the story of the murder of JFK Sr. I think it is necessary to tell the final chapter in the death of JFK Jr., because that chapter is not credible without it. A separate issue, altogether, is that I had no idea you had spoken to anyone from George after the plane went down. I would very very much like to know all the detail there is about that conversation: Who called who? Why? How long after the plane crash? To say "the file went down with John" seems an obvious euphemism. How could they not have multiple copies? that is, how could several investigators and an entire magazine staff be working on it without each having copies of the materials they were investigating? I'm surprised and grateful that you contacted me at all. I'm surprised and grateful that you gave me permission to discuss the story with others. You can't be surprised that I would try as hard as I can to get all the information necessary to tell the story well. thanks sincerely John "A. True Ott PhD" wrote: John: Yes, the "original" file was/is copies of docs (bank statements, travel vouchers, cancelled checks, letters from Bush on Zapata letterheads, etc.). The mob had targeted Cuba as their gaming "mecca" - following the Bay of Pigs debacle, they moved with plan B - Las Vegas. It was one of the George office staff who told me the file went down with John - (Don't remember if it was Richard or someone else - only they were da--ed nervous.) Here's the kicker: Even with "THE FILE", John Jr. couldn't get it done. What makes you think you or I could do any better??????? All my best, True ----- Original Message ----- From: John Hankey To: A True Ott PhD Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 8:10 AM Subject: Re: Dr. Steven Jones Dear True I'm grateful that you called me at all. But it sounds like I'm better off to shut my mouth about what you've told me, since, like many true stories, it's so incredible and the other evidence is there in plain sight anyway. This new book, "Brothers," further corroborates all the CIA-trained Cubans and mafia material in JFK II. But just looking at the face across from me at the table as I'm telling the story, to finish with "oh yeah, the files not available" just rips the carpet out from under any credibility the story had. Oh well. The story stands on the other evidence. Since you brought it up, I'm very interested to know, please, who told you the original file went down in the plane. I assumed that the "original" was just photocopies of documents in any case. Were there original documents in the file? John "A. True Ott PhD" wrote: The original file went down with John's plane (at least that is what I was told). The copied file sent to my D.C. attorney is simply not available - my immediate family is at risk - giving it to others would violate the "detente" agreement - columnist Jack Anderson evidently saw the file 5 or 6 years ago, and even he refused to open pandora's box. Best to let sleeping dogs lie - the truth is that the crime cartel running this country is simply too big and too powerful for the common man to fight. I reiterate what I told you on the phone ------- You figured it out ----- the "Gemstone" file only gives complete confirmation to what you produced. True (Perhaps you should look at the Inquirer article, and see if you can track down their "sources" for corroboration.) ----- Original Message ----- From: John Hankey To: A True Ott PhD Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 8:53 AM Subject: Re: Dr. Steven Jones Of course it's the truth, but the truth is often incredible, important truth almost always so. So, I have to find corroboration to make the story credible. I told my closest friend. He's puzzled and incredulous, like this: if the story's true, where's the file? I didn't have a good answer for that. John "A. True Ott PhD" wrote: John: Trust me, I have NO REASON to make such a sordid story up. Of course it is the truth. Jones was a tenured Mormon professor at BYU. When I talked to him two years ago to warn him of the dangers inherent in "speaking out" he assured me he was fine. Last summer Bush, Cheney, et. al. visited Salt Lake City for the VFW convention. Bush and Cheney meet privately for over one hour with LDS Church President Hinckley and Counselor Monson as soon as they arrived in SLC. The PRESS is told the subject matter of the meeting was completely private (strange they didn't just make some subject up - i.e. P.R. or just polite protocol conversation). The following week, Jones is fired from BYU and is now personna non grata among faithful Mormons. Go figure! As far as sharing my story - there are no limits except the truth. Just tell it like it is. True ----- Original Message ----- From: John Hankey To: A True Ott PhD Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 3:03 AM Subject: Re: Dr. Steven Jones Hey True You know they've separated him from BYU. The office number gives and error message. The lab phone just rings. I've sent out emails to the 2 addresses. By the way, I thought I'd share a couple of thoughts that wandered through my mind. 1) There was never another issue of George. This makes no sense from any point of view. When one issue is on the news stands, the next 3 are well in the works. A tribute issue would have sold millions of copies. Yours is the only plausible explanation for this anomaly. 2) Richard Blow says that on the day he died, he told his staff in a meeting, "As long as I'm alive, you have a job at George magazine." That's an extraordinary statement. What could possibly have moved him to make such a commitment? Again, yours is the only plausible explanation. He set the dangers of the task before them and offered to let anyone leave who wanted to. And then was utterly committed to those who stayed. So, I believe your story. I'd like to share it with other people. I'd like to invite you to tell me what you'd like me to not say. JohnI have always had a bit of a soft spot for the ‘bad guy’. As a child watching professional wrestling the one getting booed the loudest, that was my guy. As an adult I often say that I enjoy watching a good scam in action. This is not to say that I savor the infliction of pain. At my core I believe in and promote the constructive goodness of human beings. But there is something subconsciously compelling about a delectably evil ruse in action….
In the fall of 2015, as the presidential campaign of progressive hero Bernie Sanders began to gain surprising popularity, excitement swept over me. The majority of the commotion in my progressive soul came from having a true champion of the cause at the highest level of the political discussion, and from witnessing the enthusiastic response of a purportedly ‘center-right’ population. But I admit there was a darker side to my enthusiasm. As Sanders preached a message of Wall Street greed, a rigged economy, and a corrupt campaign finance system I felt a ravenous anticipation towards the impending response from the establishment. Usually the power structure brushes away challengers as one might a pesky mosquito, but it quickly became evident that this was no regular challenge. While attendance at Sanders’ rallies grew rapidly from the hundreds into the thousands, the sound of the gears of the mighty oligarchy machine beginning to turn became deafening in my ears.
After winning the New Hampshire primary in a landslide Sanders said in his victory speech that he expected the establishment to “throw the kitchen sink” at him. No shit. Up to that point if they had not already thrown the kitchen sink, they had certainly thrown the dish rack and the cutting board.
In anticipation of what is to come, let us examine the majesty of that which has been thrown at Bernie Sanders thus far. As I said, I love a good ruse…
The first and most overtly effective tool of establishment manipulation comes from the corporate media. While presented as a ‘free press’ the reality is that 90% of American media is controlled by only six companies who together put forward a very specific version of reality which fits their narrative It is through this narrative that democratically elected foreign leaders are turned into tyrannical dictators, activists turned into thugs, and questions dismissed as conspiracies. As George Orwell might say — “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”.
At the onset of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign the corporate media response was to simply ignore him in hopes that he would go away, the strategy of a child who thinks the world disappears when they close their eyes. A telling example–Throughout their 2015 election coverage nightly news spent nearly 4 hours talking about Donald Trump, and nearly 2 hours talking about Hillary Clinton, compared to only 10 minutes talking about Bernie Sanders. But rather than disappear, support for Sanders only grew stronger thanks to enthusiastic proselytizing by his supporters on social media and in their communities.
When ignoring Bernie Sanders failed the media turned to a more proactive approach.There is a reason that Reporters Without Borders ranks America as 46th in the world in ‘press freedom’. When their interests are challenged the media is happy to shamelessly abandon any semblance of journalistic integrity in order to further their agenda. In the case of Bernie Sanders, his message against corrupt campaign financing and corporate greed was a direct challenge to the modus operandi of the massive corporations which own and control the media. And thus journalistic neutrality was aggressively discarded in favor of a message which has been at best massaged, and at worst a plethora of audacious lies. The examples are too numerous to list in detail here, but I’d like to examine a few of the more egregious cases.
I am not even going to bother talking about CNN. Their loaded debate questioning and transparently slanted coverage amounts to little more than cheerleading from the station affectionately known as the ‘Clinton News Network’. Rather let us first focus on MSNBC, ironically advertised as the station “progressives have been waiting for”, and their amusing host Chris Matthews. Apparently months of biased pro-Hillary ‘reporting’ was not enough to satiate this circus clown in a suit and tie. The day after the Iowa caucus turned out to be not quite the coronation Hillary Clinton and her corporate sponsors were expecting Matthews unleashed a tirade of belligerence in which he threw out such gems as;
“The only person standing between a confirmed socialist who is calling for political revolution in this country winning the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party is (Hillary Clinton).”
“A revolution of promises, really.”
“Look, the history of the Democratic party– (Hillary Clinton’s) party, not Bernie Sanders. He’s not a Democrat.”
“Can the Bernie people be taught—not him, he can’t be taught—can the kids behind him be told that this is how it works in our system? You can call for a revolution but it ain’t gonna happen. There isn’t going to be a revolution. You don’t have to have logic any more. We’re going to have a revolution and pay for anything.”
It may be surprising to see this type of condescending, biased, and provocatively non-factual commentary presented as journalism, especially from a source which advertises itself as ‘progressive’. That is until you remember that Chris Matthews makes upwards of $5 million per year and is representing a multinational corporation with assets north of $160 billion. Add in that Matthews’ wife Kathleen has worked closely with the Clinton Foundation and is being backed in her run for Congress by the same donors which are backing Hillary Clinton’s run for President and it becomes clear that the opinions of Chris Matthews carry about the same level of integrity and legitimacy as the opinions of your drunk uncle on Thanksgiving.
But enough about MSNBC. What about the Washington Post? Surely the newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal and constantly receives criticism for supposed left-wing bias would take a more even handed approach to the Democratic primary.
Wrong.
Days before the Iowa caucus the paper published an editorial board op-ed (that is to say – a piece articulating the opinion of the newspaper) entitled “Bernie Sanders’s Fiction-Filled Campaign”. This piece of slanderous propaganda contained lines such as;
“Mr. Sanders is not a brave truth teller. He is selling his own brand of political fiction”
“Mr. Sanders’ success does not show the country is ready for a political revolution”
“Here is a reality check. Wall Street has already undergone a round of reform significantly reducing risks big banks pose to the financial system”
Interesting. In the opinion of the board of the Washington Post Bernie Sanders was a liar, his success did not indicate a hunger for a political change in the United States, and, contrary to the opinions of most economists, the risks posed by Wall Street had already been sufficiently reduced. You may be inclined to weigh these opinions as those of an authority on the subject, until you realize that they represent the board of a newspaper worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and and owner, Jeff Bezos (pictured above), worth $50 billion. While Mr. Bezos may rank just outside the top 15 richest people in the world he did manage to finish first in another metric. In 2014 he was named “world’s worst boss” by the International Trade Union Confederation. Personally I don’t usually get opinions on progressive politics from someone who according to the ITUC “represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the American corporate model”.
I could continue but I will stop there. When even the so-called “left wing” media ignores then attacks a progressive champion like Bernie Sanders they do so because he represents a threat to the existing power structure of which they are a part. In this context there is no right-wing and left-wing, there is only up-wing and down-wing. But the attempted media sabotage of Bernie Sanders reeks of fear. And it should.
The ideal of American democracy is much like the ideal of human rights. Both are presented as fundamental and inalienable but in reality are bestowed by the establishment power structure in a tightly controlled manner. In running for President Bernie Sanders has faced not only media manipulation but the diabolical subversion of the democratic process, most specifically through the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and their very own Sheriff of Nottingham — Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
The first way that this manifested itself was through the debate schedule. While in the 2007/08 Democratic primary there were 26 debates, this time around there was to be only 6. Compounding the issue was that these debates were scheduled on weekends, a well understood wasteland for viewership. This of course was criticized loudly by not only the Sanders campaign, but by Martin O’Malley as well as other political organizations as an attempt to prevent the public exchange of ideas and stack the deck in favor of Hillary Clinton. It certainly did not help that Wasserman-Schultz, who as DNC Chair was setting the debate schedule, had herself run the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2008. As if to confirm this bias the DNC did eventually add 4 additional debates, but comically did so mere days after Bernie Sanders had caught or surpassed Hillary Clinton in the polls of multiple early primary states.
Much as the corporate media took a more proactive approach of attack when ignoring Bernie Sanders did not stem the tide of his popularity, so too did the DNC when their contrived debate schedule failed to discourage the dissemination of his ideas. The first major offensive came in the form of the bizarre firewall breach hoax. Mere days after Bernie Sanders surpassed 2 million individual campaign donations and received one of his most consequential endorsements, and the day before the final debate of 2015, his campaign was accused of improperly accessing voter information from the DNC database during a software glitch which removed the firewall between each campaign’s data. Rather than deal with the apparent problem internally and impartially Debbie Wasserman-Schultz appeared on multiple corporate news outlets to loudly condemn the Sanders campaign. It was announced that the punishment would be a suspension of the Sanders campaign from access to the DNC database, including to their own information, while the issue was examined. For an essentially totally grassroots campaign without the benefit of hundreds of millions of corporate dollars behind it an indefinite suspension of days or weeks from crucial information was a not so subtle attempt to stamp out Sanders. However in less than 24 hours almost 1 million petition signatures and emails had been sent to the DNC on Sanders’ behalf, a lawsuit had been filed by his campaign, and the DNC quickly scurried away from the light of public scrutiny and restored access to the information.
If this is where the story ended it would perhaps be remembered as a rather mundane piece of campaign tomfoolery. But it is the depth of the hoax that is the true meat on this bone.
First, a similar firewall glitch had happened months prior to this event and was pointed out to the DNC and the vendor which handled the software by the Sanders campaign. Tip to criminals — If you are planning on robbing a bank do not go into the bank a month before and explain to them the glitches in their security.
Secondly, in addition to the lawsuit against the DNC the Sanders campaign also demanded a full third-party inquiry into the situation. This demand for an inquiry was deferred and brushed aside by the DNC. It is a peculiar thing to have the accused demanding a full investigation and the accuser refusing, unless of course the accuser is actually the guilty party.
Third, and most mouthwatering, is the history of the vendor which provided the apparently glitchy software — NGP VAN. This is a company founded by Nathaniel Pearlman, who was the chief technology officer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007/08. Their current CEO, Stuart Trevelyan, a man who hilariously shares a surname with a James Bond villain, worked for the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992. The company has also worked closely with the Ready For Hillary Super PAC during this election cycle, even going so far as to take a company “fieldtrip” to the Ready For Hillary headquarters. If you proposed this as a James Bond storyline it would be rejected as too obvious of a hoax.
“Something smells in the Democratic Party” -Des Moines Register, Feb. 5, 2016
By the time the first votes were finally ready to be cast Bernie Sanders had caught or passed Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire polls and was closing fast nationally. As the results of the Iowa caucus came in it became clear that, much as the polls had predicted, the race would be very close. Hillary Clinton appeared before the votes had been fully counted and proclaimed victory, while Bernie Sanders called it a “virtual tie”. The corporate media presented a tie or narrow Clinton victory as a signal that the ‘political revolution’ which Sanders had been promoting was over. Forget that Clinton had once been leading by upwards of 60 points in Iowa. Everyone go home, nothing to see here.
But a then a pungent stench began to emanate from the Iowa “results”. In the hours and days after it became clear that the caucus had been, as the Des Moines Register put it, a “debacle”. Ignore Hillary Clinton’s miraculous 6/6 record in coin flips which earned her 6 extra delegates (or the lunacy of coin flips determining results in a democracy). Ignore the fact that the Clinton campaign brought in out of state precinct captains to oversee caucus groups, shamelessly disrespecting the idea of ‘local’ politics. Even ignore the fact that these captains were provided with a phone app to instruct them how to maneuver Clinton supporters around so as to make Martin O’Malley viable in caucuses where he otherwise wouldn’t have been, blocking his supporters from joining Bernie Sanders. While unapologetically unethical these shenanigans are all legal. Rather I would direct your attention to a few of the more nefarious situations on record;
In Woodbury County #43 the only caucus goer was a man named Keane Schwarz. He voted for Bernie Sanders. Final vote count; Bernie Sanders -1, Hillary Clinton -0, Martin O’Malley-0. However a check of the DNC results shows that Hillary Clinton was awarded the delegate.
In Knoxville County #3 the final vote count was Sanders-58, Clinton-52. Delegates were rightfully recorded as 5-4 for Sanders but in the DNC results appear as 5-4 for Clinton.
Additionally there were multiple instances in which the number of votes recorded did not equal the number of voters registered at the start of the caucus. In another situation a video surfaced of a Hillary Clinton precinct captain reporting a vote total which they had not counted, and then lying and saying they had counted when there was a discrepancy in results.
Perhaps worst of all was that the final results were missing counts from 90 precincts. In a vote which was “decided” by less than 0.05% to miss approximately 5% of the total votes is ludicrous.
Individually, these examples may each be seen as something between trivial and frustrating. But when combined together, and this certainly is not a comprehensive list, they appear to be part of a more coordinated plot. It does not help the situation to consider that the chair of the Iowa Democratic Committee has been driving around for years with a licence plate which read “HRC 2016”. At best, Iowa was a miscarriage of democracy. At worst, intentional and flagrant voter fraud.
A campaign which attacks the existing political spoils system is bound to bring out of the woodwork in defense those politicians who have grown the most corpulent on spoils. Hillary Clinton constantly brags about the vast array of political endorsements she has received, seemingly tone-deaf to the growing rejection of establishment politics going on around her. And if early polls led to fear in these pigs at the trough, the results in Iowa led to outright terror. Endorsements for Hillary Clinton quickly turned to public attacks of Bernie Sanders.
Take Gerry Connolly, a Democratic Congressman from Virginia who said he believed the election of Bernie Sanders “could have real serious down ballot consequences”. This is the same Gerry Connolly who has been one of the leading fighters in favor of the TPP, and has supported military intervention in Syria. The same Gerry Connolly whose top five career campaign donors include two financial institutions and two defense contractors.
Or what about Scott Peters, a Democratic Congressman from California who said he was “not comfortable at all” with Bernie Sanders. Yes this is the same Scott Peters whose political career has been mainly funded by two financial institutions. In fact this is the same Scott Peters who is married to Lynn Gorguze, a woman worth over $100 million due to her position as CEO of Cameron Holdings, a financial institution.
Or finally, how about the sad case of Claire McCaskill, the Democratic Senator from Missouri and purveyor of some of the most vicious public attacks against Bernie Sanders. Early in her political career McCaskill was somewhat of a people’s champion, fighting for increases in minimum wage and against Wall Street power. But she soon grew fat within the political spoils system as many do, her transformation likely helped by her marriage to real estate tycoon Joseph Shepard, a man worth north of $30 million. Nowadays when you hear about Senator McCaskill it is likely due to her being accused of hiding assets, taking advantage of government subsidies for personal gain, conducting audits in which she has a conflict of interest, or, more comically, using taxpayer money to pay for her private jet then turning around not paying her taxes on said plane.
As in other sections the examples could essentially continue indefinitely. What should be clear is that when these individuals speak they do so not as representatives of the people trying to educate their constituents, but as the corrupt defending corruption.
Even after the “virtual tie” in Iowa it would have been hard for Hillary Clinton to foresee the carnage that awaited her in New Hampshire, a state which she had dramatically won from Barack Obama in 2008, and in which Bill Clinton had proclaimed himself “the comeback kid” during the 1992 primary. But the 22 point drubbing which prompted the “kitchen sink” speech from Bernie Sanders was only the beginning of the problem for Clinton.
After enjoying an enormous fundraising advantage throughout 2015 thanks to her corporate donors, Clinton was actually out-raised in January 2016 due to the incredible procession of small donations to the Sanders campaign. And in the 24 hours following the New Hampshire primary Sanders raised an incredible $7 million. This prompted yet another backlash from the DNC and their want-to-be tyrant Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as they rolled back restrictions on campaign contributions from lobbyists and PACs. This maneuver to help Hillary Clinton’s floundering fundraising efforts seemed to totally disregard the political climate which got her into trouble in the first place. But the DNC could apparently not envision a world in which regular people had a similar monetary clout in the political system as corporations. It is the beauty of being an organizer in a rigged system; if the game isn’t working for you, simply change the rules.
I am not a religious man. But there is something awe inspiring about watching a real life battle between David and Goliath. American democracy descended so gradually into oligarchy that it was hard to notice. And yet, here we are. The gravity of the message of Bernie Sanders is so monumental that it is almost incomprehensible.
I have often read about revolutionary periods in history and wondered; How did the oppressed people do it? How did the power structure fight back?
Will the movement around Bernie Sanders be able to ‘do it’, to succeed in fundamentally restructuring their existence? I do not know the answer. But I do know that watching the power structure fight back with every tool at their disposal is glorious.
-Nigel Clarke
@Nig_Clarke
AdvertisementsCOLUMN ONE In Montana, an old arcade game worth a fortune
The outside world recently discovered this town's classic gypsy fortuneteller booth. Only one or two of its kind are left in the world. Collectors are offering millions, but cash-strapped Virginia City won't sell. 'We love her,' says one official.
Collectors say the machine is among the most elaborate of the once-popular genre that drew crowds at the elaborate penny arcades and carnivals of the early 20th century. Only one or two of its kind are left in the world.
These days, most of the trouble is over the gypsy herself — a classic gypsy fortuneteller booth recently discovered, by the outside world at least, in this remote old mining town in the middle of the Montana prairie.
Or maybe: "Beware of a dark-haired woman. She is going to get you in trouble."
"You will find marriage three times, each better than the last," she might say.
In towns across America, a nickel would get pushed into the slot in her glass booth and her gypsy voice would rise. Her black eyes would become suddenly animated, ratcheting to and fro. Her papier-mâché teeth would click menacingly behind her frozen smile.
Reporting from Virginia City, Mont. — She was the |
it’s time to serve your Greek Pomegranate Sangria, think about using stemless wine glasses – they’re the perfect way to show off this gorgeous drink with every glass!
3 cups Mavrodafni / sweet Greek fortified wine (little less than 1 bottle)
3/4 cup Metaxa / Greek brandy (preferably 7 star)
1 cup pomegranate juice (unsweetened -this is more common than sweetened)
1 cup fresh squeezed orange juice
1/2 cup fresh squeezed lime juice
large cinnamon stick
1/2 cup pomegranate molasses (easy how-to below) / sub with simple syrup if necessary
Garnish: small cinnamon sticks, sliced limes/oranges, 2 cups pomegranate seeds (about 2 poms)
Mix all ingredients, excluding garnish, together in large bowl or pitcher and let sit in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours preferably over night.
Pour over ice and garnish with lime, oranges, cinnamon sticks and pomegranates. Serve immediately after pouring.
Serves 6 liberally.
Pomegranate Molasses
Take the extra step to use pom molasses in place of simple syrup whenever you can. It makes a huge difference in the finished sangria and takes no time at all.
– 4 cups pomegranate juice
– 1/2 cup white sugar
– 2 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
Stir to combine in small saucepan and cook over medium/low heat for about 30 min or until the top of the syrup starts to froth with a layer of very small bubbles. You’re looking for a running, sticky syrup – careful not to cook too long or on too high heat.
You can make this ahead and keep it covered in the fridge for 3-5 days. And don’t laugh, but pomegranate molasses is A-mazing over rice pilaf with a few extra pom seeds added in 🙂In August, embattled Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke to an audience of Hispanic supporters in Nevada. "I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK," he said smugly. "Do I need to say more?"
That, in a nutshell, is his party's strategy for capturing the Hispanic vote. In the absence of tangible accomplishments, Democrats are counting on Republican bigotry to drive Hispanic voters permanently into the arms of the Democratic Party.
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ADAM SERWER looks at the Latino vote in this month's issue of the American Prospect. We looked at this last month, so in the interest of not boring our readers, I just want to comment on this quickly. I agree with the contours of Mr Serwer's analysis: after a few stabs at immigration reform from moderate Republicans such as George W. Bush and John McCain, the party as a whole has lapsed into a more nativist approach (including Mr McCain, raging out there in the desert), which reinforces the Democratic lead among Latino voters. But if Democrats remain complacent about this advantage, as they currently are, they risk losing that edge. This bit sums it up nicely:
This is a fair assessment of the national Democratic strategy with regard to Latino voters. It might be a viable one, in the medium term. Mr Serwer only mentions the Arizona immigration law in passing, but I think people are going to be talking about that one for years to come. On the merits, however, as I've said before, this approach is so shallow that it borders on racist. And both parties indulge in this kind of complacency: with regard to women, young people, evangelicals, African-Americans, etc. For constituencies, as for individual voters, I see little value in being heavily affiliated with one party over the other. Annoying for the parties, no doubt, to approach every election cycle with millions of voters shrugging their shoulders and asking, "What have you done for me lately?" But isn't that the question the voters should always be quick to ask?
(Photo credit: AFP)Summary
This report is about American and British involvement in the Afghan drug trade in opium, focusing on the history of such involvement, and the nature of the drug trade since the 2001 occupation of Afghanistan. Today, Afghanistan supplies “more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium, from which heroin is made,”[1] so who’s profiting from the trade?
Analysis
The Anglo-Americans and the Origins of the Taliban
The CIA Creates Al-Qaeda
In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, said in an interview with a French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, that the US intervention in the Afghan-Soviet war did not begin in the 1980s, but that, “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” which precipitated the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan.[2] From the Soviet invasion, a bloody ten-year war followed.
Amazingly, “Before 1979 Pakistan and Afghanistan exported very little heroin to the West,”[3] but by 1981, “trucks from the Pakistan army’s National Logistics Cell arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin – protected by ISI [Pakistan’s internal security service] papers freeing them from police search.”[4] This change occurred in 1981 when then CIA Director William Casey, Prince Turki bin Faisal of Saudi intelligence and the ISI worked together to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992 in camps overseen by the CIA and [British] MI6. The SAS [British special forces] trained future Al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts” while their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.[5] Further, “CIA aid was funneled through [Pakistani President] General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”[6]
Creating the Taliban
In the mid-1990s, an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban.[7] During that same time the Taliban acquired contacts with the ISI,[8] often referred to as Pakistan’s “shadow government.” In 1995, the ISI was actively aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan’s civil war against the warlords that controlled the country.[9] In addition, just as in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union in the previous decade, the ISI looked to Saudi intelligence to provide the funding for the Taliban, and the ties between the ISI and Saudi intelligence grew much closer.[10] The Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan was also aided by the CIA, which worked with the Pakistani ISI.[11]
A few years after the Taliban came to power they began a campaign to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium crops, and “The success of Afghanistan’s 2000 drug eradication program under the Taliban government was recognized by the United Nations” as a monumental feat, in that “no other country was able to implement a comparable program.”[12] In October of 2001, the UN acknowledged that the Taliban reduced opium production in Afghanistan from 3300 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.[13]
In June of 2001, a few months before 9/11, it was reported that a “recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan” was announced “by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, [which] made the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban.”[14]
Anglo-American Involvement in the Afghan Opium Trade
The World’s #1 Narco-State
Drug trafficking is the largest global commodity in profits after the oil and arms trade, consequently, “immediately following the October 2001 invasion opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the domestic price of opium in Afghanistan (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.”[15] The Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan successfully restored the drug trade. The Guardian recently reported that, “In 2007 Afghanistan had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.”[16].
The British
In 2005 it was reported by the Independent that Afghanistan’s Interior Minister had resigned, “amid reports he had quit because of the involvement of senior government officials in the illegal drug trade.” He had “been outspoken over the involvement of officials in the drug trade and is believed to have had differences with President Karzai over the appointment of Provincial officials.”[17] In 2006, the Independent reported that, “British intelligence officers and military commanders accused the US of undermining British policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the sacking of a key British ally in the Afghan province of Helmand.” The British “blamed pressure from the CIA for President Hamid Karzai’s decision to dismiss Mohammed Daud as governor of Helmand.” Mr. Daud “had survived several Taliban assassination attempts, was seen as a key player in Britain’s anti-drugs campaign in Helmand,” and was fired after Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s President, “listened to advice from ‘other powerful Western players’.”[18]
Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in a 2007 article in the UK Daily Mail, that what has been achieved in Afghanistan is “the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.”[19] Murray elaborated that, “Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.” This means that Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with NATO troops.” Murray explains that this was able to happen because “the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government.” Murray stated that, “Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London.”[20]
The Americans
In 2002, former Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India wrote that, in regard to the failure to combat the rise in opium production, “this marked lack of success in the heroin front is due to the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops, is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of the Al Qaeda.”[21]
The Hindu reported in 2008 that, “90 per cent of the heroin sold in Russia comes from Afghanistan,” and Putin was quoted as saying, “Unfortunately, they (NATO) are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” and that the coalition forces were “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.” The article then reported that, “according to unconfirmed reports the U.S. military transport aviation is used for the delivery of drugs from Afghanistan to the American airbases, Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey,” and that, “It has been reported earlier that the CIA is involved in Afghanistan’s opium production, or is at least protecting it.” One Russian journalist quoted anonymous Afghan officials as saying, “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation.”[22]
The British and the Taliban
Training the Taliban
The Independent reported in 2008 that “Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides. The plans were discovered on a memory stick seized by Afghan secret police in December.” Further, “The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taliban fighters and 200 low-level commanders.”[23]
The article explained that, “the Afghans feared the British were training a militia with no loyalty to the central government. Intercepted Taliban communications suggested they thought the British were trying to help them.” The article further reported that, the program was bankrolled by the British,” and that, “the memory stick revealed that $125,000 (£64,000) had been spent on preparing the camp and a further $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008,” which “sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taliban.” Further, “the Afghan government took issue with plans to provide military training to turn the insurgents into a defence force.” On top of that, “the memory stick revealed plans to train the Taliban to use secure satellite phones, so they could communicate directly with UK officials.” “Officially, the British embassy remains tight-lipped, fuelling speculation that the plan may have been part of a wider clandestine operation.”[24]
Who Profits from the Drug Trade?
Wall Street and Big Banks
Michel Chossudovsky describes the heroin trade as a “hierarchy of prices,” with the drug’s street price, (what it is sold for in largely Western cities around the world), is 80 to 100 times the price paid to the farmers who cultivate it in Afghanistan.[25] The IMF reported that in the late 1990s, money laundering accounted for 2-5% of the world’s GDP, and that a large percentage of the 590 billion to 1.5 trillion dollars in annual money laundering is “directly linked to the trade in narcotics.” This lucrative trade in narcotics produces profits which are “laundered in the numerous offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and some 50 other locations around the globe.” These offshore havens “are controlled by major Western banks and financial institutions” which “have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining the drug trade.”[26]
An example of the interest of Wall Street and London bankers in the international drug trade, we can look to Colombia and the FARC rebel group. In “1999, NYSE [New York Stock Exchange] Chairman Dick Grasso traveled to Colombia and met with the leader of the FARC rebels controlling the southern third of the country.” “Grasso had asked the Colombian rebels to invest their profits in Wall Street.”[27] The Associated Press reported that Grasso told the rebel leader to, “make peace and expect great economic benefits from global investors,” and invited the rebel leader to visit Wall Street.[28] To allow for drug investment in Western financial institutions, “major banks like Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase all offer private client services for the very wealthy with very few questions asked.”[29]
It not surprising that opioid and opiate medication abuse is on the rise because people can easily get such drugs online without a prescription, not to mention the fact that heroin continues to flow into the country despite the War on Drugs.
Andrew G. Marshall is a contributor to Geopoliticalmonitor.com
Sources:
[1] Stephen Fidler, UN alarm at spread of Afghan opium. Financial Times: March 4, 2008: http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto030420081933091960 [2] Bill Blum (translator). The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan. Global Research: October 15, 2001: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html [3-4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of North America. University of California Press: 2007, page 124 [5] Peter Dale Scott, Ibid, page 122-23 [6] Peter Dale Scott, Ibid, page 123 [7] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Books, New York, 2004: Page 328 [8] Steve Coll, Ibid, page 293 [9] Steve Coll, Ibid, pages 293-294 [10] Steve Coll, Ibid, pages 295-296 [11] Times of India, CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban. Times of India Online: March 7, 2001: http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/taliban.htm [12] Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, 2nd ed. Center for Research on Globalization: Québec, 2005: Page 226 [13] Michel Chossudovsky, Ibid, page 227 [14] Robert Scheer, Bush’s Faustian Deal With the Taliban. The Nation: June 4, 2001: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010604/20010522 [15] Michel Chossudovsky, Op cit, page 228 [16] Patrick Wintour, Opium economy will take 20 years and £1bn to remove. The Guardian: February 6, 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/06/afghanistan.politics [17] Justin Huggler, Afghan minister quits over opium trade. The Independent: September 28, 2005: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghan-minister-quits-over-opium-trade-508664.html [18] Robert Fox, CIA is undermining British war effort, say military chiefs. The Independent: December 10, 2006: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/cia-is-undermining-british-war-effort-say-military-chiefs-427848.html [19-20] Craig Murray, Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time. UK Daily Mail: July 21, 2007: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=469983&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true [21] B. Raman, Assassination of Jaki Abdul Qadeer in Kabul. South Asia Analysis Group: Paper no. 489, August 7, 2002: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers5/paper489.html [22] Vladimir Radyuhin, Russia: victim of narco-aggression. The Hindu: February 4, 2008: http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/04/stories/2008020453271000.htm [23-24] Jerome Starkey, Revealed: British plan to build training camp for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The Independent: February 4, 2008: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/revealed-british-plan-to-build-training-camp-for-taliban-fighters-in-afghanistan-777671.html [25] Michel Chossudovsky, Op cit, page 230 [26] Michel Chossudovsky, Ibid, page 233 [27] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. New Society Publishers: Canada, 2004: Page 57 [28] CBS MarketWatch, NYSE’s Grasso met with Colombia’s FARC. AP: June 29, 1999: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/-nyses-grasso-met-colombias/story.aspx?guid=%7B571A6F96-E694-4D58-A7A9-F5DBFF132F4A%7D [29] Michael C. Ruppert, Op cit, page 61Standing beside one of the two waterfalls he had built into his duplex condominium on West 15th Street in Manhattan, Colin Rath smiled. The waterfalls feed a narrow koi pond that runs the length of the living room and was scooped out in the shape of a scale replica of the Yangtze River in China.
“It’s so peaceful in here,” he said.
What he wanted to do next door, however, is another story, one Mr. Rath, 52, has now told in a self-published book. Whether it was a case of tremendous misfortune or terrible miscalculation is hard to say. What the episode does reveal is the remarkable excesses that prevailed a decade ago, and perhaps again today, across New York City.
“We went to hell and back I don’t know how many times,” Mr. Rath said, reflecting on the two decades he spent on the block in the Chelsea neighborhood, half of them trying to build his “green dream,” an eight-story boutique condominium building.
Meant to be ahead of its time, employing every luxury and technology imaginable, the project instead pulled its creator in over his head. In 2010, he walked away with nothing but 27 debtors clamoring for absent millions, and friends and relatives who had soured on the enterprise.Economic Ideas Have Consequences... Indirectly.
Remnant Review
In the year 1750, the greatest philosopher in the world was the Scotsman, David Hume.
Toward the end of the century, the philosopher who replaced him as the greatest philosopher in the world was Immanuel Kant. Yet, Kant wrote the following: "I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction." David Hume was the heavy hitter, philosophy wise, in the middle of the 18th century.
In 1752, Hume wrote an essay defending free trade: "On Commerce." A quarter of a century later, his close friend Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, which was basically an 800-page extension of David Hume's original essay.
Most economists today favor free trade. There are a few exceptions, and there have always been exceptions. In contrast, in their judicial capacity as voters, the general public has never been persuaded of the free trade position. Even among the voters who claim to be defenders of the free market, when push comes to shove, they are still mercantilists. They still hold the economic position defended by the early economists of the late 17th century, against whom David Hume and Adam Smith directed their intellectual firepower.
We get back to the bedrock reality of human thought, namely, that most people cannot follow long chains of reasoning. Only a relatively small group have this ability, and only within their specialties. Even they get sidetracked when it is in their economic self-interest to stop following a particular chain of reasoning.
FREE TRADE AND FREE MEN
The touchstone of whether a person really believes in the free market is his attitude on free trade. This has certainly been true since 1776, when Smith wrote his book. The basic arguments in favor of free trade have not changed since 1776, or even 1752. The basic arguments for mercantilism have not changed since about 1670. We can find defenders of both positions among professional economists.
American manufacturers are almost instinctively mercantilists. They don't want competition from abroad, and they scrounge around in search of any kind of argument to defend the imposition of federal sales taxes on imports, which is what all tariffs are. It has nothing to do with logic. It has everything to do with pocketbooks.
We find that there are few defenders of free trade among American textile manufacturers. We find that special interest groups in the manufacturing sector hire professional economists to defend the special interest group's call for tariffs, import quotas, and other restrictions on competition from outside the borders of the United States. They always find economists who are willing to abandon their commitment to free market principles for the sake of a high salary. These economists journey to Washington to testify before congressional committees, and they present graphs, arguments, and even equations in favor of government restrictions on imports.
Beginning before World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation began sponsoring conferences in favor of free trade. This was part of a global effort to create an international trading community. Large-scale American manufacturers that were involved in international trade wanted lower tariffs. It was clear that these large manufacturing organizations could compete successfully, so their senior managers favored free trade. The internationalists, of which the Rockefeller interests were the most notable agents, favored free trade as a means of extending international trade, international finance, and international law. So, the interests of the Rockefeller Foundation and large American corporations -- today called multinationals -- were unified.
The Rockefeller Foundation began holding conferences of professional economists. Free market economists, such as F. A. Hayek, Wilhelm Roepke, and Ludwig von Mises, were paid to participate in these conferences and to write books. These free market economists were internationalists in the area of economic trade, so the Rockefeller Foundation put up the money to help promote their ideas on trade. Other economists fell in line because in the history of economics, ever since the time of Adam Smith, free trade has been the dominant position.
But there was an exception to the internationalism of the Rockefeller Foundation and large American corporations. They did not like the international gold coin standard. That was because they did not like it domestically. The gold coin standard placed limits on the manipulation of the domestic economy by central banks. The internationalists have always been great promoters of national central banks. This goes back to the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. So, when it comes to internationalism, the internationalists do not favor the single institution which has done more than any other to promote international trade: the international gold coin standard. They opposed it throughout the 20th century.
Professional economists virtually all fell into line. You cannot find a college-level economics textbook that does not promote central banking. You also cannot find one that openly favors the international gold coin standard. Always, the textbook writers, in the name of free enterprise, promote central banking, yet the economics of central banking is exactly the same as the economics of every other cartel. The government creates a cartel to favor a special interest group within the economy. The textbooks all go into detail regarding the nature of this special arrangement, and how cartels reduce customer satisfaction and consumer wealth. But, when it comes to the chapter on central banking, the authors are careful to separate this chapter from the chapter on cartels. The economics are identical, but the chapters are separated. This is not random. This is self-conscious.
Throughout the 20th century, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Federal Reserve system put economists on the payroll, or granted financial aid to economists who would promote the interests of central banking. The entire economics profession in the United States got the message, with the exception of the Austrian school. This is why the overwhelming majority of professional economists are persuaded that the best possible way to run an economy is by means of a central bank. They may not favor central planning in any other area, but they do with respect to the central institution of all economies, namely, money and banking. Here, they favor government regulation. Here, they favor committees of expert economists who will guide the economy by means of manipulating the money supply.
In other words, economists are true to their real commitment, which is their confession of faith: self-interest is supreme. Money talks. People follow their own self-interest in making decisions, and then they create justifications for these decisions.
This was Marx's line of reasoning. He said that the mode of production is fundamental to society, and philosophy and ethics are simply justifications for the prevailing mode of production. The mode of production is the substructure, and philosophy is the superstructure. What matters is the mode of production. This was Marx's view, and when push comes to shove, this is also the view of most free market economists. They really do believe in self-interest as the motivating factor of most people, or even all people, most of the time, or even all of the time.
VOTERS VS. CONSUMERS
Most voters favor tariffs and import quotas. Most voters are operational mercantilists. They have never believed Adam Smith.
Nevertheless, voters have been thwarted ever since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. There has been a constant push from the presidency to reduce tariffs, reduce import quotas, and extend the authority of bureaucratic international organizations, of which the supreme model is the World Trade Organization. So, we have seen the triumph of reduced tariffs. We have seen a tremendous increase in foreign trade within the American economy over the last generation. The voters have not gotten their way.
Above all other special interest groups, the trade unions have not gotten their way. The trade unions vote Democrats into office, and then most Democrats turn on them by promoting reduced tariffs, greater trade, and therefore greater competition from low-wage countries. The result has been the steady elimination of trade unions in the United States, except in the various levels of civil government.
Here is the amazing fact. Trade union members vote against their self-interest every time they vote for a Democrat to represent them in Congress. Surely, they vote against their own interests in electing Democrat presidents. Historically, the Republican Party has favored tariffs. Historically, the Democrats have favored free trade. Yet the trade union movement since 1912 has been in favor of the Democrats. These people never catch on. The Republicans wanted free trade in labor services inside the United States, and the Democrats did not. But the Democrats favored free trade across American borders, and while most Republicans since 1970 also favored this, there were more Republicans opposed to it than Democrats. It didn't matter. Free trade has pretty much destroyed the trade union movement, yet trade union members are registered Democrats.
Trade union members did figure out that free trade, whether domestic or international, undermined the union movement. The union movement is based on government coercion that favors trade unions. The great growth of trade unions came after Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932. But trade unionists never figured out how to deal with the problem of Democrats who are in favor of free trade across America's borders. These Democrats, while officially opposing right-to-work laws, and officially opposing the Taft-Hartley law of 1947, nevertheless consistently voted for lower tariffs. That was sufficient to undermine the trade union movement in manufacturing.
THE LIMITS OF LOGIC
I recognized a generation ago that arguing in favor of free trade was probably futile with respect to the average conservative voter. I said this specifically back in 1973. I wrote this in my book, Introduction to Christian Economics.
We come now to the economic issue that separates the economists from the special interest pleaders. There are a lot of supposedly free market capitalists who shout the praises of open competition, but when the chips are really down, they call for the intervention of the monopolistic, coercive State to keep Americans from trading with other Free World countries. Competition among Americans, but not between American companies and foreign companies: here is the cry of the tariff advocates. The fact that less than 5% of our economy is directly involved in foreign trade never phases these enthusiasts: free trade is "destroying" the other 95% of the American economy! Somehow, the principles of capitalism operate only within national boundaries. Somehow the intervention of the State will "protect" Americans. Henry Hazlitt's classic little book, Economics in One Lesson, so completely destroys the arguments of the tariff supporters that there is nothing left of their position; still they keep coming. For two centuries their position has been intellectually bankrupt; still they keep coming. Tariffs hurt all consumers except those on the public dole of tariff intervention, e.g., the "infant industries" such as steel or textiles. Yet the advocates say that all Americans are "protected." The logic of economics cannot seem to penetrate otherwise rational minds (p. 341).
Yet this mercantilist mindset of the voters did not translate into federal trade policy.
I still spend time arguing in favor of free trade. I have even set up an entire department arguing in favor of free trade. Why do I do this? Because I believe that, in the long run, righteousness wins out. In the long run, those economic policies that are in favor of forced wealth redistribution by the government, direct regulation by the government, and all the rest of the modern Keynesian economy, will ultimately fail the test of competition.
Free-market policies lead to greater benefits for consumers, and ultimately consumers make the final decisions. They have the money, and money is the most marketable commodity. Consumers demand to be served, and even when they go into the voting booth and vote in favor of politicians who say they will vote in favor of tariffs, this will not be successful. What people do in the voting booths will not overcome what they do in the marketplace. They want better deals. They want cheaper products. They ultimately don't want to buy American when American-made products don't meet their criteria. They are going to vote with their pocketbooks; they are going to vote for economic efficiency. Self-interested behavior in the marketplace will ultimately overcome self-interested behavior in the voting booth.
I am in the business of promoting ideas that will ultimately triumph in society, not primarily because of their logic, but because of the tremendous power of the free market to overwhelm all forms of interventionism. It was not Adam Smith who won the case for free trade. It was the British Empire, which was based mostly on free trade. By the early nineteenth century, the British Empire of trade was no longer based on political favors to the East India Company. It was based on open competition. This favored British producers, and this favored British consumers. It favored consumers in every nation. That is why Adam Smith's outlook won.
In other words, I believe in consistency. I believe there is cause-and-effect ethically in the universe. I believe that right makes might. I believe that customer authority will eventually triumph over voter sovereignty. I believe that money talks. And I believe that when it talks, it talks in favor of liberty. When people go out to spend their money, which is what really matters in the free market, they spend it in favor of those producers who compete most successfully internationally, which means those firms that profit most in terms of free trade.
There will always be lots of arguments in favor of mercantilism. In the long run, they will fail. They will fail precisely because people, in their capacity as customers, vote with their money in favor of better deals, and widespread competition increases the number of good deals. This applies also to Keynesianism, which is a form of mercantilism.
This is why Keynesianism cannot survive much longer. This is why tariffs and quotas cannot survive much longer. This is why central banks will not be running the political or economic show at the end of the 21st century. Consumers will then go in search of moral and ideological justifications of those institutional arrangements that have triumphed in open market competition.
CONCLUSION
Ideas have consequences, but in matters economic, consumer spending has far greater consequences. Consumer spending is going to determine which people adopt which ideas.
I think Keynesian logic, like mercantilist logic, will fail to persuade the vast majority of self-interested promoters. The most influential self-interested promoters are customers. They have the money, and money is the most marketable commodity.Did you know that rearranging the letters of "George Bush" gives "He bugs Gore", "Madonna Louise Ciccone" gives "Occasional nude income" and "William Shakespeare", "I am a weakish speller"??! Now you can find what lurks within the letters of YOUR name, and that of your boss, employer or anything else you want! This FREE service is based around a version of the remarkable Anagram Genius software - available to download and have running on your own computer! Click here to download a free copy for Windows! Looking for the old email server? This is now a service for members of crosswordtools.com. First visit? Don't be shy - you have nothing to lose and might discover something remarkable!
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['@ Play' is a kinda-sorta bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]
As you may have figured out by now, roguelikes are one of my favorite types of computer games. It's not that I hate other kinds of games, or even other RPGs. But roguelikes, good ones at least, provide essential gaming nutrients unavailable nearly anywhere else. They're games of skill instead of patience, which is rare for CRPGs. They are difficult but, once one knows how to play, often fair. And they and are set in a world of wonder and amazement balanced by great danger.
The possibilities there seem endless. You could play Rogue a hundred times and not experience two games that are similar to each other. You could play Nethack or ADOM for years and still encounter a new aspect of the game from time to time. Dungeon Crawl is more than just a game: it is dozens of games, each class and race playing surprisingly differently from the others. Just being a roguelike doesn't make a game good, of course, but the best are among the greatest games ever made.
I believe that, someday, eventually, the tide will turn in the public perception of roguelike games, or at least the core ideas that drive them. This is not due to any magical quality bestowed by turn-based movement or grid-based game worlds, which are a superficial determination of roguelikeness but doesn't get to what makes them interesting. No, one plays a roguelike to explore an unknown world, relying on uncertain resources, figuring the rules out along the way, and learning the underlying logic of the game. And of course, when people start talking about procedural content generation, they are unknowingly calling upon the ancient monster-deities of the Dungeons of Doom.
But these ideas did not originate with roguelikes. It must be remembered that approximately half of what makes roguelikes interesting as computer games was invented years before, in a pen-and-paper game created back when teletype machines roamed the earth.
That roguelike feeling
The soul of the roguel |
’s bundled with the Chromecast
In each Chromecast box, there’s also a small (4″) HDMI extension cable which you can attach between the Chromecast and the HDMI socket in your TV.
If your Chromecast is already connecting at 72Mbps then it’s not going to make any difference. It’s likely that you might only see an improvement using this if a part of your TV protrudes between the Chromecast and the direction of your wireless router.
In each Chromecast box, there’s also a small (4″) HDMI extension cable which you can attach between the Chromecast and the HDMI socket in your TV. If your Chromecast is already connecting at 72Mbps then it’s not going to make any difference. It’s likely that you might only see an improvement using this if a part of your TV protrudes between the Chromecast and the direction of your wireless router. Try repositioning your router
With WiFi, many connection problems can be solved by reducing the distance between the router and the connecting device, or avoiding large obstacles in the path between them (many walls etc.).
Some more unusual ways of dealing with this problem include placing mirrors or tin foil sheets behind a router to act as a signal reflector, or printing out a very simple DIY antenna template, covering it with foil, and attach it to the router.
With WiFi, many connection problems can be solved by reducing the distance between the router and the connecting device, or avoiding large obstacles in the path between them (many walls etc.). Some more unusual ways of dealing with this problem include placing mirrors or tin foil sheets behind a router to act as a signal reflector, or printing out a very simple DIY antenna template, covering it with foil, and attach it to the router. Consider a dual-band or.11ac router
Dual-band routers can use both the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands simultaneously. Although Chromecast doesn’t support the 5Ghz band, this may still be useful if you have an extensive wireless setup.
By offloading some of your existing WiFi connections on to 5Ghz, it frees up capacity for devices like the Chromecast which can only use the 2.4Ghz portion. This can be especially useful in built-up areas where there is already saturation in the 2.4Ghz band.
Nearly all of the newer.11ac routers are also dual-band capable, so it’s worth looking at something like the TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750 for maximum capacity.
You’ll still need to have.11ac compatible wireless devices to take full advantage of the increased speeds however.
Other casting options
Although there are now a number of similar devices available such as the Roku or Amazon Fire sticks, Chromecast has a good combination of low cost, widespread app support, and flexible tab/screen mirroring options (from laptop and Android devices).
Not bad for a device that’s available online for less than $35.
Here are some alternative casting setups which might be worth exploring depending on what you want to watch, and where it’s stored:
Full-screen casting
You can cast your entire laptop screen from the tab casting interface. Needless to say, this is a very useful feature for anyone giving PowerPoint style presentations, for example, or classroom IT demonstrations.
After clicking on in the browser, click on the downward-pointing arrow on the right of the dialog box, where you can then select “Cast screen/window”.
On Android, you can do the same by using the “Cast screen” button from the Chromecast app.
You can’t currently mirror iPhone or iPad screens with Chromecast (at least, for non-jailbroken devices).
You can cast your entire laptop screen from the tab casting interface. Needless to say, this is a very useful feature for anyone giving PowerPoint style presentations, for example, or classroom IT demonstrations. After clicking on in the browser, click on the downward-pointing arrow on the right of the dialog box, where you can then select “Cast screen/window”. On Android, you can do the same by using the “Cast screen” button from the Chromecast app. You can’t currently mirror iPhone or iPad screens with Chromecast (at least, for non-jailbroken devices). Cast local files – It’s possible to cast audio or video files that you have stored locally, by opening them directly in Chrome browser. On Windows or Mac, press Ctrl-O in the browser to open a file in a new tab. You can now tab cast this file as usual by pressing the button.
However there are a number of problems with this – only some basic files like.mp3 and some video files will actually play in a browser tab; other files not supported by the internal media player will simply start downloading. There’s also the additional network & CPU overheads of tab-casting mode to consider.
A slightly better alternative is to install Plex on your laptop as if the laptop is acting as a local media server (see below).
Another local streaming app/extension is Videostream (Chrome browser and Android), which is a more lightweight, but less polished alternative to installing Plex locally.
For iPhone/iPad, you can try something like Photo/Video Cast.
Android users can also check out LocalCast.
– It’s possible to cast audio or video files that you have stored locally, by opening them directly in Chrome browser. On Windows or Mac, press Ctrl-O in the browser to open a file in a new tab. You can now tab cast this file as usual by pressing the button. However there are a number of problems with this – only some basic files like.mp3 and some video files will actually play in a browser tab; other files not supported by the internal media player will simply start downloading. There’s also the additional network & CPU overheads of tab-casting mode to consider. A slightly better alternative is to install Plex on your laptop as if the laptop is acting as a local media server (see below). Another local streaming app/extension is Videostream (Chrome browser and Android), which is a more lightweight, but less polished alternative to installing Plex locally. For iPhone/iPad, you can try something like Photo/Video Cast. Android users can also check out LocalCast. Cast from a local media server – You can use something like Plex to setup a local streaming media server, and connect that box directly via network cable to your WiFi router, so that you’re not using any additional wireless bandwidth when casting.
Now simply start the cast using one of the Plex mobile or web apps, and it will hand-off the stream to the Chromecast in App casting mode, so that you’re only using a single Wifi connection when casting. Non-MP4 files may need to be transcoded by the Plex server, so it should be powerful enough to achieve this.
Additionally, if your Plex library is installed on a WiFi-connected laptop, it may work, but will require a very solid connection, since there are now WiFi connections both from your laptop to your router, and from the router to the Chromecast.
– You can use something like Plex to setup a local streaming media server, and connect that box directly via network cable to your WiFi router, so that you’re not using any additional wireless bandwidth when casting. Now simply start the cast using one of the Plex mobile or web apps, and it will hand-off the stream to the Chromecast in App casting mode, so that you’re only using a single Wifi connection when casting. Non-MP4 files may need to be transcoded by the Plex server, so it should be powerful enough to achieve this. Additionally, if your Plex library is installed on a WiFi-connected laptop, it may work, but will require a very solid connection, since there are now WiFi connections both from your laptop to your router, and from the router to the Chromecast. Cast from a cloud file server – Android apps such as LocalCast can cast videos stored on Google Drive. For iOS, AllCast can cast from Google Drive and Dropbox, or try nPlayer as an alternative for Dropbox and other cloud casting. Chromebooks now support casting content from Google Drive.
Another alternative for casting remote files is Plex, which works on all platforms. If you signup for Plex pass, you can use the Cloud sync feature to stream content stored on Google Drive, Dropbox etc.
Again this uses app casting mode, so it will go directly from the cloud service to the Chromecast itself, instead of being re-transmitted through your laptop or other device.
Checking WiFi connection rates using OpenWRT / DD-WRT
Since the quality of your WiFi connection is a big factor in Chromecast quality, you need to be able to check exactly what’s happening with the connection between your devices and WiFi router.
With laptops and some mobile devices, this is easy enough, as the current connection rate can often be seen by clicking/tapping on WiFi connection icons.
However, it may not be immediately obvious how to see what speed your Chromecast is connecting to your router at. We need to look at the stats for connected devices on the wireless router for this.
With laptops and some mobile devices, this is easy enough, as the current connection rate can often be seen by clicking/tapping on WiFi connection icons. First, you’ll need to find out your Chromecast IP and/or MAC address. You can find these details by using the Chromecast setup program or app, and scrolling down to the “Information” section.
Once you have your Chromecast IP or MAC address, you should be able to identify it on your routers “Associated Stations” or “Connected Devices” list. Not all router models give this info, so we’re going to use OpenWRT (version 14 – “Barrier Breaker”) as an example to check it.
Login to your router, and scroll down to the Associated Stations list (under the “Status->Overview” tab). Now try to find the MAC address of your Chromecast (on some routers you can check for the IP address instead):
You should now be able to identify your Chromecast on the list, and confirm the rate it’s connecting at.
In our example in OpenWrt, the Chromecast is connected at the maximum 72.2 Mbit for both sending and receiving. TX rate is from the point of view of the router – i.e. sending data to the Chromecast, so it’s more important in this case compared to the RX rate.
If you’re tab casting, you can also check the TX and RX rates of your tab-casting devices here, taking into account the tab-casting data transfer layout described earlier.
In our example in OpenWrt, the Chromecast is connected at the maximum 72.2 Mbit for both sending and receiving. TX rate is from the point of view of the router – i.e. sending data to the Chromecast, so it’s more important in this case compared to the RX rate. If you’re tab casting, you can also check the TX and RX rates of your tab-casting devices here, taking into account the tab-casting data transfer layout described earlier. Note that these speeds are simply the WiFi connection rates – they are maximum rates and don’t indicate the current amount of data being transferred. In practice, actual transfer speeds will be much lower than these rates, due to factors such as WiFi protocol overhead.
Although it varies depending on the link rate and other settings, the actual transfer capacity can be thought of as 40% of the displayed rate, as a very rough estimate.
Although it varies depending on the link rate and other settings, the actual transfer capacity can be thought of as 40% of the displayed rate, as a very rough estimate. You should check these connection speeds while casting some content, otherwise the WiFi connection list on your router may appear to remain idle at a lower connection rate.
Your Chromecast setup
Maybe you have a specific way of casting that works especially well with your setup?
Or perhaps you’ve found that a different HDMI streaming stick does the job better?
Either way, let us know in the comments section below!The 4-0 win for Orange County SC on Saturday over local rivals LA Galaxy II was fantastic, but the night was marked by another occasion, as OCSC opened their tenure at Orange County Great Park.
The facility used on Saturday, a pop-up temporary stadium to be used until the permanent stadium being built at the Great Park is finished, may not have looked particularly impressive if you didn’t understand the context, but a good opening showing is a sign of promise for Orange County SC moving forward.
First, attendance was healthy for the game. There’s no question that the local opponents helped bring in a few spectators, but for a facility that is projected to hold 5,000, announced attendance on the night was 4,123. Considering the Blues last season were drawing three figures more often than four, getting several thousand out to the game — even with the ominous clouds, periodic sprinkles and unrelenting wind — is a good sign. It’s perhaps a shame that the game stream picked up the smaller side of the stands, the “VIP” side, making the crowd look smaller than it actually was.
Considering this is a facility to be used by OCSC alone, there was a sense of ownership over the venue. Orange County SC flags were posted all around the stadium, and large signs featuring the club’s crest were posted prominently. It may be a small thing, but even having the signs provided an improvement over the atmosphere at Anteater Stadium in the past, where there was a sense of anonymity for Orange County.
The team attempted to create a fun atmosphere before the game, offering sports carnival games and food vendors like you would find at a local festival or youth sports tournament. There was a merchandise table, T-shirt giveaways as part of a promotion for the game, an Orange County player signing shirts and game programs, and for the grown-ups, alcohol for sale. This last point will probably go a long way to trying to bring back repeat customers — it’s a lot easier to convince a friend or co-worker to check out a game if there’s the promise of a beer behind it.
One of the other cool features of the pop-up stadium was the sightlines at the corners. Obviously in a pretty small facility, there aren’t exactly terrible views of the action anywhere, but in the two corners on the “VIP” side, there’s a basic barrier and spectators could walk up to it and watch from field level. In some ways that’s not an intentional feature, but without seats in the corners it provides those attending with antsy legs or those looking for a real close-up to get a pretty cool vantage point.
The drawbacks from opening night? Concessions weren’t fully stocked pregame, so those looking for substantial food were forced to wait. The restrooms were porta pottys, which to be fair is to be expected at a temporary facility but still probably not preferred by the majority of attendants, especially those with small children.
And the field needs a clock and scoreboard. It seems small, but watching a game without knowing the time elapsed is a pain. Nerds like me might pack a watch and actually time the halves, but having a display of the time and score is basic and should be mandatory for a pro game.
Aside from that, the crowds came out and the team performed, and considering the context things couldn’t have gone much better. Orange County SC should be proud of the spectacle they put on Saturday, and their next task? Keep the momentum at their new home going throughout the season.
What do you think? Leave a comment below!I love shopping at Corti Brothers and one of the reasons is that you can find a really interesting Georgian wine for only $12.99. Georgia is one of the most exciting wine-producing regions, but also one of the least heralded. It’s exciting because they are making traditional wines (sometimes even made in amphorae buried in the ground!) from traditional grapes, a rare feat these days.
Georgians have been making wine for 8,000 years and have over 500 indigenous grape varieties! Both the wine styles and the grapes are essentially unknown to most wine drinkers, even those who pride themselves on enjoying the obscure.
This wine made by Teliani Valley in 2007 comes from the Lechkumi appellation which is in a river valley in northeastern Georgia. Tsolikouri is a white grape indigenous to the north: it reminds me of some white German grapes like Muscat and Gewurtztraminer, though not quite as musky as those. This wine is slightly musky and rose-scented, medium bodied with good acid, somewhat pleasantly oxidized. A pan-fried trout, some roasted potatoes, and a lightly dressed salad would make a perfect meal for this delightful wine.As the sun slowly unlocks frigid water from the icy caps above, the valley’s residents give what modest arable land they have its first tilling, chanting while they plow and rake. Into the ground go barley seeds, a hardy, nutritious and durable grain that can last over the long winter when people here light fires, stay indoors and slowly whittle away at their food stores until the next spring. This is not a land of plenty; people here, after eating all the meat and cartilage off a bone, crack it to suck out the marrow.
The village of Markha itself is but a few dozen beige mud-brick homes, sitting on a slight promontory, almost invisible against the brown backdrop. Livestock outnumber people. At night, it is as if all the stars in the sky gather here, the rest of the world having slowly abandoned them. One barely notices the moon among all that starlight.
To get there, though, is an arduous task. As the polling team gazed across the muddy Zanskar River at Chilling, what was ahead began to dawn on them. Each wore his city shoes. Not one had a proper hiking backpack, so the team opted to pool money to rent a pony to carry the luggage. With no bridge to cross the Zanskar, a major tributary of the Indus, the team, electronic voting machines clutched to their chests, crossed the river one by one using a hand-pulled trolley much like a zip line with a wooden crate attached.
By nightfall, the team still had not reached its destination. For more than five hours, locals heading downriver had been saying that the village was only two hours away. It had already been 10 hours of hiking, and a decision was made to stay at a guesthouse — a plan quickly foiled when its proprietor promptly informed the team that she had no safe shelter for the pony, and that two days earlier, snow leopards had been sighted in the area.
And so the men plodded along in the dim moonlight until they came upon a stream bursting with the day’s snowmelt — so much that it had taken out the rock bridge crossing it. With no choice but to push on to Markha, the exhausted workers took off their shoes, rolled up their pants, held hands and waded through the waist-high water.Vatican City, the small sovereign nation of the Pope in Rome has a higher crime rate than any other nation of the world – and that’s saying something since it is populated by the Holy Father, Cardinals, and nuns!
Vatican City has a reported 1.5 crimes per citizen. However, it is not the nuns and cardinals committing the crimes. Vatican City experiences an extremely high rate of crime on account of the fact that it is swarming with awestruck tourists and opportunist pickpockets. Due to its low population and high rate of theft, it has the highest crime rate.
By the way, when I was once at the Vatican I left my camera at the security check point. When I went back for the camera it was gone. A security agent led me away from the Vatican a few blocks and then into an unmarked building. We went up some stairs and there I was in a secret security room with video monitors. My camera was there and it was returned to me.
As a I left and walked by St Anne’s Gate a black car drove up and the Pope Benedict XVI got out of it. I hollered “Viva Papa!” and he waved at me. True story. If I hadn’t lost my camera, that would have never happened. I was still an Anglican at the time. Perhaps Christ allowed me to see His Vicar that one time to push me over the edge.NEW YORK -- A woman's dog was shot to death by a New York police officer, and the devastated woman wants the officer held accountable, CBS New York station WCBS-TV reports.
The Bronx woman said the officer had no reason to open fire. The entire episode was caught on video.
"He was my beloved, and now he's gone," Yvonne Rosado said Thursday.
She relives the moment when her dog, Spike, was killed every time she leaves her apartment.
"It's like a tearing inside that I feel every day when I open that door and I see that in my head, him just lying there twitching," Rosado said.
It happened in the stairwell of Rosado's building in the Fordham section of the Bronx last month, when a neighbor called police for an unrelated issue.
The neighbor said she was talking to officers when Rosado cracked open her own door to see what was going on. Spike, a pit bull, slipped out to investigate.
"When I realized that it was an officer in front of the door, I said, 'He's friendly! He's friendly!'" Rosado said.
Surveillance video shows Spike coming out of the apartment. His tail was wagging as he ran over to the officer, who pulled his weapon and shot him at point-blank range.
"The officer just started backing away, and I thought he was pointing his finger at him, but he pointed the gun and shot," Rosado said. "Everything happened in less than one minute."
Rosado ran out of her apartment in her underwear; it was early in the morning. She tried to comfort the animal while the officers backed down the stairs.
The video was too graphic to show on television, but it was clear that the dog was not instantly killed.
"He was still wagging his tail as he was dying," Rosado said. "It's the worst thing."
Rosado was hysterical and followed the officers.
"I was very emotionally upset," she said.
At that point, she said the officers took her down.
"They jumped on top of me - three men," she said. "I'm in my undergarments in the hallway."
"They pinned her down to the stairs," added neighbor Irma Santiago. "Her whole back was black and blue."
Rosado said the incident has left her traumatized. She has retained attorney David Thompson of the firm Stecklow & Thompson, and she said all she wants now is justice.
"I want the officer to be disciplined for what he did to my beloved because he tore away something, a family member," Rosado said.
The NYPD has not released the name of the officer who fired the shot. The department said the incident is being reviewed by the Force Investigation Division.Please wait. Bleeding edge experimental technology of the future is being loaded,which may take 10 or 20 seconds with no apparent progress.Be patient. Do not make hasty keystrokes.
from README:
The game runs rather slowly in the browser (fastest on Chrome)
and you are limited to only one font, though it's scalable.
Keyboard input and saving game progress requires recent enough
version of a browser (but mouse input is enough to play the game).
Also, savefiles are prone to corruption on the browser,
e.g., when it's closed while the game is still saving progress
(which takes a long time). Hence, after trying out the game,
you may prefer to use a native binary for your architecture, if it exists.
Copyright (c) 2008--2019 Andres Loeh, Mikolaj Konarski and others (see git history)Uncharted on PS4 has “Stupidly Impressive Tricks and Tech,” Is “Breathtaking,” – Rumor (UPDATED)
Giuseppe Nelva May 30, 2014 12:16:43 PM EST
Industry insiders have been dropping a few hints about what we’re probably going to see at E3 of the new Uncharted on PS4, and today Ahsan “Thuway” Rasheed dropped a bit more information from his sources:
Uncharted PS4 visuals will make you say, “Quantum/Order/Division who?” Stupidly impressive tricks and tech. Uncharted preview is being described as breathtaking. I don’t know about any more Sony megatons- but the word the last word I got is: The 1st Party stuff is seriously impressive. Whenever it’s shown, it will make people take notice.
Interestingly, Rasheed seems to have come out empty handed on information about Microsoft, but that’s not surprising, as the house of Xbox tends to run a tighter ship than Sony concerning leaks and information that filters through to the public when it’s not supposed to:
I tried pressing for more info, nothing there. Also no new info on MS’s megatons. Looks like leaks are sealed. See you guys next Monday.
Oh and before you ask, no I haven’t heard about any SECRET PS4 titles or GG’s game showing up. The only one I knew was Castlevania Souls.
It’s no mystery that Naughty Dog normally delivers on the visuals, and it’s definitely hard not to be excited about seeing what the new Uncharted has to show at E3.
Incidentally, before you go thinking about a new Castlevania, “Castlevania Souls” is how Rasheed calls Project Beast, due to its similarities with the Castlevania series and the rumored status as Demons’ Souls spiritual successor.
One thing is for sure: we’re still two weeks away from E3, and the hype is definitely skyrocketing. Will Sony release the Naughty Dog from the leash and let it steal the show?
Update: anotherprominent insider, Tidux, added more fuel to the Uncharted fire, also confirming that the protagonist of the new game is still Nathan Drake and the setting is “tropical”.
Just seen a new build of Uncharted, I have no words #GreatnessAwaits #PS4 Cool use of The ds4. Kinda like Transistor but not really.Buy Photo Jericho Road at the intersection of U.S. 250 (Photo: Randall K. Wolf/The News Leader)Buy Photo
FISHERSVILLE - A Staunton man was shot by a crossbow and killed Sunday morning in Fishersville, according to Augusta County Sheriff Donald Smith.
The incident happened around 10 a.m. Sunday at 25 Jericho Rd. in Fishersville, Smith said.
Upon arrival, deputies discovered the body of an unidentified male lying facedown in the driveway of that residence, a release said.
Buy Photo A group of homes on Jericho Road in Fishersville where a man was found outside killed by a crossbow on Sunday, May 29, 2016. (Photo: Randall K. Wolf/The News Leader)
The victim was identified as Zachary A. Porter, 26. Deputies investigated the scene and determined Porter had been the victim of a homicide by a crossbow, a release said.
Jeffrey A. Craun Jr. of Fishersville was arrested Sunday night for the alleged murder of Porter and is being held at Middle River Regional Jail, Smith said.
Jeffrey A. Craun Jr. (Photo: Submitted/Augusta County Sheriff's Office)
According to court records, Craun has had run-ins with the law with multiple hunting charges stemming back to 2007.
He was charged with hunting without a license in Augusta County back in 2007 and found guilty of a misdemeanor charge.
In 2008, he was charged with hunting without a National Forest permit and found guilty of a misdemeanor charge. Later in 2013, Craun was charged twice with hunting without a license in Augusta County, but the charges were dismissed.
Craun was also found guilty of a misdemeanor for marijuana possession in Waynesboro in 2014.
The Augusta County Sheriff's Office said the homicide investigation is ongoing.
Anyone with information about this Homicide is requested to contact Inv. Patrick B. Fuchs at 540-245-5333 ext. 380 or Central Shenandoah Crime Stoppers at 1-800-322-2017.
Follow Laura Peters @peterslaura and @peterpants. You can reach her at lpeters@newsleader.com or 213-9125.
Read or Share this story: http://www.newsleader.com/story/news/local/2016/05/30/man-dead-fishersville-deemed-homicide/85155086/The Reese’s peanut butter cup eggs really are the best. I’m not entirely sure why, either. I assume it has something to do with the changed peanut butter to chocolate ratio, but now that they make trees for Christmas and hearts for Valentine’s Day that hypothesis doesn’t seem to hold. They simply don’t taste as good. Maybe it’s psychological, but then that would mean I’m crazy for eggs…yeah, probably has something to do with the ratio.
↓ Transcript HOBO: What are your students working so intensely on?
SCIENCE: Figuring out why Reese's eggs taste better than any other peanut butter cup product.
HOBO: Is that really science?
SCIENCE: It's not like all my classes are working on it.
SCIENCE: My morning class is trying to figure out what exactly are Peeps?CNN anchor Anderson Cooper tried his damndest to railroad Trump the other night during the debates over the recent 2005 tape where Trump made inappropriate comments towards women. Cooper has been rather vocal in his disgust, blasting Trump for objectifying women. Yet in an ironic twist, every single person that has come out to smear Trump has some video audio, or photographic skeleton hidden in their not so-private-closet. And unfortunately for Cooper, he has quite a little scandal of his own, and in the video below you’ll see his startling hypocrisy unfold.
Another huge hypocrite who needs to be brought front and center is the “squeaky clean” little Megyn Kelly, who appeared on the Howard Stern show to talk about penis sizes. Yep that sure doesn’t objectify anyone. Enjoy!
Liberals are the biggest hypocrites on the face of the planet. Seriously..what the hell!Image caption In May Portuguese and Spanish youths rallied in Lisbon against unemployment
Thousands of young unemployed professionals are escaping Portugal's crippling economic crisis by finding jobs in former colonies, such as Brazil and Angola. The reversal of traditional migration patterns is fuelling talk of a "lost generation".
Natalia Santos has had enough. She occasionally laughs as she tells me her story but there is hardness in her olive-green eyes.
Nobody could accuse the 29-year-old teacher from Porto of lacking initiative. She has done more than most to find full-time work in Portugal.
This is the biggest emigration wave since the 1960s Filipa Pinho, Emigration Observatory
Over the past six years she has applied to 362 schools, yet despite glowing references, she has never landed a job that lasted more than nine months.
Natalia has been forced to accept a string of short-term contracts on the minimum wage of around 500 euro per month.
In the fallow periods in-between, she helps her unemployed parents to grow fruit and vegetables.
Brain drain
Young and jobless in numbers 75 million
or 12.6% of young people are
unemployed worldwide Three times more likely to be jobless 7.5 million are not in education or training
Youth unemployment is highest in North Africa - 27.9% and lowest in East Asia - 9% Source: ILO 2011
Natalia also went to Poland for a year, on the Erasmus European volunteering scheme. She wanted to work - even if it was unpaid apart from expenses.
She hoped that the experience would help her back in Portugal, but it didn't. So she applied for a position in Ireland but then the economy there crashed.
Undeterred, Natalia tried another tack and went back to university to train as a special needs teacher.
Image caption After trying tirelessly to get a job in Portugal, Natalia is preparing to leave
But recent cuts in the education budget mean that most schools are now restricted to just one special needs teacher instead of four or five.
So no luck there either.
"I feel very frustrated sometimes and very disappointed," she says.
"But I won't give up. I'll go abroad because I am not going to wait for Portugal to give me something."
Natalia is about to join the growing brain drain.
One in 10 graduates now leaves the country, leading many to talking about Portugal's "lost generation".
"This is the biggest emigration wave since the 1960s," says Filipa Pinho of the government's newly established Emigration Observatory.
Dizzying growth
Portugal has traditionally exported some of its manpower - it has a diaspora around the world of three million. But in the past, it was blue-collar workers and villagers who left for a better life. Now it's the skilled and well-educated.
And if 50 years ago young Portuguese left to seek their fortune in richer parts of Europe, today they are packing their bags for booming Brazil, Angola and Mozambique.
It is a historic role reversal, because for decades Portugal lured immigrants from its former colonies in Latin America and Africa.
The Lost Generation Youth unemployment in Portugal is 26.8%, with more than 95,000 people jobless between the ages of 16 and 25
About 6.5% of the country's population of 10 million left the country between 1998 and 2008, according to economist Alvaro Santos Pereira
About a quarter of the working population are freelance, even if they work full time
A protest picnic in March which brought 400,000 people on to the streets of Lisbon and Porto, was one of the biggest demonstrations in the country since the 1974 revolution
Ms Pinho admits that her agency's statistics lag behind trends, but according to the Observatory, the number of Portuguese registered at consulates in Brazil jumped by some 60,000 between 2009 and 2010.
As for Angola, in 2006, only 156 Angolan visas were issued to southbound Portuguese, but in 2010, the figure was 23,787.
Today, there are around 3,000 Portuguese companies in Angola. Some of these belong to Antonio Bagal, a 32-year-old entrepreneur from Lisbon.
Flushed with success, he's now got his eye on a much bigger emerging market - Brazil.
Back in Portugal for a family wedding, he explains that when he started working in the Angolan capital Luanda a few years ago, most of the expats were in their 40s and 50s.
Now, though, more young people are arriving.
Image caption Angola's capital Luanda is a lure for entrepreneurs
"Most of them have good degrees, masters, even PhDs," he says, "and the new thing is that many of them don't want to come back. Right now Angola is developing really fast, it needs skilled people to build the infrastructure."
A civil engineer earning 900 euros ($1,300, or £800) a month in Portugal could earn four times as much in Angola, he says.
But Brazil is also eager for Portuguese engineers and architects, he says, because there is a construction boom ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the Olympics in 2016.
Find out more Each day this week, Lucy Ash has been reporting on Europe's disaffected youth at a time of economic turmoil. Generation E continues on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 1 September at 1545 BST Listen via the BBC iPlayer
When David Bernado, a Portuguese businessman based in Sao Paulo set up a Facebook page entitled Jobs for Foreigners in Brazil, it attracted 20,000 people in less than a fortnight. Most were young Portuguese aged 24 to 35, and more than half were women.
The numbers of young Portuguese leaving for traditional migrant destinations have also risen.
In the past two years there has been a 6.3% increase in Portuguese moving to the US, a 16% increase in those moving to Canada and a 4.8% increase in those heading to Australia.
But Antonio says that in the country's former colonies, the economies are growing at dizzying rates and the added advantage is that you don't have to speak English.
While I'm in Lisbon, I get an email from Miguel Paula, a 29-year-old who has just been laid off from his administrative job in the Portuguese parliament.
Speaking Portuguese Seven former colonies have Portuguese as their official language: Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, East Timor
It is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, with roughly 240 million speakers
His 25-year-old wife used to work for an advertising company specialising in pharmaceutical products, but she has just been replaced by an unpaid intern.
They are now planning to move to jobs in Maputo, Mozambique. Miguel says that his best friend has just relocated to Macao - the Las Vegas of the Lusophone world.
Natalia has no doubt about who is blame for the crisis, which has destroyed her career aspirations.
"Banks. They made mistakes and now they say we have to pay. But I disagree, I don't want to pay," she says.
"I prefer to leave everything behind - family, friends, my culture - everything than to pay for a crisis I didn't cause."
This episode of Generation E was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 29 August at 1545 BST. It is part of a week-long series which continues on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 30 August at 1545 BST. Listen again via the BBC iPlayer.Steemit announced Tuesday the release of a public beta version of its social media content aggregator developed to reward content creators and curators with cryptocurrency, said a press release sent to CoinReport.
Harnessing the power of blockchain technology, the New York-based company uses a new cryptocurrency called Steem to reward users who post content such as images, articles and commentary, as well as users who source and upvote popular content. The earlier a user upvotes content that becomes popular, the more the user is rewarded.
Steemit pays users half with “Steem Power,” a vesting currency that fuels voting power, and half with Steem Dollars, which can be exchanged for U.S. Dollars. Steem is now trading on Bittrex and OpenLedger.
The company’s peer-to-peer social economy is accessible to anyone in the world, according to the release. The technology Steemit uses is open source and available to be seen and expanded upon by others.
The company is led by CEO Ned Scott, who has a background in private equity, and CTO Dan Larimer, creator of BitShares.
Scott said in the press release he developed the system in order to foster a community, incentivize them to contribute and improve the quality of original content.
“Our vision is to not only build an empowered community but give content creators an avenue to make money online without needing to advertise,” said Scott. He said blockchain’s versatility has allowed him and Larimer “to create an incentivized social media platform to exchange conversation, creativity, empowerment, and |
,680, waited no more than four weeks and five days.
According to AHS, Edmonton posts slightly shorter waits while treating more patients in part because of streamlined scheduling and appointment processes for radiation patients.
Although operating hours are the same at both cancer hospitals, appointment times in Edmonton are shorter, which means the Cross Cancer Institute can treat more patients, AHS said.
The health authority has recently begun implementing the same time-saving process at Tom Baker. Belanger said the change will not affect patient care, but will eliminate waste. It may involve centralizing care in a single clinic, for instance, where physicians no longer have to walk to one place to find equipment, another to get a patient’s chart and another to see the patient, Belanger said.
“To say that there is a single bottleneck (in Calgary) … I think we can’t make that assumption,” Belanger said. “I know because we study this all the time. There’s always multiple factors that affect wait times.”
rsouthwick@calgaryherald.comGETTY Facebook wanted to test the loyalty of its user to breaking point
Facebook is the most popular social network in the world, with more than 1.50 billion monthly active users. The US social network, which was launched by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, is now valued at a staggering £197 billion. But details of an experiment to test social media users' loyalty to Facebook has now emerged online. The Californian social network is believed to be preparing for the eventuality that Google one day removes Facebook's apps from its Play Store marketplace for competitive reasons. As a result, Facebook tried to test the loyalty and patience of its Android users to the limit.
The US firm secretly rolled-out a slew of artificial errors within the Android app that would automatically crash the mobile app for hours at a time, a source has claimed. The experiment was designed to test at what point a Facebook user would give-up and ditch the Facebook app from their device all-together. Speaking anonymously to The Information, a source familiar with the one-time test, which is believed to have taken place a few years ago, said Facebook was never able to reach this threshold. "People never stopped coming back," the source said.
GETTY Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg founded the site in 2004, which is now valued at £197 billion
GETTY Android users were logged out of the app to test whether or not they would delete the app
Facebook wanted to see whether users would abandon the social network or simply switch to the far-inferior mobile website while their Android app was artificially broken. Former Facebook data scientist JJ Maxwell defended the move, saying tests like these are "hugely valuable" to the company and "their prerogative," The Verge reports. Admittedly, Facebook is not alone – many technology firms quietly test new features on users. Google famously cycled between 41 different shades of blue on its homepage, to see which promoted the best response from its users. But tweaking a shade of blue is very different to testing the loyalty of your users by deliberately crashing their access to the service. Especially when you state your company mission is to "connect the world" and you have a feature – dubbed Safety Check – to allow users to log-in and signal to one another that they are safe in a time of disaster. It's criticial to ensure people can stay connected.
GETTY Facebook promises to 'connect the world'
The latest revelation follows the controversial 2014 experiment which manipulated users' emotions using the Facebook News Feed. Devised by the social network's on-staff data scientist, Facebook scientifically tweaked the News Feed of hundreds of thousands of users. Some were sent an onslaught of upsetting or negative posts, while others were given a barrage of positive posts to another group. A number of critics highlighted the potential dangers of this type of manipulation, following the publication of two separate studies from the University of Houston which linked Facebook to depression. Entitled "Seeing Everyone Else's Highlight Reels: How Facebook Usage is Linked to Depressive Symptoms," the study provided evidence that Facebook users felt depressed when comparing themselves to others.
But Facebook data scientist and co-author of the study Adam Kramer said: "The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. "We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. "At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook."Repeat drink drivers in Western Australia will be forced to install "alcohol interlock devices" from the end of October in a new campaign to crackdown on serious offenders.
The device, which requires a breath test for cars to start, will also be paid for by offenders at a cost of $1600.
Alcohol interlocks will be installed in the cars of drink drivers from October.
Deputy Premier and Road Safety Minister Liza Harvey said on Sunday the devices would be fitted to vehicles once drivers had served drink driving suspensions and would remain in place for at least six months.
As part of the new legislation Ms Harvey launched a public education campaign on the devices in the lead up to the law coming in to force on October 24.With Google Assistant coming to the iPhone, the company hopes to kill off Siri and wants to ‘see’ inside your home as it reiterates its AI-first approach
There were whoops and cheers from developers as Google announced the incremental ways it is strengthening its grip on many aspects of people’s lives at its annual developer conference, Google I/O.
There were no jaw-dropping major product launches nor executives proclaiming their utopian vision of the future (ahem, Mark Zuckerberg). Instead there was a showcase of features, powered by artificial intelligence, designed to make people more connected – and more reliant on Google.
“We are focused on our core mission of organising the world’s information for everyone and approach this by applying deep computer science and technical insights to solve problems at scale,” said CEO Sundar Pichai.
By combining the personal data harvested from its users with industry-leading (and human Go player beating) artificial intelligence, Google is squeezing itself into spaces in our everyday interactions it hasn’t been before, filling in the gaps and oozing into new territory like a sticky glue that is becoming harder and harder to escape.
Here’s what the key I/O announcements tell us about Google’s future.
1. AI is Google’s unique selling point
Google reiterated that the company has shifted from a mobile-first to an AI-first approach. This means using AI at the core of all of its new products, whether that’s to improve image recognition in Google Assistant or for beating human players at Go.
2. Google wants to ‘see’ as well as ‘hear’ your surroundings
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lens is Google’s answer to Facebook’s augmented reality Camera Effects platform. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Lens is Google’s answer to Facebook’s augmented reality Camera Effects platform. It comprises a set of vision-based computing capabilities, combined into Google Assistant and the Photos app, that works to “understand” what you’re looking at. So you can point the camera at a flower and it will identify the species or automatically connect to a wifi network by showing the camera the log-in details printed on the sticker on the router. You can also hold your camera up to a restaurant in the street and see reviews.
3. Google Assistant is getting smarter
Google’s equivalent of Siri, Google Assistant, is embedded in Android devices including smartphones, watches and Google Home. Google’s Scott Huffman noted that Assistant would become even more conversational over the coming months, allowing you accomplish tasks with a quick chat.
In addition to having voice recognition, Google Assistant, drawing on Lens, can now take in, understand and have conversations about what you see. For example, if you are in Japan but don’t read Japanese, you can hold the Assistant up to a sign advertising some street food and it will “read” and translate the text. You can then ask “what does it look like?” and Google will know that the “it” refers to the name of the food written on the sign and it will pull up pictures of the dish.
“It comes so naturally to humans, and now Google is getting really good at conversations too,” said Huffman.
4. Google Home is getting creepier (and more useful)
The voice-activated smart speaker Google Home will offer “proactive assistance” rather than waiting for you to say “OK, Google” to wake it up. For example, it might notify you if you have to leave your house earlier than expected because traffic is particularly heavy. Perhaps the company will start proactively advertising to customers in the future?
Less creepy is the option to make hands-free calls from the Google Home speaker. You simply ask it to dial any landline or mobile number in the US or Canada and it will do so for free. The device can also now recognize up to six different voices in a household and adapt to personal preferences accordingly.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hands-free calls are coming to the Google Home speaker. Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters
5. Google wants to replace Siri on iPhones
A key theme throughout the keynote was creating a seamless experience across devices, even if that device isn’t in Google’s Android ecosystem. This means that Google Assistant is now available on the iPhone.
Assistant is widely considered much smarter than Siri, thanks to the fact that Google harvests a lot more personal data than privacy-conscious Apple. This means that frustrated Siri users wanting to translate a sentence into another language, play a movie on their Chromecast-enabled TV or order takeout using voice commands will now be able to do so.
6. It’s trying to keep YouTube creators happy
Ever since Google added stricter controls for advertisers on YouTube after it was discovered ads were being placed alongside hate speech or terrorist videos, some vloggers have complained about making less money.
YouTube relies on these internet celebrities to post regular videos and live streams as they attract huge audiences to the platform. That might explain why the company has launched the “super chat”, announced in January. Audience members can pay to have their comment featured prominently during a live stream and in turn donate money to the YouTuber or their chosen cause. The feature was enabled during a popular live stream of a New York-based giraffe giving birth in February, allowing the zoo to make “tens of thousands” of dollars.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki speaks on stage during the annual Google I/O developers conference. Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters
7. It wants to take a slice of recruitment advertising
Google for Jobs is a new search function that, by disintermediating the many job listings middlemen, makes it easier for people to find employment (and harder for those listing sites to make money).
“We want to better connect employers and job seekers through Google for Jobs,” said Pichai.
The company has worked with partners including LinkedIn, Monster, and Career Builder to aggregate search in one place – similar to what it’s done with its airline-search tool, Google Flights. The company uses machine learning to understand and group together roles for which employers and employees use different words, for example store clerk and retail manager.
Pichai positioned the launch as an effort to boost American employment, but it’s sure to help get Google – already taking, along with Facebook, the lion’s share of online advertising revenue – a bigger slice of the pie.
8. It needs to attract the ‘next billion’ or two
During the I/O keynote, Pichai stated that seven of Google’s products had more than a billion monthly users: Google search, Android, Chrome, Maps, YouTube, Google Play and Gmail. However, if it’s to continue to grow, it needs to attract the so-called “next billion” users, typically users in lower-income countries just starting to come online through mobile devices. That’s why Google has developed Android Go, a pared-down version of the mobile operating system for entry-level devices that uses less data and loads apps more quickly, even when the signal is poor.
Android Go will be embedded in the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, Android O, which is more battery efficient and features better protections against viruses and malware in downloaded apps – a notorious problem for Android devices compared with iPhones.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pichai stated that seven of Google’s products had more than a billion monthly users. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
9. It’s realistic about VR and AR
There’s a bucketload of hype around virtual reality and augmented reality, but Google’s approach felt more measured, focusing on the immediate, practical applications (perhaps a symptom of being burned by the now defunct Google Glass prototype, launched with great fanfare and an army of tech evangelists).
The company already has an entry level VR headset that uses a smartphone as the screen, but it teased a couple of more advanced standalone DayDream headsets, made in collaboration with HTC and Lenovo. The details were scarce but Google emphasised that unlike with Oculus or HTC Vive headsets, DayDream headset users wouldn’t need expensive computers to power them or rigs of external cameras to detect the person’s position.
With augmented reality, Google described a “visual positioning system” similar to GPS but with accuracy to the level of centimetres. It works by using the camera to identify objects visually within a space, for example a large store. This means you’d be able to hold up your camera (or wear a pair of smart glasses) and be guided to a specific product on a shelf. This extends Google’s mission to organize the world’s information in the physical domain.
“Imagine what it could mean to people with impaired vision,” said Clay Bavor, vice-president of virtual reality, who suggested that Google-powered camera phones (or other wearable devices) could act as a blind person’s “eyes”.Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Although construction of new homes stalled at the Villebois development in Wilsonville during the recession, it is now almost complete. (Josh Kulla/Pamplin Media Group)
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Although construction of new homes stalled at the Villebois development in Wilsonville during the recession, it is now almost complete. (Josh Kulla/Pamplin Media Group)
Jim Redden, The Portland Tribune - PORTLAND, Ore. (PORTLAND TRIBUNE) --- For years urban planners have been saying that Americans are moving to cities — especially since living far away from jobs, shopping and entertainment proved to be a bad idea during the Great Recession.
So, it may be hard to believe that from 2015 to 2016, suburbs grew faster than cities in this country — including those in the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro metropolitan area. At least, that's what happened according to a May analysis of U.S. Census data by the Brookings Institution.
"Within the nation's major metropolitan areas, the suburban population is growing faster than their cities; and nearly two-thirds of the nation's largest cities showed a drop-off in growth during the last year," wrote William Frey, a senior fellow with the institute's Metropolitan Policy Program.
According to the analysis, in the Portland metro area, suburbs grew 1.8 percent compared to 1.4 percent for cities. That may not sound like much, but it's bigger than the national difference, which was.89 percent for suburbs and.82 percent for cities.
But both are a reversal of a national trend that's been going on for the past decade, when cities began growing faster than suburbs for the first time since the end of World War II.
"These patterns do not necessarily imply the end of city attractiveness, but they do signal a shift away from the city growth dominance that was heralded three or four years ago," Frey wrote in a May 30 online article titled, "City growth dips below suburban growth, Census shows."
Local economist Joe Cortright, a nationally recognized expert on cities, isn't convinced. He believes the census data does not accurately separate cities from suburbs in metropolitan areas. But Cortright also says the growth in some cities has slowed recently because land for additional housing is limited — and that includes Portland.
"I think the'slack' issue is a key one for Portland: We're not building housing fast enough to keep up with demand. For the first few years after the recession, we could grow mostly by reducing vacancy (filling empty housing), but now with vacancy rates very low, population growth depends on building more, and within the city we're bumping up against that limit," Cortright emailed the Tribune in response to questions about Frey's analysis.
Another nationally recognized expert on cities is more convinced by the analysis. University of Toronto professor Richard Florida cites the increasing cost of housing as a major reason for the reversal in a Sept. 1 opinion piece in the New York Times — and singles out Portland for mention.
"The most desirable cities have become incredibly expensive places to live. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the average home costs more than 10 times the average income; in New York, Washington, Seattle, Denver, Miami and Portland, Ore., it's more than five times," Florida wrote in a piece headlined, "The Urban Revival is Over." He previously predicted the growth of cities in his 2002 book, "The Rise of the Creative Class."
In August, the national rental tracking firm Abodo also documented the high cost of living in Portland in a report on national rental costs.
"We found that in Portland, more than 45.4 percent of Millennials are spending at least 30 percent of their income on rent. And 41.0 percent of Gen Xers and 50.4 percent of Baby Boomers are doing the same," wrote Senior Communication Manager Sam Radbil.
Given all the visible apartment construction in Portland, it's easy to wonder where else people are finding homes in the region. But real estate professionals say that within the past few years, new home construction outside the city has increased, with new or expanded subdivisions being completed in many areas, including Clark County, Happy Valley in East Multnomah County, and North Bethany in North Washington County.
"From 2008 to 2011, we were in the mortgage crisis and nothing was being built. Some developers went out of business. But others held onto the land they have already acquired and waited for the market to turn around, which it began to do around 2012. It takes a few years to get permits and start development, so it makes sense that more homes started to get built in 2014, 2014 and 2015," says Brigitte Pascutoi, principal broker at the John L. Scott office in the Sunset Corridor.
But, as Cortright notes, some of the most popular new developments blur the differences between cities and suburbs. For example, several new apartment buildings have been completed in the dense Orenco Station planned community along the MAX light rail line in Hillsboro in recent years. And some of the new subdivisions include multifamily housing buildings and retail centers, like the ones in Villebois at the end of the WES line in Wilsonville.
Frey admits that one year's worth of data is not nearly enough to prove a new trend has started. But he says new census data released earlier this year suggests that the Millennials who once favored cities are now moving to the suburbs as they grow older, get married and start families.
"These new numbers suggest that suburbs are, again, becoming attractive to this group and to others. But it is only a one-year data point. Thus, the jury is still out as to whether or not the 2010s will be the 'decade of the city,'" Frey wrote."We are pleased to add Conor Casey to our squad," said Sporting Director and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter. "He is an MLS Cup champion and in addition to his invaluable amount of experience in this League and in Germany, Conor brings proven goal-scoring ability and a high level of soccer intelligence. We would like to thank Conor for choosing Crew SC and we look forward to integrating him into our system immediately as we continue preseason training."
Columbus Crew SC today announced that it has signed free agent forward Conor Casey. In addition to tenures in the Bundesliga as well as with the United States Men's National Team, Casey brings nine years of Major League Soccer experience to Crew SC. With 71 career tallies in MLS, Casey ranks sixth among all active League players in career regular-season goal-scoring. With Casey and Kei Kamara (74), Crew SC becomes the only MLS side to have two players on its current roster with 70 or more all-time regular-season goals. Per club and MLS policy, additional details of the deal were not disclosed. Casey helped the Colorado Rapids win the MLS Cup during his fourth year with the club in 2010. He scored the game-tying goal in the 57th minute of the 2010 MLS Cup against FC Dallas and was named MLS Cup MVP following the match. In 2009, following a career-best 16 goal campaign, Casey was named to the MLS Best XI. He has been named as an MLS All-Star twice, including to the gameday roster for the 2009 MLS All-Star Game.
After two years at the University of Portland, Casey began his professional career in Germany by signing with Borussia Dortmund. In Germany, he played for Dortmund in addition to Hannover 96, Karlsruher SC and 1. FSV Mainz 05 through 2006, totaling 44 appearances in the first-division Bundesliga as well as 49 in the 2. Bundesliga.
READ: Five things to know about Conor Casey - http://bit.ly/1K7w5QL
In 2007, Casey returned to North America after joining Toronto FC. He was traded to the Rapids on April 19 of that year, where he went on to score 50 goals over 119 appearances with the club. Casey moved to the Philadelphia Union ahead of the 2013 campaign, where he notched his fourth double-digit MLS goal-scoring season that year after scoring 10 times.
Internationally, Casey has earned 19 caps for the United States, scoring two goals. He made his senior debut for the Stars & Stripes on March 31, 2004 against Poland. On October 10, 2009, he scored two goals at Honduras in a qualification match ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. At the Under-23 level, Casey played in the 2000 Summer Olympics for the United States before becoming a professional.
READ: Ashe, Wahl describe what Casey brings to Crew SC - http://bit.ly/1OVbOKS
The Black & Gold continue their preseason with their first camp in Lakewood Ranch, Florida through February 5. After that camp, Crew SC trains at SuperKick from February 8-12 before departing to participate in the Desert Diamond Cup from February 15-27. The Black & Gold begin their 21st season on Sunday, March 6 at Portland and return home for the Opening Match at MAPFRE Stadium on Saturday, March 12 against Philadelphia. Information on Crew SC Season Ticket Memberships in 2016 can be found at http://bit.ly/2016CrewSCSTM.Urged on by Lady Gaga, more than a million people signed a petition on Thursday calling on the electors, when they meet next month, to ignore the current rules, which bind them to voting for the winner of their state and cast their ballots instead for the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton.
“The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump,” Michael Moore wrote on Facebook post Wednesday. “The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College.”
Every four years, the bizarre, undemocratic institution at the heart of American democracy, the Electoral College, gets more vocal detractors. That is particularly the case in years like this one, when the mechanism awards the presidency to the runner-up in the national popular vote, Donald Trump.
While Clinton is ahead in the popular vote, and has a lead that is expected to grow, there is no reason to think any of the party loyalists appointed to those positions would even consider such a move. Still, it is remarkable that it would take just 38 electors from states that voted for Trump, or just the Texas delegation, to cast their votes the other way to make Clinton president.
The situation is mirrored to an extent by the fact that far more votes were cast on Tuesday for Democratic Senate candidates than Republicans — 45.3 million to 39.5 million at last count — yet the Democrats gained just two seats.
The widespread carping with the system is not new. As Five Thirty Eight reports, “there have been more proposed constitutional amendments to change the Electoral College than any other topic (700 proposals in Congress in the last 200 years!).” Gallup found in 2011 that 62 percent of Americans favor eliminating the institution.
To avoid the need for a Constitutional amendment, reformers have been working to get states to adopt the National Popular Vote bill, in which they promise to award their electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationally. So far, it has been enacted into law in 11 states, with a total of 165 electoral votes, and will take effect when adopted by states with 105 more, guaranteeing 270 electoral votes, a winning margin, to the popular vote winner.
In perhaps the supreme demonstration that Trump’s passionately stated views on politics are transactional, just four years ago, on the night that President Obama was declared the electoral-vote winner before all the ballots had been counted, the developer called for people take to the streets in “a revolution” to end the Electoral College.
Trump’s Twitter tirade that night was sparked by his mistaken belief that Mitt Romney had won the popular vote.
Minutes after the polls had closed on the West Coast that night, at 11 p.m Eastern Time, the broadcast networks called the election for Obama on the safe, and accurate, assumption that he would win overwhelmingly in California, Oregon and Washington. Clearly not understanding that these states would ensure that Obama would go on to win the popular vote, even though he was trailing in that count as the projection was made, Trump launched into a Twitter tirade.In recent press releases, the Department of Justice has been using the phrase "illegal alien" to define illegal immigrants.
“So-called ‘sanctuary’ policies make all of us less safe because they intentionally undermined our laws and protect illegal aliens who have committed crimes,” the DOJ announced last week.
As expected, the critics are out in full force.
Some are calling it "legally inaccurate."
“They’re using a legally inaccurate term that’s deployed to unfairly label and scapegoat people who are out of status due to a variety of systemic circumstances,” Xakota Espinoza from the Center for Racial Justice Innovation, told LawNewz.com.
Others, like Chicago Tribune contributor Ted Slowik, dedicated an entire op-ed explaining why the phrase is too "loaded."
Why does this matter? The phrase "illegal alien" plays into assumptions that immigrants living in this country without proper documentation are criminals. In fact, immigration status is often a civil matter, not a criminal one. I think this cuts to the heart of the debate over sanctuary cities and to what extent local law enforcement should cooperate with immigration authorities. Important legal nuances are reflected in words we use. A "detainee" is not a "prisoner," for instance.
In summary, illegal immigrants committed a crime entering this country by circumventing the proper channels - but they're not criminals.
For a different perspective, read Heritage's take on why the term "illegal alien" is wholly appropriate. As they note, even the Supreme Court has employed the phrase.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions probably could care less what the most "politically correct" term is for illegal immigration. He is just doing his job and cracking down on it. He has given sanctuary cities an ultimatum: Stop harboring those who are here illegally, or lose federal funding.Arrow's third season hasn't been without its problems, but most of them were resolved in this week's terrific episode, "Canaries." Team Arrow is working as a cohesive unit again, Laurel finally told her dad about Sara, Thea actually knows the truth about Oliver, and she responded to the revelation with love and gratitude. Yes, everything's fixed - except the worst folly of Season Three: its treatment of Felicity Smoak.
Arrow really lucked into this character. It's legend, now, that Emily Bett Rickards was intended to be a one-off role in the first season, but her performance was so fun, and her chemistry with Stephen Amell's Oliver so pleasing, that the writers kept her around. Remember Season One Felicity? Frizzy ponytail, funky manicures, frumpy office attire? And, of course, a scathing wit and awkward charm. Felicity was a new kind of character for the sidekick role: goofy, brilliant and quarrelsome. She never let Oliver push her around, and lord knows Oliver spends most of his show pushing people around.
But in spite, or because, of her occasionally truculent spirit, Felicity has always been a beacon of levity on a show that desperately needs it. She was always saying the wrong thing in just the right way, or pointing out the silliness in a situation that Oliver was almost certainly taking too seriously. Along with Diggle, she was the heart of Arrow, gently coaxing Oliver back toward his humanity with a few well-chosen words and an indomitable belief in his goodness, almost in spite of the man himself. She was indispensable to the team not only because she's one of the foremost hackers in the world, but because she's a bright light in a dour city.
And then Olicity happened.
Look, I get it. When two attractive people get along on television, the fan base starts clamoring for a coupling. And Felicity's open attraction to Oliver was a boon to the show. In an ideal world, her crush could have been left at that: Felicity has a hot boss who often trains shirtless in her office. She's allowed to ogle without falling in love. But fall in love she did, because that's what the fans wanted. And Oliver seemed to fall in love a little, too - but their prospective romance was made of nothing more than a few longing looks per season, buffered by mostly shop talk and some lovely demonstrations of friendship. It was a slow burn that could have sizzled for seasons, and it worked that way.
But then the writers must have realized that they'd backed themselves into a corner. Because of course Dinah Laurel Lance is Oliver's destiny, and much of her Season Two arc, a storyline that left Laurel a bit of a trainwreck, alienated viewers, turning them against the character. So what do you do when your audience is'shipping a couple that isn't canon? Here's what Arrow did: they bolted from longing looks to a failed romance in the space of one episode. Somewhere between the Season Two finale and the Season Three premiere, Felicity became Oliver's love interest.
But she should be so much more than a love interest! And, worse, because Oliver doesn't feel like he can be in a relationship with Felicity and secure her safety, she's now a woman scorned. And boy, is she acting like it. As Laurel and Thea grow ever more likable in Season Three - and I'm so glad they have; Katie Cassidy and Willa Holland are crushing it this season - the dynamic is conserved by turning Felicity into something of a stern den mother. She cries and/or yells in nearly every episode. She jumped from rejoicing that Oliver returned from the dead to telling him she didn't want to be his girlfriend in one minute, flat. She's mad, she's sad - she's not Felicity. Gone are the messy ponytail and dorky work clothes, and gone are the inadvertent double entendres and goofy grins, and we're left with a sleeker, sexier, more sullen Felicity who is missing the singular coolness-meets-nerdiness we fell in love with. It's a big part of the reason her visits to Central City have been so welcome this year - on The Flash, she's the Felicity we remember. On Arrow, she's someone else entirely.
And then there's Ray Palmer. I love Brandon Routh's portrayal of The Atom. He's funny and charming and kind, and I don't mind the idea of giving Felicity another love interest to distract her - and her fans - from Oliver. But Felicity's relationship with Palmer has never felt right. When she's rejected by one salmon ladder-trained billionaire CEO moonlighting as a superhero, she immediately turns to the other salmon ladder-trained billionaire CEO moonlighting as a superhero. And we don't see Felicity falling for Ray's kindness, humor or desire to help people - instead we see her mooning over his muscles and the fact that he bought her an expensive dress. It's frankly gross, and it's beneath the character who once introduced herself as "Felicity Smoak, MIT, Class of '09," who railed against the idea of disguising herself as Oliver's executive assistant because she worked her ass off to get her job at Queen Consolidated's technical department.
So here's how you fix it, Arrow writers: drop all of this messy romance stuff. Felicity's never better than when she's befriending another woman, be it Caitlin, Laurel, Sara or Thea, and we saw a too-brief glimpse of that in "Canaries" as she comforted Laurel after she was dosed with Vertigo. Let's give Felicity a storyline that doesn't have anything to do with being Oliver's girlfriend, or Ray's girlfriend, or Barry's girlfriend. Let Emily Bett Rickards - by all accounts and based on her social media presence, a hilarious and charming individual - shine through the character the way she did in previous seasons, instead of writing her into a surly angst that the actress can't quite pull off.
And if you need a blueprint for how to handle the fun, feisty, brilliant sidekick that your audience is hoping will end up with your main character when you have no intention of allowing it, here's one: Chloe Sullivan on Smallville. She went from pining over Clark to becoming a journalist at the Daily Planet and eventually Watchtower for the Justice League, and only then - after she'd had several seasons of her own adventures and made an indelible mark on the show that had nothing to do with her love life - did she get her romantic happily ever after...which just so happened to be with Oliver Queen. I'm aware that's a little confusing in the context of Arrow.
Or even better, if you need a blueprint, just look at the Felicity of Seasons One and Two. You already know how to write that character. So do it.The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, cited in news reports for halting nonunion repair crews from helping to restore power in superstorm Sandy's New Jersey-New York path, is one of nation's top union donors to Democrats, a group President Obama last year praised in a visit to an IBEW training Center.
The Center for Responsive Politics, a public political spending watchdog, said IBEW has the nation's fifth highest spending political action committee, doling out nearly $2.3 million, 97 percent of which went to Democrats. According to the group, IBEW during this election cycle has given $2,928,973 to Democratic House and Senate candidates, and just $51,600 to Republicans. They have also helped raise money for Obama.
Among the recipients were political figures and groups in New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania, key political battleground states.
News organizations today are reporting that nonunion crews from Alabama were approached by IBEW officials telling them to join before going into the disaster areas.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the IBEW is the top industrial union contributor, which earned it the center's "heavy hitter" designation.
While the president has wooed IBEW, they snubbed him this year when it came time to help fund the Democratic National Committee because the party chose non-union North Carolina to host the event.The many industries that support outdoor recreation have a significant impact on Alaska's economy, but tracking that impact has been a mostly scattered endeavor. Now, new federal legislation will ferret out exactly how much the outdoor industry contributes to the national economy.
The Outdoor Recreation Jobs and Economic Impact Act of 2016 directs several agencies to conduct "an assessment and analysis of the outdoor recreation economy of the United States and the effects attributable to it on the overall U.S. economy." President Barack Obama signed the bill into law in December.
Some in Alaska say it will be useful in the future as a way to show the role the outdoor industry plays here.
"I'm excited about it because it's always fun to be able to understand the economy more, and we know it's important in Alaska, relatively speaking, compared to other places," said Neal Fried, a state economist.
Tom Howells is the chief of the industry analysis division at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, which will pull together the data to measure this new category. He said it will be a year or two until the first national figures are available, with the potential for creating state-by-state figures after that.
It will take a lot of work for the agency to understand how different facets of industries like tourism and retail, for example, fit into the outdoor recreation economy.
"Certainly it's the case that (right now) we are capturing everything associated with outdoor recreation," Howells said. "It's captured (in economic data) but it's not highlighted, not easy to see. There's a lot of folks who want to see that separated out and be able to compare that to the total."
Some reports have already examined the economic impact of outdoor activities in Alaska. A report last year from consulting firm ECONorthwest — commissioned by Pew Charitable Trusts — found that recreational activities such as hiking, fishing, camping and hunting had a $47 million spending impact in Alaska in 2014. A U.S. Interior Department report on visitor spending at Denali National Park and Preserve found that "park visitors in 2008 spent $104 million in the Denali region."
The U.S. National Park Service found that in 2015, "park visitors spent an estimated $1.2 billion in local gateway regions while visiting (National Park Service) lands in Alaska," according to a report on the agency's website. That included $247 million visitors spent on recreation industries. All told, that factored out to an economic output of $1.7 billion.
But the new national measurement will be much more comprehensive. It might be challenging to quantify exactly which parts of tourism, the cruise industry, retail, hospitality and other industries will count as part of the outdoor recreation economy, Fried said.
"There's a lot of moving parts," he said. "Hotel rooms? What about snowmachines? How about dog sleds? It'll be interesting to see what they (include). Some things are much easier to measure than others. Like dog sledding — how are they going to capture that?"
Measuring the economic impact of the outdoor industry might help some businesses and government agencies from a marketing or lobbying perspective.
"I think it has a large impact on Alaska because you can look at what impact that has on the state and it can help promote certain projects," said Britteny |
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Transcript of Elder D. Todd Christofferson Interview:
Michael Otterson, Managing Director, Church Public Affairs: How would you describe your role as a Church leader?
Elder D. Todd Christofferson, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: Well, the responsibilities, of course, include administrative matters, but first and foremost, it’s a ministry. And we, my colleagues and I, travel across the world in many places, in many circumstances doing what the Lord commanded Peter to do and feed His sheep. And these questions that have arisen, we’re sympathetic to. They’re difficult, they’re sensitive, they tug at the heartstrings and they’re very real. And this is about family; this is about love and especially the love of the Savior and how He wants people to be helped and fed and lifted, and that’s the whole motivation that underlies our effort.
Michael Otterson: On November the 5, the Church made some changes to its handbook in relation to same-sex marriage and its policy towards the children of same-sex marriage partners. Could you explain why that was necessary?
Elder Christofferson: We regard same-sex marriage as a particularly grievous or significant, serious kind of sin that requires Church discipline. It means the discipline is mandatory — doesn’t dictate outcomes but it dictates that discipline is needed in those cases. It’s a statement to remove any question or doubt that may exist. We recognize that same-sex marriages are now legal in the United States and some other countries and that people have the right, if they choose, to enter into those, and we understand that. But that is not a right that exists in the Church. That’s the clarification.
Michael Otterson: So in the last couple of years there’s been a tone from the Church of understanding and acceptance of those people who experience same-sex attraction, and this policy seemed to be rather abrupt. What actually prompted this handbook change?
Elder Christofferson: To some degree it came from questions that have surfaced in different parts of the world and the United States. With the Supreme Court’s decision in the United States, there was a need for a distinction to be made between what may be legal and what may be the law of the Church and the law of the Lord and how we respond to that. So it’s a matter of being clear; it’s a matter of understanding right and wrong; it’s a matter of a firm policy that doesn’t allow for question or doubt. We think it’s possible and mandatory, incumbent upon us as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, to yield no ground in the matter of love and sympathy and help and brotherhood and serving in doing all we can for anybody; at the same time maintaining the standards He maintained. That was the Savior’s pattern. He always was firm in what was right and wrong. He never excused or winked at sin. He never redefined it. He never changed His mind. It was what it was and is what it is and that’s where we are, but His compassion, of course, was unexcelled and His desire and willingness and proactive efforts to minister, to heal, to bless, to lift and to bring people toward the path that leads to happiness never ceased. That’s where we are. We’re not going to stop that. We’re not going to yield on our efforts to help people find what brings happiness, but we know sin does not. And so we’re going to stand firm there because we don’t want to mislead people. There’s no kindness in misdirecting people and leading them into any misunderstanding about what is true, what is right, what is wrong, what leads to Christ and what leads away from Christ.
Michael Otterson: Why are the children of these same-sex partners an issue here?
Elder Christofferson: Well, in answering or responding to your question, let me say I speak not only as an apostle in the Church, but as a husband, as a father and as a grandfather. And like others in those more enduring callings, I have a sense of compassion and sympathy and tender feelings that they do. So this policy originates out of that compassion. It originates from a desire to protect children in their innocence and in their minority years. When, for example, there is the formal blessing and naming of a child in the Church, which happens when a child has parents who are members of the Church, it triggers a lot of things. First, a membership record for them. It triggers the assignment of visiting and home teachers. It triggers an expectation that they will be in Primary and the other Church organizations. And that is likely not going to be an appropriate thing in the home setting, in the family setting where they're living as children where their parents are a same-sex couple. We don't want there to be the conflicts that that would engender. We don't want the child to have to deal with issues that might arise where the parents feel one way and the expectations of the Church are very different. And so with the other ordinances on through baptism and so on, there's time for that if, when a child reaches majority, he or she feels like that's what they want and they can make an informed and conscious decision about that. Nothing is lost to them in the end if that's the direction they want to go. In the meantime, they're not placed in a position where there will be difficulties, challenges, conflicts that can injure their development in very tender years.
The situation with polygamist families, for example, and same-sex marriage couples and families really has a parallel. For generations we've had these same kinds of policies that relate to children in polygamist families that we wouldn't go forward with these ordinances while they're in that circumstance and before they reach their majority. That's the same sort of situation we're dealing with here, so it's something we have had a history with. It's a practice that really is analogous that's been the case over many generations.
Michael Otterson: There is also provisional requirement for a person who has reached the age of maturity who maybe wants to serve a mission in the Church, but who has come from a same-sex marriage relationship, family. There is a requirement for them to disavow the idea of same-sex marriage. Not disavow their parents, but same-sex marriage. What was the thinking behind that?
Elder Christofferson: Well again, this is a parallel with polygamy. Anyone coming out of a polygamous setting who wants to serve a mission, it has to be clear that they understand that is wrong and is sin and cannot be followed. They disavow the practice of plural marriage. And that would be the same case here. They would disavow, or assent I guess would be a better way to say it, to the doctrines and practices of the Church with regards to same-sex marriage. So they would be saying, as you said, not disavowing their parents, but disavowing the practice.
Michael Otterson: Elder Christofferson, a lot of attention has been given over the last year or so to the Church's very prominent outreach and message on being fair to everyone — the idea of "fairness for all," and that phrase has been used a lot. How does the fairness for all approach, particularly in relation to same-gender attraction, fit in this particular conversation?
Elder Christofferson: Very consistently. This is really two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, we have worked with others and will continue to do so to protect rights and employment and housing and that sort of thing for all. And on the other hand, there needs to be respect and acknowledgment of the rights of the religious community to set its standards and to live according to them and to teach and abide by its own doctrines, such as regards marriage in this case. The Church of course doesn't attempt to practice mind control, and people have varying opinions. It's only a problem if there is advocacy and people lobby and advocate against the standard and the very clear and expressed position of the Church as it has been stated repeatedly, and again now.
Michael Otterson: There are other ordinances like blessing of the sick when a baby is sick. Does this policy also exclude that kind of blessing, or is it only the formal membership?
Elder Christofferson: When we are talking about blessings, priesthood blessings, given to those who are ill or want a blessing of comfort or guidance, that's open to all. We would expect that to be done throughout their lifetime, from infancy on as long as that's the desire of the parents and of the child. That's something we are anxious to provide.
Michael Otterson: So if there was a grandfather, for example, who, with the permission of the parents wanted to bless a grandchild, that would be permissible, in terms of a healing blessing or blessing for sickness?
Elder Christofferson: Certainly. Certainly. Where there is any kind of need for blessing, for counsel, for help of whatever kind, that can be offered; we want to do that.If you are in Nipawin in the month of July and would like a tour of our growing area and fields, please call.
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Early Order & Volume Discounts Orders over $250.00 and post dated before April 1 get a 10% discount. Orders over $500.00 this year will get a 5% discount - applicable for all. By ordering before April 1st you may get in on both discounts. All prices are in Canadian Funds When the time comes to give a gift to someone for a birthday, wedding, anniversary, house warming or that special neighbor, you can't go wrong by giving them a gift certificate (available in any denomination and appropriate for any occasion!) from " Boughen Nurseries Ltd ". SPECIAL NOTES: We also sell other plants and trees that may not be listed in our catalogue, if you are looking for something that is not listed, please call.When Avengers: Infinity War explodes into theaters next year, it will see 10 yeas worth of Marvel heroes created on the big screen uniting for a battle against their toughest opponent yet: Thanos.
Over the weekend at Disney's D23 Expo, Marvel Studios revealed this battle to be even more of a challenge than anyone had imagined when they literally dropped the curtain to show off the Black Order. The Black Order, or Cull Obsidian, are Thanos' loyal steeds who help him raze planets in Jonathan Hickman's Infinity comic from 2013. However, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the four characters coming to the big screen will see a major change.
One of Thanos' main goals in the Infinity comic was to find his son Thane. Each member of the Black Order is sent to different locations in an effort to find him. However, in Avengers: Infinity War, these characters will be the children of Thanos. This major change was revealed by the host at Marvel Studios' booth who introduced each character individually before calling them the "children of Thanos." From there, executive producer Louis D'Esposito tweeted a photo of the characters as they appeared at the Marvel Studios D23 booth with those three words in his caption.
This likely changes their mission, as well. Instead of hunting for Thanos' son, the members of the Black Order will likely be hunting for Infinity Stones as the Mad Titan attempts to load up his Gauntlet. The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Black Order consists of Ebony Maw, Corvus Glave, Proxima Midnight, Supergiant, and the Black Dwarf. The group is also referred to as Cull Obsidian on the pages of Marvel Comics.
After the first footage from Avengers: Infinity War was released, the characters were unveiled at Disney's D23 Expo in the Anaheim Convention Center over the weekend.
Josh Brolin unveils Avengers: Infinity War's Black Order and Infinity Gauntlet! https://t.co/K5E5oZ4j8A pic.twitter.com/mQ8EVJ5Mmu — Comicbook.com (@ComicBook) July 15, 2017
The change to these characters gives extra meaning to Thanos' line in Guardians of the Galaxy, where he tells Nebula, "You alienated my favorite daughter, Gamora." This confirms the two cosmic siblings were not the only children of the Mad Titan, after all.
Ebony Maw's most dangerous weapon is his thinking ability. Working in Thanos' Black Order, Ebony Maw was sent to Earth to deal with Doctor Strange, one of the smartest Earth-based heroes, in the Infinity comic story. Corvus Glaive, a member of the Black Order, is married to Proxima Midnight. When Thanos decided he would raze Earth in search of his son, Corvus Glaive was sent to the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. Proxima Midnight is sent to Atlantis, where she is to retrieve an Infinity Stone from Namor. Black Dwarf was sent to Wakanda, where he met a resistance much greater than he anticipated.bigg boss 7 case registered against ajaz khan after bjp protest in lonavla
Mumbai: Mumbai police has registered a case against Bigg Boss 7 contestant Ajaz Khan in Samta Nagar police station for his anti-Modi remarks.
A group of BJP supporters today staged a protest outside Bigg Boss house in Lonavla. The workers tried to force their way inside and were engaged in a scuffle with policemen.Ajaz Khan had made objectionable remarks against BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and the BJP workers were demanding that he be arrested.Ajaz Khan had used an abusive remark about Modi while speaking to Gauhar, Kushal, Armaan and Tanisha, and his remark was deleted before telecast, but it made its way to YouTube.BJP MLA from Kandivali and Borivali Gopal Shetty has filed a police complaint against Ajaz Khan, and the case has been transferred to Lonavla police station.Earlier this week, Illinois’ Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and leaders from the Democratic-controlled legislature took a break from campaigning and gathered together at a ceremony in Chicago to smile for cameras and extol the spirit of compromise as the governor signed legislation aimed at reforming the state’s broken criminal justice system.
To an observer outside Illinois politics, the significance of this show of bipartisanship might not be readily apparent. Election year politics aside, cooperation between Rauner and the General Assembly has been almost nonexistent since the governor took office in 2015. The two sides have been locked in a bitter and protracted budget battle, with the government operating on stopgap and court-ordered funding, while each side accuses the other of holding the state hostage.
No one should expect that the recent bill signing represents a break in the impasse that has paralyzed government in Illinois. However, it does demonstrate that the growing consensus that Illinois’ criminal justice system is broken and in need of immediate reform has the power to transcend even the unprecedented partisan distrust and hostility that exists in Springfield today.
The current state of Illinois’ criminal justice system is the product of a familiar story that is playing out in cities all across the country. Although crime rates have been on a steady decline for decades, our prisons are severely overcrowded as a result of “tough on crime” sentencing laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s, and the destructive impact of over-incarceration has fallen disproportionately upon communities of color and the poor. There is also a profound shortage of rehabilitative services to address behavioral health disorders that can thrust people into crisis and lead to negative interactions with law enforcement.
Those released from prison face barriers to employment, education, and housing years after paying their debts to society. Not surprisingly, recidivism among those released from prison remains high. Meanwhile, relations between police and the community are at a tipping point, and our draconian drug sentencing laws have done nothing to stave off an epidemic of addiction and overdose.
As the governor himself acknowledged, the five bills enacted into law on Monday are the first tiny steps in a long process of reform. Gov. Rauner created the Illinois State Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform in early 2015, and he tasked it with recommending specific reforms which, if implemented, will enable the state to safely reduce its incarcerated population by 25 percent over 10 years.
In December, the commission released part one of its final report, which included recommendations to repeal some mandatory minimums and expand probation eligibility for nonviolent offenses in order to reduce the number of admissions to prison. However, the commission has deferred making recommendations to address the excessive length of prison stays — the most significant driver of over-incarceration — until later this year when part two of its final report is due.
Only one of the measures signed at Monday’s ceremony was the product of the commission’s initial round of recommendations: The governor approved a bill that will require judges to justify, on the record, sentencing a defendant to prison for a low-level felony, if the person has no prior probation sentence or conviction for a violent offense. Another of the new reforms prohibits, in most cases, the commitment of a juvenile to a state correctional facility for a low-level drug offense and reduces the length of mandatory probation terms for delinquent youth. Other bills signed as part of this package would ease employment restrictions on people with criminal records and expedite the process of expunging juvenile records.
Gov. Rauner and the bipartisan group of legislators who set their differences aside to achieve these important reforms in a challenging political environment undoubtedly deserve praise and recognition. But these modest achievements are only a small down payment on the kind of cooperation that will be needed to truly transform Illinois’ broken system. Our elected officials must show the political courage to reject the old “soft on crime” lines of attack if criminal justice reform is to continue advancing against the headwind of Illinois’ political dysfunction.Update 2: Shipping times in at least Hong Kong started at 1-2 weeks then quickly to changed to “currently unavailable”.
Update: The Australian Apple Online store and others are back up and listing all iPad Air models as shipping in 24 hours.
Lines have started to form at Apple stores around the world. Send pics of your Apple Store line to tips@9to5mac.com. Images below.
With Apple’s iPad Air launch about to kick off on the morning of Nov. 1 local time in over 40 countries, Apple has now started taking online stores down around the world to prepare for the launch. That includes Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Netherlands, Thailand, China, and others, which will be the first regions to get their hands on the device as we roll into tomorrow morning local time in those countries.
Yesterday we reported that iPad Airs had started arriving at Apple Stores and other retailers and that supplies were likely to be plentiful as large stores received as much as 500-1000 units of the device. We also heard that business discounts will be available for the new device on day one, which wasn’t the case in previous years.
Apple will begin selling the iPad Air at 8 a.m. local time Nov. 1 through its Apple retail stores in the following countries:
The best 4K & 5K displays for Mac
US, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China (Wi-Fi models only), Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao (Wi-Fi models only), Macedonia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK
Reviews for the iPad Air, which features an all-new slimmed down design, the 64-bit A7 processor that debuted in the iPhone 5s, and other upgraded internals, have been almost all positive.
Japan (via):
Zurich:
Berlin:
Berliner Apple Store Kurfürstendamm pic.twitter.com/HtljoMV4VN — Jonas (@techniklike) October 31, 2013
Sven schickt uns ein Bild vom Apple Store Berlin. Das iPad Air kann kommen! pic.twitter.com/dANLZHnd2U — Apfelpage.de (@apfelpage_de) October 31, 2013
US:
https://twitter.com/theballisorange/status/395906841307525120
why is there a line at the apple store — Megan (@mmccafferty2729) October 31, 2013
https://twitter.com/h_ailey/status/395938249656795137The Church took first place for its in-house produced safety video “Lightning Safety: Interview with a Cloud” during an awards ceremony Oct. 8 sponsored by Training magazine. The production was named the best training video during Training Television Awards’ second annual event.
Training magazine received nearly 140 video submissions and gave awards for the top three submissions in two categories. Training magazine reported the judges’ comments about the Church-produced video: “Great concept and content. Nice use of video, graphics, sound effects and music. And the actor playing the cloud is very good.”
When the “Interview with a Cloud” video was shown at the award event, the crowd became quite animated, clapping and laughing, said Quinn Orr, director/producer in LDS Publishing Services. “The final vote showed it was in the number one spot. After the awards were handed out, the master of ceremonies announced that they had requests from the group to see the film again, and it was shown one more time. It was the only video with such a request.”
READ MORE AT LDS CHURCH NEWSIt’s been just a few weeks since Apple released its newest iPhone models and it is quite plausible that you might have already read most of the reviews about the devices. Both the new iPhone models – the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus, are arguably the best iPhones ever made by Apple. Both the devices feature cutting edge hardware, an awesome camera, most features any smartphone users would love to have, and a very reliable, stable operating system. However, there seems to be one area where people, consumers and reviewers alike, seem to agree on. The smaller screened iPhone – the iPhone 7 – has really poor battery life. And if we are to believe a recent study carried out by a UK based consumer group called “Which?” the iPhone 7 has the worst battery performance when compared to its contemporaries.
iPhone 7 review: how good can a phone be if the battery doesn't last even a day?... https://t.co/akZ6xKZpSz — The Gadgets Lover (@thegadgetslover) October 2, 2016
In a blog post made by the company, the author writes that they compared the battery performance of the iPhone 7 with devices like the Samsung Galaxy S7, the HTC 10, and the LG G5 – all of which are fairly new devices that run on Google’s Android platform. All the phones were made to perform normal tasks that any average smartphone user would do – you know, making calls and browsing the web. Now, just to be fair to each handset involved in the test, all handsets were running the latest, public stable version of their respective operating systems.This meant that the iPhone 7 was running iOS 10 and all the Android were on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. (Android Nougat is around – but it is yet to be released for most Android phones out there).
Anyway, coming back to the performances of each of the devices, the first test that they did was to check how long each of the phones lasted when used for calls. The iPhone offered a very decent sounding 712 minutes of call-time. However, this is nearly half of what the Samsung Galaxy S7 had on offer (it got 1,492 minutes)! The best performer among these four handsets was the HTC 10 which offered an incredible 1,859 minutes of call time. The LG G5, famous for its modular battery, also did well offering 1,579 minutes of call time.
Moving on to internet browsing on 3G, all the devices offered much lesser usage time. However, the iPhone came last in this test as well. Leading the charts again, and offering over 790 minutes of 3G usage time, was the HTC 10. The HTC was followed by the Samsung Galaxy S7 which gave 677 minutes of 3G usage. The LG G5 came third after offering 640 minutes of 3G usage. The iPhone 7 came last and offered 615 minutes of 3G usage. While the difference doesn’t sound that huge in this case, it still doesn’t make a pretty reading for Apple, the publication notes.
Here's a review that says the iPhone 7 has poor battery life... https://t.co/JV20VPfJDp — Dorian Farrimond (@DorianFarrimond) September 27, 2016
All said and done, is the iPhone 7 really such a poor performer when it comes to the battery performance? In absolute terms, while it may lag behind most of the handsets here, one thing to be noted is the fact that the battery used by the iPhone 7 is of much lower capacity than what the others use. For example. the HTC 10 uses a 3,000 mAh battery compared to the 1,900 mAh unit used by the iPhone 7. Also, Apple has had a policy of not mentioning the battery capacities of the iPhone because according to them, at the end of the day, the performance of the device matters. If that was not all, some readers have pointed that a more fair comparison would have been with the iPhone 7 Plus because the larger iPhone 7 Plus also houses a larger capacity battery which should offer much better results. This has prompted several people to question whether the test was done to make the iPhone 7 look bad.
Do you own an iPhone 7? Is the battery life really as terrible as this report made it out to be?
[Featured Image by Pixabay]US A-grade metal saviours Lamb of God have had a hard time of it as late, but then you knew that, given the documentary on Randy’s trial, a traumatic event which we will also be able to re-reflect upon in detail once his extensive autobiography hits shelves. We don’t need to re-live it here again, but in brief, Randy was tossed in jail awaiting trial, in Czech Republic, based on a fan dying after he was pushed off the stage at a Lamb of God gig friggin’ two years earlier. On March 5, 2013, he was found not criminally liable, but as he’s said all along, there’s nothing to rejoice here, as one of his fans is still dead, at a young 19 years of age as well.
Crawling from the wreckage, Lamb of God have given us now their first album in over three years. VII: Sturm Und Drang is everything you expect from the band like they’ve never been gone, along with a spot of singing that seems to have the bravewords.com scribes raising their scribe eyebrows (see Crossfire).
But the free and clear Randall Blythe casts an eye toward his two guitarists to spot the contrast between this album and the previous six...
“Yes, well, I would say that this record—and not just against Resolution, but the one or two before it—is a much more cohesive Lamb of God record. You kind of get the whole Lamb of God experience, the whole package this time, and that is entirely due to the fact that the guys who write the music, that being Mark and Willy, did it together in the studio rather than at home, you know? The other records, to me, they sound like Lamb of God, but they’re a collection of different people’s songs. There’s very little like in-depth, ‘we wrote this song together,’ I think, on those albums. On this one, they were hijacking each other’s riff, they were changing this and that... It got to the point where I would come in... because I can always tell a Mark song or a Willy song.”
And that difference would be...?
“What is the difference between a Mark and a Willy song? You know, Mark... well, Willy started getting weird (laughs). But Mark definitely comes from a more classic rock background; he really does. Where you hear like blues licks in the solos and stuff—that’s Mark, for the most part. Willy, I think is a more technical kind of dude than Mark. Now, me saying this, I would like to qualify this right now and please put this in the interview, I’m not a guitar player, and I might not know what I’m talking about (laughs). Okay? But I would say Mark is more like the soul, and Willy is more like the heart. However on this record, man, it really changed, because they hijacked each other’s riffs and wrote... For example, a song like ‘Overlord,’ upon hearing it first, the verse stuff, I would immediately say that’s a Mark song. But it’s not! It’s a Willy song. So it’s kind of a throwback to the way we used to do things way back, the way all bands used to do things, when bands were real bands. They got in a practice space together and wrote together like a band does, instead of at home on their computer. So this, to me, I knew it was working when I would come to the studio and Josh (Wilbur – producer) would play me a song, and he goes, ‘Who do you think this is, Mark or Willy?’ And I’d say Mark. And he’d say, ‘Nope, it’s a Willy!’ And I’m like, that one’s Willy. ‘Nope, Mark started that and Willy changed it.’ And I’m like, man, they’re writing together—that’s awesome.”
As for working with Josh Wilbur, who also produced Resolution and Wrath, Randy says it’s because, well, “He’s a cool dude (laughs). You know, honestly, I’ll tell you the truth, people are like, ‘Why did you choose to use Josh Wilbur again?’ And I’ll be honest, I do not remember any conversation about, hey, we’re gonna choose a producer. Maybe they had that conversation when they started getting together when I was busy writing my book; maybe they decided that. All I know is I showed up and started doing writing, and they’re like, ‘Okay, Josh is coming for preproduction.’ Okay, cool, I’ve got no problem with it. It’s just like I showed up and he was there. So it wasn’t a choice. We were comfortable working with him. He’s a good dude, and I don’t know, I love Josh. He’s my friend as well. So I was more than happy to work with him again. And that’s important, man, to have a good relationship with your producer, at least for a band like us—we are a very complicated band.”
And so that begs the question, is Randy happy with the tones all over VII: Sturm Und Drang? Or more generally, what does Randy like in a mix?
“I like low-end heavy bass; I really do. I like to feel a rumble when I listen to music. You know, that was the one thing with Palaces. When we first heard it, that mix was so thin, the first one, and it was due to time constraints. And so it was remixed and remastered to bring it out, but it was so thin and so trebly, it sounded like an ‘80s speed metal record to me, which is just horrible. I can’t stand some of that stuff, where it’s just so shrill. And I like some clarity in the bass too. I like to be able to hear some notes, particularly in the bass. What do I like? It’s kind of funny, because I’m in a band like this, and what I like in a mix for drums, I like big toms, heavy toms, loud, big, big, big ones, like kettle drum-sized toms. I listen to a lot of sludge though, dude, I don’t listen to a lot of fast stuff.”
And you guys are the opposite of most of that!
“Yeah, man. There’s... it’s a machine, dude; I don’t mind saying this. We’re a tight band; when we play live, we’re tight. If there’s a mistake, we are super critical of ourselves, and other people, of course, would never notice it. But yeah, it’s the opposite of what I listen to. Lamb of God is the opposite of what I listen to (laughs).”
But of course, Randy had to listen to the music (whether he wanted to or not!), and then cough up a few chunks of lung o’ertop, while expressing something meaningful at the same time. As he’s said in the lead-up press to the record, there’s a theme throughout of stress under extreme conditions. No track on the record is more intensely indicative of that, than “Torches,” which marches along at a tense and barely restrained middle pace strafed by sophisticated—and much faster—riffing.
“It’s about, specifically, people who self-immolate as a form of political protest,” explains Randy. “I mean, that’s the specifics of the song. It was inspired by a few different examples of that I had run across. I started researching it, and to this day people are still doing that. And it’s not getting the attention that it used to. There’s Tibetans that go and immolate in China in protest to the treatment of their nation by China. And you don’t hear about this. But during the Vietnam era... you know that famous picture on the Rage Against the Machine cover? When that happened, when that picture was brought to the president of the United States of America, he reportedly uttered an expletive. And he was shocked. Today we live in such a jaded world that this kind of thing is like, oh, somewhat caught themselves on fire. Click, let me go see what the Kardashians are doing. To me that’s horrifying, that that’s not of such importance to the world that the world is watching.”
“And it happens in the Middle East,” continues Blythe. “I started researching political immolations and it continues to happen. And it made me really think, man, what... and it’s almost always by people… These aren’t mentally ill people. These are people who are suffering under regimes of such severe oppression that they cannot take it anymore, and can’t live a normal life. They are so upset that their freedoms have been impinged upon so hard that they cast themselves on fire. And that’s about as heavy as it gets, you know what I mean? That’s about as heavy as it gets. You are so disturbed about something, you light yourself on fire. That’s what that song ‘Torches’ is about. I tried to put myself into one of those people’s shoes, any one of those people who have done that, and kind of bring attention to it. And that’s certainly a way of acting under stress. That is one way of reacting to stress. It’s a very dramatic way.”
This theme is also expressed through the curious cover art picked to contain the band’s banquet of mensa-mad neo-neo-thrash. “We explained to Ken Adams, who has done our cover art, the concept of the record, of it being under stress. And if you look at it, it’s the seventh Lamb of God record, so there’s like seven little tiny mummies, and there’s seven ants, I believe, on the cover. And the motif, you’ll see a bird. There’s like a bird skull, and that’s kind of a recurring motif for us that Ken Adams came up with. But the bird looks like it’s being compressed, like in the Star Wars movie, where they’re in the trash compactor. He’s kind of in a room comprised of vices and he’s under pressure. So it’s really to illustrate pressure; that’s how I take it. And I think Ken took that concept and executed it fairly well.”
In closing, I wondered if getting locked up and even put into solitary—his wait for trial was about a month—put into perspective the idea that this could all be taken away from him and the band so easily. By his answer, it seems he took my muddled attempt at a point more in the spirit of “turning his life around.”
“No. I was living pretty good before then. You know, my life changed. The prospect of remaining drunk... you know, I’m an alcoholic. I drank for 22 years. And if I don’t screw it up, I’ll be sober for five years. So my appreciation for life and my days and my time came long before any of this legal stuff ever occurred. Me undergoing all this stuff, going back to trial and all that stuff, that was just me trying to follow the correction operating procedure that I had learned in sobriety, you know? It was not any big change or decision or anything. All that came when I got sober.”
How about any lessons absorbed even just with respect to career?
“Well, I mean, really, the last thing on my mind is my fucking heavy metal band, when I’m looking at five to ten years,” laughs Randy. “You know what I’m saying? I’m not like, oh, no, I might not get to be in Lamb of God anymore. I didn’t give a shit. You know, if you let me out, I’ll wash dishes for the rest of my life.”
Top slider photo by: Mats AnderssonWhen About.com Table Tennis forum member dadsky posted some scathing claims about modern table tennis made by an acquaintance that favors hardbat, fellow forum member and hardbat advocate Scott Gordon posted an insightful and balanced reply, which I have reproduced below.
Claims About Modern Table Tennis vs Hardbat from dadsky's Acquaintance
Rubber and blade manufacturers promise high-speed table tennis resulting from their "research" when hardbat table tennis (or classical table tennis) with crappy equipment offers a faster pace of play, more control, and cheaper equipment. Table tennis play as seen on TV, using those commercial rubbers, is dull - similar to Formula 1 races where the most powerful engine wins. Skill is not the absolute factor in winning. Play with rubbers and so-called ITTF Rubbers is boring - play rarely goes beyond five exchanges - while hardbatters enjoy up to a dozen or more exchanges with every point. Commercial table tennis is just that - commercial. And there are suckers born every minute who actually believe that table tennis using ITTF equipment actually makes table tennis more exciting. and it's both sad and funny that so many people actually purchase this ITTF equipment and give away their hard-earned bucks to these money-making table tennis equipment manufacturers. He |
summer if this project is successful is to determine if I really do have the talent to maybe make a go of photography as more than just a hobby.
The funds from this kickstarter will go to slightly fleshing out my camera equipment. I am not going to buy the biggest and best camera, I understand it is not the camera that makes the photos, it is the photographer. I have already purchased a vast majority of the equipment needed to complete this project. I just need some odds and ends to really get it going. (mostly a tripod that doesn't suck and other sundry things) Mostly the funds from this kickstarter will go to actually taking the photographs. The time I need free, the cost of transporting myself and my equipment to unique and spectacular places around the state, from the coast to the rain forest, high plains to the rolling wheat fields. This state is like a mini USA spanning a huge range of environments, I want a chance to photograph them all.
Just so you know this isn't my first rodeo. I stated before that I have talent and I think I do, you can judge for yourself by taking a look at my flikr page doc_myren. I believe I can do this and make a product that you as a backer and the public in general will enjoy and will be worth while. What I am lacking is the time to do all the things I want to do with this project.
I would like to close by saying Thank You. Even if you decide not to be a backer I appreciate your time and the fact that you even stopped by to read this page lifts my heart. If you do decide to become a backer I can only say Thank You for your faith in my abilities and I will do my best to exceed any expectations you may have of my work.Alex Wong / Getty Images Ron Paul holds a campaign event in Virginia in early 2012.
Most people have hobbies: golf, model trains, restoring old cars, whatever. A year after Ron Paul announced his Republican presidential bid, I have concluded that his supporters must not do these things. They can’t possibly have the time. While others are at rest or at play, Paul’s supporters are on the Internet, googling his name and diving into the comments sections of news articles to register their opinions. Maybe it’s a measure of their dedication or their web savvy, or both. I don’t know. But they always show up, sometimes 500 or 600 in force or more. And since they often complain about the media giving their guy short shrift, I thought I’d give them a chance to tell Paul’s story, now that it’s in its last chapter. (There, the media just did it again.) What follows is a collection of comments, culled from TIME’s archive, that span the epoch of Ron Paul 2012.
April 2011: As Paul begins to examine another presidential campaign, his supporters take to the comments section to lay out the stakes of the election in stark terms:
America has a choice. Complete collapse, or elect Ron Paul for president. -Athan
clowns on the left, jokers to the right….the 2 party failure is over / vote a libertarian into office and see what a president should do. -JHOWA
June 2011: Ron is running. TIME interviews him about his third presidential candidacy. His supporters are riding high.
Ron Paul speaking is what freedom sounds like, he is the real deal. -Glugzy
The “dark horse” candidate speaks (and votes) good, common “horse” sense…Dr. Paul has my vote, support and prayers. I even have his bumper sticker on my car—a first for me! Go Ron Paul and clean house! 🙂 -Elizabeth
August 2011: Despite a close second-place finish in the Ames Straw Poll, Paul skepticism abounds in Washington. The commentariat is fed up.
[TIME reporter] Alex Altman is another perfect example of an employee of a firm paid by The Fed to make sure that dangerous Ron Paul doesn’t get elected. Why point to a bygone election which has no relevance? Why not point out the numerous polls showing him ahead by a wide margin? Why not “Support Our Troops” the way our troops, me included(as a veteran), support Ron Paul? Or would you rather sentence the soldiers and sailors to endless agony? Support Our Troops!!! End the senseless wars. Defend the American Way!!! Vote Ron Paul!! -Paul Wilson
Many are rankled by being labeled fanatics:
Their [sic] not fanatics; their [sic] PO[ed]! Nobody wants a talking head in office anymore. It’s embarrassing to have these puppets represent us to other countries. I’ll take the guy that has always been honest and patient when those around him refused to see what eventually came true. He reminds me of my grandfather, a WW II vet that always looked out for me, no matter how dumb I was as a kid. -James Stevens
Others seem intent on proving that the shoe fits:
Most everyone knows that Time Magazine is in bed with the CIA. Ron Paul as President means that Global Banking Elite will lose money, so he’s being Blacked-out by the MIC Media. Paul’s “weaknesses” are his strengths, actually, you big Fart! -Military Industrial Web
And at least one isn’t entirely sure where he is:
Ron Paul is the leading contender in alternative media. His campaign will be fought and won there not in establishment drab like the Times. I don’t even read the Times, I only heard about this article from an alternative media source and wanted to state my opinion. -Jeremy_db
But they are confident that their own presence is proof that they are right:
The fact that this article has more comments than the previous 6 combined just shows the fact that Ron Paul is winning, can win and will win. And journalists like Alex Altman will go in prison once things turn around. -SlickR
December 2011: Paul has been gaining in the polls, slowly but steadily as other candidates rise and fall. Despite a lingering gap, hubris rears its head:
Dr. Paul has already won. We will not vote for just another criminal. The race is now between Ron Paul and Obama. -John Wyatt
After all, how could someone who is popular on the Internet lose an election?
Here’s a poll for you. Go to Youtube and see how many hits/likes/ there’s been in 24 hours on Ron Paul’s new ad regarding neocreep Newt Gingrich: SERIAL HYPOCRISY. -yonish
For the more grounded Paulists, hope comes in the form of the unbound convention delegate:
The primaries are just beauty contests, but where the rubber meets the road the delegate selection caucuses are where the real action is. -Club_ed
Iowa approaches, and skepticism from reporters continues to frustrate the faithful.
You keep asking “how far can Dr. Paul go?” You should write a story asking why no other candidate has this question asked of him/her. Why is Ron Paul’s surge so different than the others? It is deep in the [Mainstream Media] DNA and it is poison. -Brad Hudgens
Paul is like Apple Computer, one explains.
Emotion is really powerful. For a long time, Apple Computer thrived by being loved by some and hated by others. Paul evokes strong emotions in people, and that’s a good thing. Not enough people question the political landscape they are given and told to play upon. -Dixie10
Everyone else is worse than soggy bread, writes another.
Id vote a soggy peice [sic] or [sic] bread before I’d vote for Obama or Romney. I didn’t meant [sic] to bash soggy bread, but that’s how I feel. -Ghxh
Above all, the future is bright:
We got this!!!!! Ron Paul 2012! -Kerry Fogarty
January 2012: Moment of truth: The Iowa caucuses. The commenters fire themselves up. Exclamation points and caps lock keys are deployed with abandon:
To my fellow Ron Paul supporters in Iowa. MAKE IT HAPPEN TOMORROW. SHOCK THE ESTABLISHMENT TO ITS CORE AND PUT RON PAUL IN FIRST PLACE!!!!! The country is counting on you guys. R O N P A U L 2 0 1 2 -AASDF
Ron Paul for president! Bring the troops home! Legalize the Constitution! -Laurie RonPaul Shuck
And then, disaster. Woe. Tragedy. Paul finishes a close third in Iowa behind Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. There’s anger…
Ron Paul was clearly ahead in the Iowa Caucuses, and then the establishment fix was in. I will write Ron Paul’s name if I have to, but I will never vote for any of the pompous, pandering plastic puppets the bank owned establishment is trying to push our way. -mitchie124
…embellishment…
Santorum and Ahmedinajad [sic] are two of a kind, manipulating religious emotions for their self-aggrandisement [sic]. -Sal20111
…vindictiveness…
The International Church of Satan today publicly endorses Mitt Romney as Republican Presidential Candidate, and as the next President Of The United States. -International Church of Satan
…and finally, solace in the delegate count.
But his bronze medal got him 6 delegates, just like Romney and Santorum got. There was no “winner” in Iowa. -Shane Price
The commenters quickly become students of history…
Re[a]gan never won anything til North Carolina just saying. -Minute Man 721
…delegate experts…
[H]ow can Romney have 107 delegates and Santroum have 45 delegates? Its mathematically impossible. Romney ( 7 NH+ 2 SC+ 50 FL + 14 NV = 73) Gingrich ( 23 SC+ 6 NV= 29) Paul (3 NH + 5 NV= 8) Santorum ( 3 NV).. Associated press is waaaaaayyyyyy off. You discredit yourself using them as a source. -Johneverymann
…and conspiracists.
Voter Fraud –Measurmentinc
February 2012: The contests have continued, but still no victories and few points on the board for Paul. TIME asks the question: When can we call Paul’s strategy of going after small caucus states a bust? The commentariat is irate, straining at the bonds of the little boxes below the stories.
When can we call Ron Paul’s caucus strategy a bust? Well, when can we officially call journalism a bust? Oh wait, that’s right, we can’t. We only get the comment section, not the headlines. Bummer. -Freedom_Baby
March 2012: TIME reports that Paul advisers have had backchannel conversations with other campaigns about cutting an endorsement deal. Down in the comments, denials, paranoia and capslocking continue apace.
This is neocon disinformation, their fantasies of how they would like for Paul to sabotage his movement. Not going to happen. Romney is no more electable than Santorum. It’s more likely to be a Paul-Romney ticket than the other way around. -SethK
Ron Paul will never make any backroom deals! This alleged deal between Paul and Romney is nothing but a conspiricy INVENTED by Rick Santorum because he knows he, nor anyone else can stand in the daylight and debate Ron Paul on the issues! -jsknow
WHAT A LOAD OF BS!! PAUL DOES NOT “CAHOOT” WITH ANYONE! -Katrina Cristoff
There is at least one constructive suggestion, even if its relevance is difficult to understand.
When are we going to get rid of the Electoral College? It’s so stupid. -SweetBetsy
April 2012: Election news has slowed to a trickle as Romney runs away with the nomination. But the Disciples of Paul return to herald some good news: He has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine, though even that distinction is too generous to the other 99 people on the list in one commenter’s estimation.
The only one that really matters in 2012 is Ron Paul. We have too many things to fix in this county, and he’s the only one with the answers. -Rand Paul Review
May 2012: Sad tidings: To conserve resources, Paul has announced he will no longer actively campaign or run ads, refocusing himself on securing the remaining unbound delegates and soldiering on toward the convention, all but out of the race. But that changes nothing for the commenters. There are still insults…
You really work for Time magazine? They pay you for this drivel? -Len DiCenso
…herculean feats of delusion…
This is the most publicity Ron Paul has had through the entire campaign. Smart Move…at just the right time! -Scott Elsom
…and as always, a healthy regard for the power of the comments section.
As usual, skip the article and read the comment section if you want to be informed. -Gino G
Update: We’ve arrived at the natural conclusion of our journey. Here are the 10 best comments from Ron Paul supporters in the comments section of this article about Ron Paul supporters in the comments section:
this is one of the most boring and irrelevent [sic] articles i have ever read. its [sic] not over for Ron Paul 2012. The revolution hasnt even climaxed -Veronica
You should make a time line of hit articles on dr Paul in chronological order, that would make a great article, instead of attacking your readers, sorry ex readers -DanielTourtillott
This has probably been said… but Ron Paul should be Person of the Year. It’s a mediocre award for starting an intellectual revolution, but hey, Time is a mediocre news outlet.-Rand Paul Review
lol. This is a really lazy piece. You ought to pay the people that wrote the comments. -sameolbs
I’m a full time digital artist. I work on Games, movies, eviroment [sic] art, you time it. I’m a busy person. That said googling ron paul once a week and leaving a few comments does not get in the way of me playing starcraft2 and EVE, and doing my own personal projects and playing Tactics orge when I go to bed. Oh and I’m married and have to take care of our 3 pet bunnies. Oh right and I support ron paul because everyone else is MORE of a nut case. -Jaron DiTommaso
ADAM SORENSEN why are you so jealous of Dr. Paul’s popularity and success? 🙂 Nothing you can achieve in your lifetime. Ouch!!! -MosesLavine
If ever a news “article” could be called trolling this is it. -DuderAbides
Well no matter how you slice it up, Paul supporters are active and at least trying to make heads or tails of the trials and tribulations our country and the world is going through. Right or wrong, I give them all the kudos I can for at least caring and trying to be active in US politics. Not many have the nerve to wade daily in the knee deep BS that comes with the territory. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.. -Jay Urbanik
I’m surprised TIME even did this article (let’s guess to see how many comments will say this is trash journalism (when it’s actually a pretty accurate timeline)). Unless you completely and totally praise Ron Paul like he’s perfect (which he doesn’t believe he is, he’s a Christian. All sinners ring a bell?) the comments get flooded with these hateful kids who must have Google alerts for ‘Ron Paul’ on their news feeds. Grow up. -celachGeorge Takei (MSNBC)
George Takei continued his call on Friday for voters from around the political spectrum to band together against Donald Trump’s probable presidential nomination, Media Matters reported.
“Elections have consequences,” Takei told MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “When you look beyond the November general election, it’s a whole different America that we’re looking at. I want it to be the kind of America that I love and the largest common ground we share is as Americans. We don’t want a fear-monger, someone who wants to build walls on the southern border, ban Muslims, all the things that we don’t want our country to be. I love America and I don’t want that to be the America that we’re going to be living in after November.”
The actor and activist made his remarks as protests greeted Trump for the second day in a row during his appearance at the California Republican Convention. Earlier this week, Takei released a video asking supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders to get behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should she indeed clinch the nomination on the Democratic side.
“I respect Bernie supporters and Libertarians and Green [Party] people,” he said on Friday. “But when we get past the primary, I think we should start looking at the larger picture. We don’t want Donald Trump to be the president of the United States.”
Takei also invoked his childhood experiences inside a Japanese internment camp during World War II.
“I grew up behind the barbed wire fences of American concentration camps. And that was because the nation was swept up by war hysteria and the fact that we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor and I don’t want that kind of America to return,” he said. “And what we hear, the fear-mongering from the Republicans, is chilling and I know how horrible that can be.”
Watch footage from the interview, as posted by Media Matters, below.Ducati HyperScrambler by Untitled Motorcycles Reading time: about 5 minutes. American
Ducati
Engineering
Italian
Motorcycles
Editor’s Note: This post was written by the team at Untitled Motorcycles. We like to publish the story of a custom build in the words of the builders when we can – to give you a direct look into their process.
The HyperScrambler will be offered as a Limited Edition in a series of different Ducati-heritage colours and finishes – to read more or place an order you can click here.
Hugo Eccles, owner of Untitled Motorcycles in San Francisco (UMC-SF), was contacted by Jim MacLaughlin of Marin Speed Shop in the lead up to the Worldwide Ducati Dealer ‘Custom Rumble’ build-off with an offer to build a limited edition Ducati that would stun everyone in the room when it was unveiled.
The HyperScrambler is the result of this project – and it’s certainly safe to say that it’s a jaw-dropper.
Eccles started by sourcing a Ducati Monster S2R swingarm which, with its tubular structure, better matches the Scrambler’s trellis frame. “I’d originally intended to use a Sport Classic Mono swing arm but it was impossible to source in time”. Having installed the new swingarm a new subframe, to accommodate the S2R monoshock and a new seat design, was fabricated by Turk’s Shop, a local fabricator.
“I love Ducati’s signature trellis frame on the Scrambler and wanted to celebrate it”. An UMC-designed custom petrol tank that echoes the lines and angles of the frame resulted in a tapered shape which became the overall direction for the build: “the seat, tank and headlight are all part of one single tapered form”. The slim new design also suggested a more pared-down flattrack- and supermoto-inspired style which Eccles felt was “compatible with the Scrambler’s DNA”.
From that point onwards, the build was geared towards stripping and removing all extraneous details and components, including numerous plastic panels. The result is a bike that, at 325lbs, is 85lbs lighter than the original. “We’ve created an 800cc motorcycle that weighs less than a Vespa: performance is ‘lively'” says Eccles.
Visually, the new UMC Scrambler design consists of three core elements: engine, frame, and body: The engine and other mechanical parts have been stripped to bare metal and vapour blasted to celebrate their raw mechanical nature. The frame has been painted in ‘Rosso Corsa’, a neon orange colour that Ducati uses for their Moto GP race bikes, to showcase the characteristic trellis frame and swingarm. The nickel-sided petrol tank is a nod to the 1968 original while the bodywork has been painted in a solid grey to match the slim motocross-inspired grip vinyl seat.
Eccles is the first to admit that this build is somewhat out of character for Untitled Motorcycles. “It’s a competition build so we set out to do something intentionally provocative. Although this bike is road legal, the next road-going versions will be designed and detailed differently”.
Technical Specifications:
Frame, Suspension, Wheels
– Original main frame, de-tabbed and original shock mount removed.
– Ducati Monster S2R swingarm, Ohlins monoshock.
– Custom UMC subframe with welded-in LED channels, fabricated by Turk’s Shop
– Ducati ‘Rosso Corsa’ neon orange race paint by Motojrefinish.
– Original 18″ front wheel replaced with Ducati Monster M796 17″ front wheel.
– Original 17″ rear wheel replaced with Ducati Monster 1100 17″ rear wheel.
– Continental RaceAttack Rain tyres (120/70-17 front, 180/55-17 rear).
– EBC wave brake discs, customised.
– GSXR Showa big piston forks, stripped and custom-anodised to match the frame by Ano-Tech.
– OEM foot pegs and levers, customised by UMC.
– Custom fork guards, designed and fabricated in-house.
Electrics, Lighting
– Rear LED strips, integrated into the rear hoop, act as both brake lights and turn signals (Custom Dynamics).
– Motogadget M-Unit control module and M-Button.
– 1300 lumen LED headlight, modified and machined in-house, mounted to a custom bracket welded to the headstock.
– Antigravity XPS SC-1 lithium battery installed under the custom seat.
– Simplified loom, re-routed and re-wrapped in neon orange fabric tape.
– Original ignition retained and relocated to right hand side of frame, under custom petrol tank.
Controls
– Motogadget motoscope mini speedometer and lights, machined into modified top fork bracket.
– Brembo brake master cylinder with 2-into-2 braided stainless steel lines.
– Brembo clutch master cylinder with braided stainless steel line.
– Custom throttle with braided stainless steel cable.
– Custom levers, with integrated LED turn signals, by HugeMoto.
– Renthal lo-rise handlebar with custom switchgear.
Engine & Exhaust
– Reprogrammed ECU
– Oxygen sensors and air injectors removed.
– Stock plastic airbox removed, Uni snowmobile air filter installed.
– Original Bing throttle body retained, machined to accommodate air temperature sensor.
– Clear high-pressure braided fuel line by Helix Racing.
– Billet oil filler cap and sprocket cover by Slingshot Racing.
– Hydraulic clutch conversion, Ducati clutch slave with braided stainless steel line.
– Ducabike wet clutch cover with polycarbonate observation window, OEM clutch plates machined and finished by UMC.
– Original stator cover machined and modified by Turk’s Shop.
– Rear sprocket changed to 41-tooth to improve top-end speed.
– QD ex-box exhaust and headers, modified by UMC.
Bodywork
– Custom-fabricated 10L steel petrol tank, original fuel pump, nickel plated and painted (range 95 miles, 115 miles on reserve)
– Aluminium headlight housing, brushed and polished in-house, 1300 lumen LED spotlight.
– Aluminum belly pan with mesh front panel and exhaust header cutout detail by Nate Diepenbroek.
– Seat upholstered in motocross grip vinyl by Acker Leather Works.
Special Thanks To: Jim MacLaughlin at Marin Speed Shop – See more of Untitled Motorcycles work here.
All images © RC Rivera 2016Immigration minister says many foreign fighters involved in conflict zones are descendants of migrants who came in the 1970s under former prime minister
Malcolm Fraser made mistakes in bringing some migrants to Australia and the country is paying for that now, Peter Dutton has said.
The immigration minister made the comments in an interview with Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt, who repeatedly questioned whether it was an error to “let in” people from Middle Eastern and African nations or cultural groups.
Dutton appeared to connect the immigration program of the 1970s – which saw people arrive mainly from Lebanon, Chile and the Czech republic – with allegations of Sudanese men committing crime, and the descendants of immigrants leaving Australia to fight in the Middle East.
“If there is a particular problem that people can point to within a certain community, and we’re talking about a significant number of people in that community who are doing the wrong thing, then clearly mistakes have been made in the past,” he said.
“The reality is that Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in in the 1970s and we’re seeing that today. We need to be honest in having that discussion.”
Thursday’s interview began with a discussion about an alleged crime wave in Victoria which Bolt said was largely down to “young men of African descent”, in particular from Sudan.
Dutton said it was a worrying law and order issue, and the Victorian government was weak on crime.
Bolt responded: “No doubt the law and order issue is very big and the lack of policing is very big, and I have noticed that you have thrown out or intend to throw out some people back to Africa, but this is reacting afterwards.”
Bolt said Fraser got the Lebanese refugee program wrong and asked if there was “another mistake” made with Sudanese refugees.
Dutton said it was an “open question” what proportion of the Sudanese community was involved, but noted an “interesting aspect” of immigration that young people going to fight in the Middle East were often born in Australia to migrant or refugee parents.
“So we need to have a proper look at what has gone wrong and clearly something has gone wrong,” he said.
“We do review the [immigration] program each year, and if we feel there are problems with particular cohorts, particular nationalities, particular people who might not be integrating well and not contributing well, then there are many other worthy recipients who seek to come to a country like ours and make an opportunity their own.”
Dutton against criticised the Victorian government on law and order, and Bolt again said he agreed with Dutton on those issues, “but the point really is … with a lot of these cases I often ask, who let them in? They shouldn’t be posing a problem in the first place”.
Bolt questioned if it was a mistake to bring in people from an “imported” culture if their children struggled to fit i, and if the government’s one-off Syrian refugee intake was a risk.
Dutton pointed to the government’s “slow pace” of processing refugees because it was conducting security checks, and said a high proportion of those accepted would be from persecuted minorities like Syrian Christians.
Australia saw high levels of humanitarian immigration from Lebanon and Asia under then Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser. In 2007 Fraser rejected any link between issues with his Lebanese migration program and current racial tensions, after cabinet documents released by the national archives found he was warned against increasing the intake at the time.
Refugees are Australia's most entrepreneurial migrants, says research Read more
By 1980 more than 16,000 Lebanese people had arrived under humanitarian immigration policies enacted in response to the country’s 1976 civil war. A draft government document leaked earlier this year – and criticised by the opposition as verging on bigotry and racism – singled out the Lebanese community in connection with Australian-based Sunni extremists.
In the 10 years to 1985 more than 95,000 Indochinese refugees were also processed for resettlement in Australia, largely in response to the Vietnam war. About 50,000 people arrived as refugees from Vietnam including on boats.
Australia’s acceptance of Sudanese refugees largely began in the late 1990s, with the highest number just 10 years ago. More than 20,000 people have settled in Australia from Sudan.
An immigration department document which cites 2011 research on the economic, social and civic contributions of first and second-generation humanitarian entrants, found that “they demonstrated a greater commitment to life in Australia compared to other migrants”.JNS.org — Israel recently thwarted a Hamas plot to carry out a series of suicide bombings in major Israeli cities and shooting attacks across Judea and Samaria, the Shin Bet security agency announced Thursday.
A joint operation by the Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces and police uncovered a Nablus-based Hamas network of 20 operatives who were planning the attacks. Many of those apprehended had served prison sentences in Israel for security offenses. All the suspects have implicated themselves in the plot, the Shin Bet said.
The network had set up an explosives lab where bombs and suicide vests were being manufactured. The group also purchased assault rifles and recruited four suicide bombers who were intending to target crowded areas in Jerusalem and Haifa as well as several major bus stations in central Israel.
“The investigation uncovered an organized Hamas network that, had it not been thwarted, would have caused widespread death and destruction,” the Shin Bet said in a statement.Qualcomm has acquired a large patent portfolio related to Palm, iPaq, and the Bitfone device management platform from Hewlett-Packard for an undisclosed sum.
The portfolio is made up of about 1,400 patents and pending patent applications in the U.S. and about 1,000 patents and applications in other countries, Qualcomm said. The innovations include “fundamental mobile operating system techniques,” the company said.
With intellectual property linked to two iconic brands, Qualcomm has acquired a piece of mobile history. Palm evolved its 1990s personal digital assistants into early data-enabled phones, and Compaq introduced the popular Microsoft-based iPaq handheld around the turn of the century. Both companies were later acquired by HP, which eventually shut down the two mobile device lines. Its 2011 decision to discontinue Palm’s webOS phones and tablets was widely criticized as a fumble by short-time CEO Leo Apotheker.
HP acquired Bitfone, a vendor of mobile device management software, in 2006 as part of its effort to build up the iPaq platform.
The patent portfolio will let Qualcomm “offer even more value to current and future licensees,” the company said. In addition to being a dominant vendor of mobile chips, Qualcomm developed many of the technologies used in mobile devices and networks and makes much of its revenue from licensing that intellectual property.Our last photo update from San Francisco's next tallest building showed the naked steel skeleton of the building's floor plates enveloping the central concrete core. Significant progress has been made in the short two months since then, including the installation of the Salesforce Tower's first panels of glass skin.
Rendering of Salesforce Tower in the skyline, image via Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects
Developed by Boston Properties and Hines, the 326-metre (1,070-foot) supertall will serve as a shining beacon on the skyline, marking the burgeoning South of Market area with a bold design by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects and Kendall / Heaton Associates. The dramatic 61-storey tower is to be accented by metal protrusions throughout the facade and a zipper element at the top of the building.
Cladding visible on the second floor, image by Forum contributor edwards
Consisting of 1.4 million square feet of office space, the project is positioned next door to the Transbay Transit Center, which will provide the region with a revitalized transportation hub. For tenants looking for a place to host casual gatherings or just to mix and mingle, the skyscraper will include a direct connection to the rooftop park that crowns the five-storey transit facility.
Cladding visible on the second floor, image by Forum contributor edwards
As the glass envelope begins its application, the solar sunshades that help frame them will likely be making their appearance soon as well. The Salesforce Tower takes advantage of the latest technologies to improve office comfort by incorporating innovative exterior air intakes on every floor. The devices will ensure a constant flow of fresh air into the work environment. Coupled with 13-foot ceilings and windows that nearly span the entire wall, the Salesforce Tower promises to provide an unmatched office atmosphere for its tenants.
Salesforce Tower construction in late June, image by Forum contributor edwards
Additional images and information can be found in the Database file linked below. Want to get involved in the discussion or share your photos? Check out the associated Forum thread or leave a comment at the bottom of this page.Sarah Crabill | Getty Images
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — For the next three weeks, Kids Drive NASCAR will celebrate the next generation of NASCAR® fans by engaging children and their families with fun and interactive social content, kids’ takeovers and at-track events and activities, NASCAR announced today.
Beginning today, kids will go head-to-head with some of the sport’s top drivers in Kids vs. Drivers, a series of timed activity challenges on social media. Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™ driver Kyle Busch kicked off Kids vs. Drivers with the 18-second toss challenge on AccelerationNation.com.
Parents can share their children’s video responses to Busch, Kyle Larson and Joey Logano via Twitter or Instagram tagging #KidsDriveNASCAR and #Promotion, or upload them to the web site for a chance to have the drivers share the content.
“Kids Drive NASCAR is about bringing kids even closer to the sport they love and the drivers they idolize,” said Jill Gregory, NASCAR senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “This year, we’ve expanded the campaign to three weeks and five race tracks — with no shortage of fun events, activities and content for children and their families.”
Beginning this weekend at Iowa Speedway and Pocono Raceway and culminating Aug. 13 at Michigan International Speedway, children attending NASCAR national series races will take part in live Kids vs. Drivers challenges, attend driver and crew chief meetings and autograph sessions, and receive behind-the-scenes garage tours.
Kids will also take over race weekend roles usually reserved for adults. NASCAR and participating tracks — which also include Watkins Glen International and Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course — will host children as honorary race officials, green-flag wavers, reporters and photographers.
Leading up to Saturday’s NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race, Pocono Raceway will host its 10th annual Lehigh Valley Children’s Hospital Kids Day. Free activities will include face painting, bounce houses, photos booths and other educational activities.
Earlier this season, NASCAR and the tracks rolled out a youth ticketing program offering free tickets to kids ages 12 and under for all NASCAR XFINITY Series™ and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series™ events. Parents can visit NASCAR.com/kidstix for information about free and discounted youth tickets.
NASCAR’s social media channels will share Kids Drive NASCAR content throughout the three weeks, including videos and Snapchat takeovers featuring young drivers. In addition to participating in the Kids vs. Driver video challenges, fans are encouraged to share pictures and videos of their families and children enjoying NASCAR races using #KidsDriveNASCAR.
Kids Drive NASCAR is part of the sport’s broader efforts to engage kids at the track, online and in the classroom. Last year, NASCAR launched the NASCAR Acceleration Nation app, the first digital experience created just for kids featuring racing-themed games, activities and fun ways to learn more about NASCAR.
The app can be downloaded for free at the App Store and Google Play. In partnership with Scholastic, NASCAR also developed the industry’s first Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) in-school education program.
For more information about NASCAR Acceleration Nation, visit AccelerationNation.com.
The Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series returns to Pocono Raceway for the Overton’s 400 on Sunday, July 30 at 3 p.m. ET on NBCSN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (channel 90) and MRN, with additional coverage on NASCAR.com.
A double-header on Saturday, July 29 begins with the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Pocono (1 p.m. ET; FOX, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio and MRN) followed by the NASCAR XFINITY Series race at Iowa Speedway (3:30 p.m. ET; NBCSN, SiriusXM NASCAR and MRN).
About NASCAR
The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. (NASCAR) is the sanctioning body for the No. 1 form of motorsports in the United States. NASCAR consists of three national series (Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™, NASCAR XFINITY Series™, and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series™), four regional series, one local grassroots series and three international series. The International Motor Sports Association™ (IMSA®) governs the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship™, the premier U.S. sports car series. Based in Daytona Beach, Fla., with offices in eight cities across North America, NASCAR sanctions more than 1,200 races in more than 30 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico and Europe. For more information visit https://www.nascar.com and http://www.IMSA.com, and follow NASCAR on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (‘NASCAR’).If money is the one reason that you are not going to college then you are about to find out that it was a bad excuse after all. If you want to go to college then there are many ways in which you can get money to do so. You will find that there are some places you had never even looked that you could use to finance your studies and it does not have to be a bad school for you to afford it. Here are some places where you can search to pay for your school
Financial Aid Office
The first place to go to is the schools financial aid office. They have a lot of information there about the scholarships, grants and state and federal aid options as well as a lot of applications you can fill out. You should visit it and see what aid you qualify for. In some cases you may not even realize it but you may even be able to go to college without paying a dime. It all depends on the school of your choice, the requirements that you meet and how much money you are able to get.
The financial aid office will also give you information on loans available to pay for your school, but you will have to think about how much deb you want to go into and if a job will be available when you graduate to pay it back. Loan repayment options have become a bit easier and loans which are backed by the federal government are the best that you can use. If you do not want to take on a lot of debt you should think of the public schools in your state which are usually a lot more affordable than the private options.
Grants And Scholarships
Grants and scholarships are the best ways of paying for college because you never have to repay them. Federal grants |
-bomb on the new PlanetSide 2 Facebook page, why not swing by the the lovely PC Gamer Facebook page while you're there? New Planetside info is set to be revealed at 7pm PDT / 3am BST tomorrow according to the Facebook page, though oddly the countdown is set to expire later than that.Erin Moran has certainly seen happier days.
A haggard Moran, who played Joanie Cunningham on the sitcom “Happy Days,” was seen smoking her way around a Holiday Inn parking lot in Corydon, Indiana, after allegedly getting kicked out of the trailer park home she shared with husband Steve Fleischmann, claims RadarOnline.
According to the gossip site, Moran was kicked out by her mother-in-law who was tired of her hard-partying ways.
The National Enquirer also alleges that the couple have bouncing between motels, but are blowing through the cash settlement she was awarded by CBS over merchandise revenue.
“On several occasions the hotel management warned Erin to curb her unruly behavior, but they finally had enough of her temper and demanded that she immediately leave the property," the tabloid reported.
Go to The Post for more celebrity news.On a dreary, rainy Tuesday afternoon, the Florida State football team returned to practice after its first off day of fall camp on Monday. In a practice which was forced inside the Indoor Practice Facility due to severe weather, scouts from the Jets, Browns and Rams were in attendance.
Injured/Absent
Not in attendance at Tuesday’s practice was freshman tight end Alexander Marshall, who was seen with a cast on his left hand at Sunday. Jimbo Fisher clarified after practice that he caught a pass which split one of his fingers open, requiring surgery to insert some pins. He has expected back in 4-6 weeks.
Additional new absences were by linebacker Matthew Thomas and running back Johnathan Vickers, both of whom were sick according to Fisher.
True freshman safety Hamsah Nasirildeen was once again sporting a non-contact uniform. Also missing from the secondary was Cyrus Fagan, who is out of action with a knee injury.
Defensive end Adam Torres was not working out, instead riding the workout bike off to the side. Freshman defensive tackle Ja’len Parks was also off to the side rehabbing on his own.
Brady Scott’s recovery from his foot injury suffered before fall camp carries on, but he was keeping a close eye on the offensive line during practice Tuesday.
Offense
Freshman wide receiver D.J. Matthews returned to practice, albeit in a limited capacity, after pulling his hamstring last week.
Former defensive back Malique Jackson seems fully converted to receiver at this point as he was working with the wideouts for the third straight practice session on Tuesday.
More of the QBs working on corner endzone passes. pic.twitter.com/qet7eyS5SK — Andrew Miller (@Andrew_Miller36) August 8, 2017
Defense
On defense, the Seminoles got significantly healthier as defensive ends Josh Sweat and Josh Kaindoh, who were both held out from Sunday’s practice, were full participants. Sweat was held out Sunday merely due to scheduled rest.
Additionally, sophomore linebacker Dontavious Jackson participated in his second straight practice, seemingly past the illness he was dealing with last week.
In the linebacker corps, defensive end Brian Burns worked with linebackers coach Bill Miller.
#FSU LBs coach Bill Miller working with outside linebackers Josh Brown and Jacob Pugh as well as defensive end Brian Burns. #Noles pic.twitter.com/Yd2LPnUSqn — Curt Weiler (@CurtMWeiler) August 8, 2017
With Sweat getting work in at the strong-side defensive end spot formally occupied by DeMarcus Walker, the buck linebacker role may be Burns’ ticket to more playing time in 2017.
Brian Burns has been the example on how to perfectly run drills in practice. #FSU pic.twitter.com/1OVeHrzIcS — Andrew Miller (@Andrew_Miller36) August 8, 2017
In unrelated news, defensive tackle Marvin Wilson is still a massive true freshman.
Marvin Wilson is indistinguishable size-wise from redshirt junior Demarcus Christmas. pic.twitter.com/Ro3kJUNJhR — Curt Weiler (@CurtMWeiler) August 8, 2017
Special Teams
Ricky Aguayo and Logan Tyler were splitting field goal and kickoff reps, as they have been all fall, on Tuesday.
Ricky Aguayo good from 44 in the rain with plenty of distance. Went 5/5 in warmups. #FSU pic.twitter.com/GuqZ1kyiBV — Andrew Miller (@Andrew_Miller36) August 8, 2017
A look at FSU’s kick return unit showed Keith Gavin, Derwin James, Amir Rasul, Cam Akers, Khalan Laborn and George Campbell as the return men for the Seminoles.
Next
The Seminoles’ next practice which the media will be able to observe is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.Rent is still too damn high. Photo via Flickr user Jake Warren
British Columbia's government has taken a lot of heat over the last few years—especially in the last six months—for ignoring Metro Vancouver's out-of-control housing crisis. Prices shot up a ridiculous 30 percent in 2015, and as far as anyone can tell, no one in the city got a 30 percent raise to match.
After spending years refusing to implement any new taxes on homebuyers, including flipping and speculation taxes proposed by Vancouver's mayor, the province announced today it would start charging a surprising 15 percent tax on foreign investors.
BC Finance Minister Mike de Jong told reporters the tax amounts to a $300,000 take on a $2-million home. According to a small slice of data collected by the government last month, foreign investors make up 5.1 percent of the Metro Vancouver housing market, which amounted to over $1 billion in property purchased between June 10 and 14.
For people who have been watching the issue closely, there's a subtle difference between "foreign money" and "foreign buyers." NDP Opposition Leader John Horgan told VICE the legislation's focus on "foreign nationals and foreign-controlled corporations" will let people with fancy lawyers and accountants slide their money right by it.
Read More: How Foreign Investors Are Using Drug Cartel Tactics in the Canadian Real Estate Market
"We've said for months and months that we need a speculation tax to focus on the money, not on the individuals," Horgan told VICE. "We don't want it to be a race-based debate, we want it to be based on how we stop this money that's distorting the market."
Observers like Ian Young of the South China Morning Post have maintained the luxury home market in Vancouver has been heating up in large part because of wealthy migrants to Canada, not overseas buyers. Those citizens and permanent residents obviously won't be affected by this new tax.
De Jong admitted foreign investment is "only one factor" driving up prices. "It represents an additional source of pressure on a market struggling to build enough new homes to keep up," he said in a statement.
Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.Amateur scientists vs. cranks
This is video of a talk given last year by David Dixon, assistant professor of math, science and engineering at Saddleback College in California. He used to work in the Physics Department at California Polytechnic State University, which, like many physics departments around the world, received loads of correspondence from non-scientists who thought they had come up with earth-shattering, game-changing hypotheses that needed to be shared.
Now, sometimes, laypeople come up with good ideas that should be explored. But many of these letters are better classified as the work of cranks — folks who had big ideas, cared deeply about those big ideas, but who were dead wrong... and utterly impervious to the idea that they might be wrong.
In this talk, Dixon delves into the collection of crank letters received by California Polytechnic State University over the years to explain the hallmarks of crankitude, the behaviors that raise red flags for professional scientists, and what we can actually learn about real science by studying fake science.
YouTube says the video is over two hours long, but that's apparently inaccurate. The actual talk is an hour long and just somehow got loaded twice into the same video.
If this is a topic that interests you, I'd also recommend reading this MetaFilter thread, where scientists explain to a poster why the poster's friend is setting off crank red flags with scientists whose attention he's trying to capture. It's a fascinating look at what to do and what not to do if you have a hypothesis you want to share.Finger info for icculus@icculus.org...
Yoohoo:
I forgot to mention: I have a Patreon! Mostly I make fun software, tools to build games, and port games to Linux. If you like those things, please throw in a buck.
Arcade1Up mod quickies!
If you missed them, I previous wrote up these other Arcade1Up cabinet mods:
So here are a few quickies that I felt were worth mentioning but not bloviating about in great detail.
Turn off (almost) everything from the stock power switch.
If you saw my first post about wiring up the power switch to GPIO3, you might be thinking: I'd like to turn off everything, instead of just having it go into standby. Or maybe your amp being on makes you crazy, or your monitor won't go into stanbdby at all, or you have blinged out LED lights all over and they have to power off, too.
You can fix this with a simple relay, if you want to get your hands dirty, but I went for a slightly more expensive but almost-turnkey solution.
As usual, Adafruit to the rescue. They sell this for 25 bucks:
It looks like an average surge suppressor power strip thing, but it has a few magical properties:
One outlet always provides power no matter what.
Two outlets only provide power when the relay is charged.
The basic idea with a relay is that you have a little electromagnet. Give that magnet a little power and it'll pull a little piece of metal over, completing a circuit. You power the magnet with that little green thing on the side. You put wires in it. You can wire this up to GPIO pins, but I had other plans...
Go find yourself a spare USB cable. Find the shittiest one in the back of the drawer, because you're going to destroy it.
If you cut open a USB cable, past the shielding that looks like aluminum foil and the other floof, there are four wires: red, black, white and green. White and green are data. Red and black deliver power. We want power.
Cut out the parts you don't need. Strip the red and black wires (these were too thin for my wire strippers, so I took an exacto-knife to it, very carefully).
The green thing in the relay pulls out with your fingers. There are screws on the top and a place to insert wires. Red is positive, black is negative. Put the wires in and tighten the screws to hold them solidly.
Plug the green thing back in.
Now your Pi goes into the "ALWAYS ON" plug and the other end of your USB cable goes into the Pi. Everything else in the cabinet goes into the NORMALLY OFF outlets. You can put a power strip in there if you need more than two outlets.
Ignore the NORMALLY ON outlet. Nothing goes into it, since it's only powered when the other outlets aren't.
The relay box gets plugged into the wall. I swapped the cable out with a standard desktop computer power cable, since the included cable is tiny.
Now turn the relay box on. The Pi gets power, and when it boots enough to load the USB drivers, it'll start sending power down the USB bus, which will go down our hacked cable and power the relay. Everything else should power up.
When you're done, flip the power switch on the arcade cabinet. The Pi should shut down cleanly, and halt. When it halts, its USB ports power down. When the USB ports power down, the relay kills the power to everything but the Pi with a most satisfying click. The Pi will remain halted but sipping power, in the ALWAYS ON outlet, acting like a standby mode, until you turn it back on with the stock cabinet on/off switch, powering the USB ports, and so on and so on.
Sharpie fixes everything.
The cabinet sides are sleekly black, but the screw holes are just wood.
Take out the screws and fill in the wood with a black Sharpie. Then Sharpie up the screw head too, and screw it back together.
This looks much better. Here's the cabinet with the top, front screw done and the next lower one on the back undone, for comparison:
Extra credit if you embed the screws into a big piece of styrofoam, take them outside and spray paint their heads black. The pen won't get into the actual notch of the head. But it still looks much better for 3 minutes of effort!
Force the HDMI resolution.
My video controller, coming in from a cold boot, often would have the wrong resolution. Something blurry from being too low. A reboot would fix it, like maybe the Pi saw the wrong maximum resolution if it booted too quickly. The fix was to force the resolution in /boot/config.txt so it's always right without fail. These are the settings that worked for me.
# This tells the Pi to force the Arcade1Up cabinet's video resolution. # Often on cold boot, it sets it too low without this. hdmi_force_hotplug=1 hdmi_group=2 hdmi_mode=35
HDMI group 2, mode 35 is 1280x1024 @ 60Hz, which matches what the cabinet's stock display expects. If you want to check this list yourself, you can check raspberrypi.org's boot settings documentation.
Once this was set up, the video was correct on every boot and reboot!
--ryan.A Proof of Peterson's Algorithm James Wilcox
In this post, we take a break from distributed systems to look at shared memory systems. As a case study, we give a proof that Peterson's algorithm provides mutual exclusion.
This quarter I've been organizing a reading group on distributed algorithms. We've been reading Lynch's aptly named Distributed Algorithms. Last week we covered shared-memory mutual exclusion algorithms, and I thought I'd have a go at formalizing some of the proofs in Coq.
Mutual Exclusion
Mutual exclusion is the problem of implementing locks. It's a classic in the concurrent programming literature, with just about everybody famous publishing solutions to it. And why not: it's not at all obvious software should be able to provide mutual exclusion on top of hardware that doesn't.
These days the algorithms are of mostly theoretical interest because modern multicore chips do have primitives that make it easier to implement locks. But these old-school algorithms don't need any of that. All they require is sequential consistency of the underlying memory system. (To make these algorithms feel even worse about themselves, sequential consistency isn't guaranteed by default on modern chips.)
Sequential Consistency
Programmers can reason about a single-threaded program by simulating its execution in their heads, with each line of code executing in order. Such reasoning is an abstraction of what's actually going on, especially on modern hardware and with modern compilers. Compilers move code around, and hardware executes instructions out of order. But they all guarantee that the program behaves as if each line of code executed in order. This guarantee ensures that the programmer's line-by-line reasoning is correct.
Sequential consistency is an extension of this reasoning technique to multithreaded programs. An execution of a multithreaded program is sequentially consistent if it corresponds to some interleaving of the steps of each thread. For example, consider the following code, which executes in an environment where both x and y are initially 0.
T1 T2 x = 1 y = 1 print y print x
Thread 1's code is in the left column. It first writes the value 1 to the global variable x. Then it prints the value of the global variable y. Thread 2's code is in the right column. It writes 1 to y and then prints x.
Now suppose we want to convince ourselves that no execution of this program will print "00". In a sequentially consistent world, we know that any execution of this program is equivalent to the sequential execution of some interleaving of the steps of the threads. So we consider all possible interleavings of the steps of the threads. Here they are.
x = 1; print y; y = 1; print x // "01" x = 1; y = 1; print x; print y // "11" x = 1; y = 1; print y; print x // "11" y = 1; x = 1; print x; print y // "11" y = 1; x = 1; print y; print x // "11" y = 1; print x; x = 1; print y // "01"
Now we imagine running each interleaving as a sequential program, and indeed, "00" is not printed by any of them. At a slightly higher level, we might argue that "00" is impossible because one thread must go first, and each thread begins by writing a 1 to its global variable. So when the other thread reaches its print statement, it must print a "1".
Peterson's Algorithm
Now that we understand sequential consistency, let's get back to mutual exclusion. Herlihy and Shavit calls Peterson's algorithm "the most succinct and elegant two-thread mutual exclusion algorithm." Well, this better be good. The original paper is here.
T1 T2 flag1 = true flag2 = true victim = 1 victim = 2 while (flag2 && while (flag1 && victim == 1) {} victim == 2) {} // critical section // critical section flag1 = false flag2 = false
Each thread begins by setting its flag to true. It then sets the victim variable to its thread id, and waits until either the other thread's flag is false or victim is set by the other thread.
To see informally why this ensures mutual exclusion, consider the case where T1 enters the critical section. Then the loop condition must have been false, which means either flag2 was false or victim was set to 2. If flag2 was false, then T2 was not even trying to enter the critical section. If victim was set to 2, then T2 was trying to enter the critical section, but T1 won the race.
Let's now prove this formally.
Modeling Shared Memory
To reason about the algorithm formally, we first have to write down our assumptions about how shared memory works. The model used here is essentially the one used by Lynch.
For the purposes of presentation, I'm going to leave out some details from the post, but this post is generated from a Coq file that contains all the proofs. The full code is available here.
Section SharedMem.
Shared memory is a set of registers.
(* register names *) Variable register : Type. (* we assume the names have decidable equality *) Context { reg_eq_dec : Eq register}. (* the type of data stored in each register *) Variable contents : register -> Type.
Each register has a name and a type of data that it stores. As a technical condition, we need to assume that register names have decidable equality. For that we use the Eq typeclass (definition not shown; see the code for more details).
Definition global_state : Type := forall r, contents r.
We model the global state of all registers as a (dependent) function from registers to their contents.
A shared-memory program is a collection of threads.
(* thread names *) Variable thread : Type. (* more decidable equality *) Context { thread_eq_dec : Eq thread}. Variable program_counter : thread -> Type. Definition program_counters : Type := forall t, program_counter t.
Each thread has a name, and we again assume the names have decidable equality. Each thread also has a program counter (PC), which keeps tracks of what it should do next. The PC is not visible to other threads. The collection of all threads' program counters is modeled as a dependent function from threads to their PC.
From the point of view of the shared memory model, a program is just a function for each thread that updates that thread's PC as well as the global state. At each step, a thread is nondeterministically selected, and its function is run with access to its current PC and the current global state. The function returns the new PC and new global state. It's important to note that the function runs atomically, without interference from other threads. To model real shared-memory algorithms, we need to use the PC to break them down into repeated applications of this function, as we'll see below.
(* one atomic step. given: - a thread t - thread t's current PC - the current global state returns thread t's new PC and the new global state *) Variable handler : forall t, program_counter t -> global_state -> (program_counter t * global_state).
Execution proceeds as described above: select a thread; run the handler; update the state; rinse; repeat. We can write this down as a step relation.
Inductive step : program_counters * global_state -> program_counters * global_state -> Prop := | step_step : forall t ls gs st' gs', handler t (ls t) gs = (st', gs') -> step (ls, gs) (update ls t st', gs').
Here we use the update function (definition not shown; see code for details) to update thread t's PC.
To model multiple steps of execution, we take the transitive closure of the relation step. It saddens me that I think the name clos_refl_trans_n1 makes sense.
Definition step_star := clos_refl_trans_n1 _ step. End SharedMem.
Peterson's Algorithm Formalized
Now that we've got a model of shared memory, we can write programs against it. Because each step of the handler function is atomic, we have to be careful to break the algorithm down into its atomic steps. Let's recall Peterson's algorithm:
T1 T2 flag1 = true flag2 = true victim = 1 victim = 2 while (flag2 && while (flag1 && victim == 1) {} victim == 2) {} // critical section // critical section flag1 = false flag2 = false
To write this in our model, we need to define register, contents, thread, program_counter, and handler. Here we go.
Peterson's algorithm works with two threads, so we'll make the type thread have two elements, T1 and T2. We give a decidable equality instance as well (see code for proof).
Module Peterson. Inductive thread := | T1 | T2. Instance thread_eq_dec : Eq thread.
Peterson's algorithm as presented above has three registers: flag1, flag2, and victim. To make it possible to write the code for both threads as a single function, we define register to have a Flag constructor that takes a thread as an argument. Thus Flag T1 corresponds to flag1 in the code above. Again, we also give a decidable equality instance.
Inductive register := | Flag : thread -> register | Victim. Instance register_eq_dec : Eq register.
The flags hold booleans while victim holds a thread name.
Definition contents (r : register) : Type := match r with | Victim => thread | Flag _ => bool end.
Initially, both flags should be set to false. But Peterson's algorithm will work correctly for any initial value of victim. Thus we define the initial state of the registers to be parametrized on a thread t that is the initial value of victim. The theorems below will show that the algorithm works for both possible values of t.
Definition register_init (t : thread) (r : register) : contents r := match r with | Victim => t | _ => false end.
We're going to split up the code into atomic sections. The program counter of each thread will keep track of which atomic section to execute next. Each line of the pseudocode above corresponds to a single atomic section (either reading or writing a single shared variable). So program_counter just has six elements, one for each line.
Inductive program_counter : Type := | SetFlag | SetVictim | CheckFlag | CheckVictim | Crit | ResetFlag.
Initially both threads start at SetFlag.
Definition PC_init (t : thread) : program_counter := SetFlag.
Now we're ready to write down the handler function. Instead of writing a separate one for each thread, we're going to write it once by using a helper function to refer to the other thread.
Definition other (t : thread) : thread := match t with | T1 => T2 | T2 => T1 end.
And finally, here's Peterson's algorithm.
Definition handler (t : thread) : HM t unit := pc <- get_PC ;; match pc with | SetFlag => Flag t ::= true ;; goto SetVictim | SetVictim => Victim ::= t ;; goto CheckFlag | CheckFlag => b <- [[ Flag (other t) ]] ;; if b then goto CheckVictim else goto Crit | CheckVictim => t' <- [[ Victim ]] ;; if Eq_dec t t' then goto CheckFlag else goto Crit | Crit => goto ResetFlag | ResetFlag => Flag t ::= false ;; goto SetFlag end.
The code is written in a monadic style. HM is a state monad over the thread's PC as well as the global state. To write the value x to a register r, there is the notation r ::= x. To read from a register r, there's the notation [[ r ]]. get_PC reads the PC. goto writes the PC.
The handler reads the current PC and branches on it. In each branch, it executes the corresponding atomic section. You should take a second to convince yourself that this code implements the pseudocode for Peterson's algorithm.
Proof
We're going to show that Peterson's algorithm provides mutual exclusion. More precisely, in any reachable state of the system, at most one thread has their PC equal to Crit.
First, we write down what it means for a state to be reachable.
Definition reachable l g : Prop := exists t0, step_star register contents thread ( fun _ => program_counter) (run_handler handler) (PC_init, register_init t0) (l, g).
Recall that the register_init takes an argument that is the initial value of Victim. Since we want the algorithm to work regardless of this initial value, a state is considered reachable if there exists any value that causes the system to reach the state. The function run_handler just unwraps the monadic handler function.
Next we provide an induction principle for the reachability predicate. This is essentially just a cleaned up version of the induction principle that you'd get from clos_refl_trans_n1.
Lemma reachable_ind : forall ( P : program_counters thread ( fun _ => program_counter) -> global_state register contents -> Prop ), ( forall t, P PC_init (register_init t)) -> ( forall l g t st' g' u, P l g -> reachable l g -> handler t (l t) g = (u, st', g') -> P (update l t st') g') -> forall l g, reachable l g -> P l g. Proof. (* see code for details *)
Qed.
First we show that the other function is correct. The proof is by case analysis.
Lemma other_neq : forall t, t <> other t. Proof. unfold other. intros. break_match; congruence. Qed.
We're finally ready to start reasoning about Peterson's algorithm. We start by showing that if Flag t is false, then the PC must be at SetFlag. This matches our intuition that the flag is true whenever the thread is acquiring, holding, or releasing the lock.
(* assertion 10.5.1 from Lynch *) Lemma flag_false : forall l g, reachable l g -> forall t, g (Flag t) = false -> l t = SetFlag.
The proof is by induction over the execution. In the base case, both threads have flags set to false and have their PC at SetFlag. The inductive case proceeds by case analysis on which thread took the step and where that thread's PC was before the step. The tactic workhorse is a helper tactic that automates some of the tedium of the case analysis; its definition is not shown, but you can find it in the code.
Proof. induction 1 using reachable_ind; intros. - auto. - unfold handler in *. monad_unfold. repeat break_match; repeat find_inversion; repeat workhorse; repeat find_apply_hyp_hyp; congruence. Qed.
Next, we'll show that if thread t holds the lock and thread other t is trying to acquire the lock, then Victim is set to other t.
(* assertion 10.5.2 from Lynch *) Lemma turn_i : forall l g, reachable l g -> forall t, In (l t) [Crit; ResetFlag] -> In (l (other t)) [CheckFlag; CheckVictim; Crit; ResetFlag] -> g Victim <> t.
The proof is again by induction over the execution. In the base case, no thread holds the lock, so the property holds trivially. In the inductive case, we do a bunch of case analysis. We use the previous lemma to rule out the case where other t enters the critical section by reading Flag t as false, which can't happen because t is in the critical section and thus not at SetFlag. The other cases are straightforward.
Proof. induction 1 using reachable_ind; intros. - compute in *. intuition ; try discriminate. - unfold handler in *. monad_unfold. repeat break_match; repeat find_inversion; workhorse; try workhorse; try solve [ simpl in *; intuition discriminate ]; try solve [ apply IHreachable; auto ; find_rewrite; simpl ; intuition ]; try solve [ exfalso ; eapply other_neq; eauto ]. + find_eapply_lem_hyp flag_false; eauto. find_rewrite. simpl in *. intuition discriminate. + repeat find_rewrite. auto using other_neq. Qed.
Now we can prove mutual exclusion: two threads never have both their PCs in the critical section.
(* lemma 10.10 from Lynch *) Theorem mutex : forall l g, reachable l g -> l T1 = Crit -> l T2 = Crit -> False.
The proof uses the previous lemma. If both threads are in the critical section, then neither of them can be the victim, a contradiction.
Proof. intros. destruct (g Victim) eqn:?; eapply turn_i; eauto ; repeat find_rewrite; simpl ; auto. Qed. End Peterson.
Conclusion
This is a horrible way to write down programs. They get longer and harder to read. Control flow has to be made explicit. The proofs aren't too bad, honestly. But it would be easy to make a mistake in translating the pseudocode into the state machine. I'd like to find a better way to write these kinds of algorithms down while still being able to reason about them. The key to the proof is attaching a bunch of invariants to the PC, but the PC had to be introduced explicitly.
I think this is related to the problem of auxiliary variables. For example, in EWD779, Dijkstra proves Peterson's algorithm correct by using an auxiliary variable that captures the essential information about the PC.There’s a sentence to make any T-Mobile fan skip a beat: Wi-Fi calling is an upcoming feature within iOS 8. Although it wasn’t among the main, highlighted features at the WWDC 2014 opening keynote, it was shown as a feature in the overview screenshot shown above.
Exactly how Wi-Fi calling will be implemented is yet to be seen. It’s very unlikely that T-Mobile phones will come preloaded with an app, or even a downloadable T-Mobile app from the App Store. If I had to guess, I’d assume it was a feature you could access from the Settings connectivity options. And – of course – there’s no guaranteed that T-Mobile iPhones in the US will have the feature enabled. But, the very fact that it’s going to be possible from iOS 8 devices is enough to get us salivating.
As for the rest of iOS 8’s improvements and main headline features, check out my roundup post from earlier.
UPDATE:
Well, that didn’t take long! Mike Sievert just published a new blog post at the usual location, stating that T-Mobile would soon be able to welcome iPhone users to its Wi-Fi calling group.
“…with the news coming out of Apple’s keynote today that Wi-Fi Calling will be enabled with iOS 8 – I’m excited to welcome our iPhone customers to the convenience and ease of T-Mobile Wi-Fi Calling as well.
When that happens, over 90 percent of all T-Mobile smartphones will feature Wi-Fi Calling. “
Exactly how that’s going to look, I’m not sure. But, I’ll try to find out.Last week, we reported on the efforts of Cathie Adams, the former Texas GOP chairwoman who now leads the state’s Eagle Forum group, to preserve language in the state party platform that declared “the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit.”
While the party ultimately removed the “fabric of society language” — ignoring Adams’s warning that such a move would lead to society’s “demise” — it added language endorsing the discredited practice of “ex-gay” therapy.
Adams told Texas Public Radio that she had pushed for the therapy language at the request of a self-proclaimed “ex-gay” friend, who wrote the resolution.
Meanwhile, as Adams was championing the anti-gay resolutions at the GOP convention, she was also fighting a battle for hearts and minds on Facebook. When someone posted one of our articles on Adams’ wall, she responded, “Homosexuality is NOT NORMAL behavior,” and proceeded to debate with pro-LGBT commenters, telling them, “You are loved. Sinful behavior is not,” “When sin is flouted it cannot be ignored,” and “I love you! I want the BEST for you now and in eternity.”
“You are dissing our Founders and the Constitution they gave us,” she added.Caretaker conventions place strict limits on what public officials can say in an election campaign, but Fairfax Media understands the NBN Board decided it was necessary to intervene given the high-profile raids last week. NBN chairman Ziggy Switkowski has defended the referral to the AFP. Credit:Luis Ascui Australian Federal Police officers last week raided the Melbourne office of former communications minister Stephen Conroy and the home of a Labor staffer as part of an investigation into the alleged leaking of confidential NBN documents. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten accused the Turnbull government - through the NBN - of muzzling whistleblowers and limiting the public's right to know about the progress of one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Australian history. "When dozens of confidential company documents are stolen, this is theft," Dr Switkowski writes in an opinion piece, published by Fairfax Media.
"When they are the basis of media headlines and partisan attacks, they wrongly tarnish our reputation, demoralise our work force, distract the executive, and raise doubts where there is little basis for concern. "The process is a form of political 'rumourtrage' - the circulation of misinformation to diminish an enterprise for political gain." Then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull appointed Dr Switkowski, the former chief executive of Telstra, to chair the NBN in 2013. He has overseen the transition from a full fire-to-the-premises rollout to a mixed technology model including use of existing copper networks. "One rationalisation has appeared that this theft is the action of whistleblowers," he writes. "No, it is not.
They cannot give voice to their preferred ideology by passing on stolen documents "NBN has a well established process for responding to information from whistleblowers with a notification process managed by an independent third party. None of the matters in the stolen documents have been raised through this channel. "If an employee has strong personal conviction unsupportive of a company's strategy, they can argue their case with management or resign. "They cannot give voice to their preferred ideology by passing on stolen documents." The warrant issued by the AFP said police were seeking documents relating to The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, the ABC and technology website Delimiter.
These outlets have published a series of damaging stories, based on internal NBN documents marked "commercial in confidence", about the the poor state of the cable TV and broadband network it purchased from Optus and of the copper network purchased from Telstra. "Contrary to media commentary, the documents did nothing to highlight poor management of the business," Dr Switkowski writes. "There are no 'cost blowouts' or 'rollout delays' to the publicly released plans - all one has to do is compare the data that is readily available. "The documents show progress updates, options to ensure targets are met and ways to solve problems which are all normal parts of doing good business. "It's simply wrong to diminish NBN's performance, because such accusations are not supported in fact."
Dr Switkowski writes the NBN is on track to meet or exceed its targets for homes ready for service, paying customers and revenues for the 2015-16 financial year. He said the company has been highly transparent, publishing a weekly rollout update and appearing regularly before Senate hearings. Follow us on TwitterThe latest issue of Famitsu has shared a listing of the top 30 best-selling games in Japan for the month of July 2017. You can check out the full results below.
1. [3DS] Dragon Quest XI – 1,193,407 (1,130,468 physical, 62,939 digital)
2. [PS4] Dragon Quest XI – 1,063,520 (950,338 physical, 113,182 digital)
3. [NSW] Splatoon 2 – 860,599 (800,394 physical, 60,205 digital)
4. [PS4] Gundam Versus – 193,421 (145,161 physical, 48,260 digital)
5. [PS4] Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age – 145,890 (124,874 physical, 21,016 digital)
6. [3DS] Hey! Pikmin – 120,536 (118,544 physical, 1,992 digital)
7. [3DS] Layton’s Mystery Journey – 93,835 (89,075 physical, 4,760 digital)
8. [NSW] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 58,133 (54,530 physical, 3,603 digital)
9. [NSW] ARMS – 44,792 (42,322 physical, 2,470 digital)
10. [PS4] Portal Knights – 41,598 (19,072 physical, 22,526 digital)
11. [3DS] Radi |
its traditional tuition-free policy;
- Alignment of the trust and charter of the school, through the cy pres petition, to reflect the evolution of the institution into its modern form and provide for judicial oversight of the effort to return to a full tuition scholarship model;
- Expansion of the Board to include student trustees (2), additional alumni trustees (2), and faculty and staff representatives (6);
- Establishment of the Council of the Associates of Cooper Union—comprised of the alumni, student, and faculty trustees—with the charge to develop a full plan and proposal for The Associates of Cooper Union.
- Appointment of an independent financial monitor who will be responsible for evaluating and reporting on the financial management of Cooper Union, including compliance with the Consent Decree;
- Transparent disclosure of Board materials, budget documents, and investment results;
- Formation of a board committee to further reform the school’s governance; and
An inclusive search committee to identify the next full-term president.
Cooper Union Alumni Association president Nils Folke Anderson said, "In the spirit of Peter Cooper’s ‘Union,’ the CUAA stands united with the entire community, willing and ready to commence work on the immense challenge before us. We welcome this opportunity to provide additional alumni representation on the Board of Trustees, and pledge to do our part on the road ahead to restore the full scholarship model at Cooper Union.”
The efforts to challenge the administration's positions were the result of years of organizing and protests. Last year, one protester, 2013 graduate Casey Gollan, said of the new students who were the first to pay tuition, "In the past few years, there’s a culture that’s built up. The freshmen that came in this year, a lot of them came in knowing what Free Cooper was, knowing about actions, knowing about the administration, knowing about the lawsuit."
One Class of 2018 freshman said to us, "Even if our class never is given free tuition, the point isn’t about our individual problems. It’s more about the larger story and preserving the legacy of the school."Episcopal Church OKs Same-Sex Blessings; Largest U.S. Denomination To Do So
Enlarge this image toggle caption Craig Ruttle /AFP/Getty Images Craig Ruttle /AFP/Getty Images
With a vote Tuesday evening by its House of Deputies, the Episcopal Church became the largest U.S. denomination so far "to officially sanction same-sex relationships," as CNN's Belief blog writes.
The Associated Press says that "supporters of the same-sex blessings insisted it was not a marriage ceremony despite any similarities. Called 'The Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant,' the ceremony includes prayers and an exchange of vows and rings. Same-sex couples must complete counseling before having their unions or civil marriages blessed by the church."
And the wire service adds that:
"Other mainline Protestant churches have struck down barriers to gay ordination in recent years or allowed individual congregations to celebrate gay or lesbian unions. However, only one major U.S. Protestant group, the United Church of Christ, has endorsed same-sex marriage outright."
At the church's website, "the Cognate Subcommittee on Blessings of the Committee 13, Prayer Book, Liturgy, and Church Music," reports that its resolution "also asks the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (SCLM) to undertake further study during the next three years on how the blessing of lifelong, committed same-sex relationships relates to Christian theology and scripture, and to reflect on the matter with our sisters and brothers throughout the Anglican Communion and with our ecumenical partners."
According to CNN, the church now has about 1.95 million members in the U.S.
In May, NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reported for Morning Edition on how believers can "read the same Bible and come to opposite conclusions about same-sex relationships." Here's an excerpt:INDIANAPOLIS -- Midnight Madness could begin earlier than usual this fall after the NCAA's Legislative Council approved a new rule.
One change would allow teams to hold up to 30 days of practice in the six weeks leading up to their first regular-season game. Previously, teams had only four weeks to get those practices in.
Another change would eliminate the starting time for the first permissible workouts. Currently, teams are not allowed to begin until 5 p.m. on the Friday closest to Oct. 15. The new rule would allow schools to make their own judgment about the starting time when practice begins.
Unless the NCAA's board of directors rejects the proposal at its May 2 meeting, the rule will go into effect this fall.
The rules would not apply to women's teams.Bowl to Crush: Ebi Wonton Soba (海老雲呑そば) — [NOTE: contains fish and shrimp]
Launched in late 2016, this shop is still fairly new to the scene. Hidden down a flight of stairs, past an Indian curry restaurant in a compartmentalized underground retail space, the shop is something of a hidden gem. Everything inside is simple and put together with care — clean white walls, gleaming new kitchen equipment. Like the shop interior, the menu is simple, with just two dishes: wakame soba and ebi-wonton soba. Both options are for pescatarians: they use no meat, but contain some fish and shrimp. The soup is made from two types of kelp and dried niboshi — it's light, fragrant and frankly delicious. The dish comes topped with wakame and onions; and if you so choose, delicate, handmade shrimp wontons. Gentle, finely crafted ramen in a quaint, comfortable setting — altogether an awesome little ramen shop.
NOTE: As of June 2017, Umeno Kisuzume is on hiatus for a couple months. Double-check to make sure it's in operation before visiting.
Opening Hours: 11:30am-3pm, 5pm-8pm
Days Closed: Sunday & National Holidays
東京都渋谷区千駄ヶ谷3-3-3 B1F
B1F, 3-3-3 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo(Must watch video, Garrett Jones’ homeruns in 3 consecutive trips to the plate.)
Former Major leaguer, Garrett Jones (ギャレット・ジョーンズ), or just “Garrett” (ギャレット, in Japan), 35 years of age… Just had a monstrous game yesterday, facing against the Central league team, Yokohama DeNA Baystars in the NPB… blasting homeruns in 3 straight trips to the plate (a 3-run shot in the 2nd for his 10th homerun, a solo shot in the 4th for his 11th, and another 3-run shot in the 5th for his 12th… all 3 were hit off against DeNA Baystars starting pitcher, Guillermo Moscoso)… Garrett Jones finished the game going 3 for 4, with 3 homeruns (his first 3 homer game in Japan), and also with 7 RBI’s in the afternoon, with the Giants winning by a score of 9-4 against DeNA… increasing his batting average from.240 the day before, to.251 now this season.
Garrett Jones, also, now owns a batting line of.251 AVG/.481 SLG/.343 OBP, with 12 homeruns and 33 RBI’s in the year, while playing mostly as the Kyojin’s right fielder… Out of all NPB league ballparks, Garrett Jones has hit very well playing in Yokohama stadium, going 11 for 22 (.500) so far this season.
In this game, history were also made…
Garrett Jones just became the 13th recorded player in Yomiuri Giants history to hit 3 homeruns in a single game, he’s the first Yomiuri player in more than 5 years to accomplish this, since Alex Ramirez did it back in June 29, year 2010. Jones also just became the second only player in Yomiuri Giants history to have a 3 homer game in his first ever year playing in Japan, since Warren Cromartie did it back in July 4, year 1984.
Garrett Jones is now just the 3rd only foreign player in Yomiuri Giants history to accomplish this amazing 3 consecutive trip to the plate homer feat… the other 2 recorded players are South Korean slugger, “Lion King”, Lee Seung-yuop, and former Major leaguer, Alex Ramirez.
With this 3 consecutive trip homer game, Garrett Jones now joins Seibu Lions Ernesto Mejia (April 24, 2016, against the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles) and Yokohama DeNA Baystar Jose Lopez (April 9, 2016, against the Tokyo Yakult Swallows)… as the only players, so far in the season, to hit homeruns in 3 straight trips to the plate in a single game.The trafficking of illegal drugs is causing deforestation in Central America to occur at an increased rate, according to a report published today in Science, whose authors suggest that reforming current U.S. drug policy and perhaps legalizing illegal drugs could help save the rain forests.
The lead author of the new report, Kendra McSweeney, an associate geology professor at Ohio State University, traveled to Central America in 2011 to study how native cultures are dealing with climate change. Instead, she discovered that there were enormous rates of deforestation occurring in areas that are deemed to be protected. As she investigated who was responsible and why, she discovered that the people responsible were drug traffickers creating new smuggling routes in remote areas after being forced out of Mexico by the U.S.’s War on Drugs.
Although drug growers are known to burn down rain forest areas in order to create fields to grow coca, scientists now report that forests are being cleared in order to build roads and landing strips to distribute drugs. In some cases, drug traffickers pay officials to do nothing as they buy land, clear it of trees and build plantations and ranches as fronts for drug money laundering. In addition, with powerful and violent drug cartels taking up residence in these areas, conservationists are limited in the work they can do to prevent loss of forest land. With the limited presence of conservationists, less enforcement of illegal logging and poaching occurs. The authors of the recently published article suggest that a change in U.S. drug policy, perhaps even legalizing illegal drugs, could help to save the rain forests.
McSweeney and her fellow researchers note that deforestation is a particular problem in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras, especially in the lowlands of the Caribbean. Because Latin America is not densely populated, drug traffickers find it a good place through which to smuggle drugs from where they are grown in South America to the U.S. Mexico historically has been the hotbed of drug smuggling efforts, but due to the U.S.-led crackdown in the country, traffickers have been forced to relocate to remote areas in which to set up smuggling routes. In Honduras, as cocaine smuggling rates rose at rapid rates from 2007 to 2011, the yearly rate of deforestation went from approximately 20 square kilometers each year to over 60, which is a 10 percent rate of deforestation annually.
According to Erik Nielsen, assistant professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, other areas that had a high amount of deforestation also had a corresponding increase in the trafficking trade in the area.
The report published Thursday does allow that although there is more than one cause of deforestation in Central America, including illegal logging, development of infrastructure, pressure to create more farmland, and urban sprawl, the activity by drug traffickers is speeding up the destruction of the rain forests.
McSweeney believes that the research conducted by her colleagues and her should refocus the U.S. efforts against drug trafficking in an attempt to find a way to control the illegal industry without causing more deforestation. She sees the recent U.S. trend toward the legalization of marijuana as a positive step towards reducing the amount of land cleared for the growing of the drug and hints that perhaps legalizing other illegal drugs would help to save the Central America rain forests as well.
By Jennifer Pfalz
Sources:
National Geographic
InfoSurHoy
Christian Science Monitor
Science Recorder
Mother Nature NetworkYou see, there have been 13 goals scored by goalies in the history of the NHL. Of those, six were intentionally shot by a goalie into the open net of the other team. The other seven were own goals that were awarded to the goalie because he was the last member of his team to touch the puck.
One said that the last goalie to score a goal was Chris Osgood of the Detroit Red Wings. The other said there had only been six or seven goalie goals ever. At that moment, I realized I had to do something to set the record strait. And no, that did not mean butting into their conversation. It’s never a good idea to correct a couple of drunk hockey fans. Instead, I decided to write this list accounting for every goalie goal ever scored in the NHL.
Last week, New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur scored the third goal of his illustrious NHL career. Well, over the weekend, I happened to overhear a couple of gentlemen discussing the issue of goalies scoring goals at a local drinking establishment that I sometimes frequent, and they were all wrong.
When: November 28, 1979 Billy Smith, the guy who backstopped the New York Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup Championships in the 1980s, was also the first goalie in NHL history to be officially credited with a goal. Rob Ramage of the Colorado Rockies (who later became the New Jersey Devils) fired the puck into his own net after his goalie had left the ice on a delayed penalty, and since Smith was the last Islander to touch the puck, he got the credit. Interestingly, Smith wasn't the first goalie initially credited with a goal. During the 1976-77 NHL season, the Los Angeles Kings' Rogie Vachon was briefly credited with a goal on a similar play. However, replays later revealed that one of his teammates had actually touched the puck, so that guy ended up getting the goal. Also interesting? This first goalie goal in NHL history is also the only one scored in a losing effort. All of the other goals came in wins. Start Slide Show
1. Billy Smith When: December 8, 1987 Eight years after Smith accidentally became the first NHL goalie to score a goal, the Philadelphia Flyers' Ron Hextall became the first to do it on purpose. The Flyers had a two-goal lead over the Bruins with just over a minute left in the game, so Boston pulled their goalie to get the extra attacker. If the Flyers had a one-goal lead, Hextall probably wouldn't have tried to shoot on goal because if he missed, the Bruins would get a faceoff in the Philly zone and a chance to tie the game. However, with a two-goal lead, Hextall had the perfect opportunity...and he made history.
2. Ron Hextall When: April 11, 1989 Ron Hextall was not only the first goalie to intentionally shoot the puck into the other team's net. He was also the first to do it twice, and the first to do it in the playoffs. During their first round playoff series against the Washington Capitals in 1989, the Flyers had a two-goal lead in Game 5, so when the opportunity presented itself, Hextall decided to go for history again. It worked, and the Flyers went on to close out the series in Game 6.
3. Ron Hextall When: March 6, 1996 The next goalie to score a goal was Chris Osgood of the Detroit Red Wings. He shot a puck into an open net late in a game against the Whalers back in '96. Interestingly, this was the first time a goalie scored a goal when his team only had a one-goal lead. So in other words, that took some cojones.
4. Chris Osgood When: April 17, 1997 In 1997, the great Martin Brodeur decided, hey, you know what? Scoring goals looks like a blast. So with a two-goal lead against the Montreal Canadiens in the first game of the first round of the playoffs, Brodeur gave it a shot. Obviously, he succeeded, becoming just the fourth goalie to score a goal and only the third to do it on purpose.
5. Martin Brodeur When: January 2, 1999 Early in 1999, American Damian Rhodes became the first non-Canadian goalie to score a goal. Playing for the Ottawa Senators in a game against the Devils, of all teams, Rhodes got credit for an own goal put in the New Jersey net by Lyle Odelein. It wasn't nearly as cool as the previous four goalie goals, which were all the result of actual shots, but it was the first goalie goal that didn't come in the third period. This one came in the first.
6. Damian Rhodes When: February 15, 2000 Martin Brodeur tied Ron Hextall on the list of career goals by a goalie during a game against the Flyers, ironically. This one, however, was an OG scored on a delayed penalty in the second period, so I'm sure Flyers fans would insist that Brodeur have an asterisk by his name in the record books.
7. Martin Brodeur When: January 2, 2001 Jose Theodore became the fourth NHL goalie to record a goal as the result of an actual shot on net. The Canadiens netminder scored with a 2-0 lead and just nine seconds left on the clock during a game against the Islanders back in 2001.
8. Jose Theodore When: March 10, 2002 Evgeni Nabokov, a Kazakhstan-born Russian, became the first goalie born outside North America to score a goal in the NHL. He is also the last goalie to score a goal by shooting it into the net on purpose. The feat was achieved in the last minute of a game against the Canucks back in 2002. Nabokov's San Jose Sharks had a 6-4 lead when he got the puck and fired it down the ice and into the open net.
9. Evgeni Nabakov When: February 14, 2004 On Valentine's Day 2004, Finland's Mika Noronen of the Buffalo Sabres got credit for an own goal netted by Robert Reichel of the Toronto Maple Leafs. An own goal scored by a member of the Maple Leafs...yep, that sounds about right.
10. Mika Noronen When: April 15, 2006 Despite the fact that this is one of the most recent entries on the list, Chris Mason's goal in 2006 is the only one for which I could not find even a poor-quality video. Of course, if you've been keeping track, then you know this, too, was an own goal. The Predators goalie got the credit when Phoenix's Geoff Sanderson put the puck in his own net on a delayed penalty midway through the 3rd period. So really, we're not missing much.
11. Chris Mason When: December 26, 2011 The Carolina Hurricanes' Cam Ward became the 10th goalie in NHL history to score a goal back in 2011. Trailing by one goal, the New Jersey Devils' $100 million superstar, Ilya Kovalchuk, put the puck in his own net late in a one-goal game. Ward was the last Hurricane to touch it, so he got the goal and the Hurricanes cemented a 4-2 win.
12. Cam Ward When: March 21, 2013 So now, finally, we arrive at the most recent goalie goal, the one scored by Martin Brodeur last week. It certainly wasn't pretty, coming off a Jordan Stall own goal, but it did make Brodeur the all-time goal leader among NHL goalies...like the guy needed another bullet point on his Hall of Fame resume. Want to know a really interesting stat? If you count the Colorado Rockies, who were a part of the very first goalie goal and later became the Devils, New Jersey has been on one side or the other of six of the 13 goals scored by goalies. The Flyers have been involved in three, as have the Hurricanes (if you count the Whalers in 1996), and the Islanders and Canadiens have each been involved twice. Funny how these freak occurrences are clustered, isn't it?Mike Huckabee played up gender stereotypes in a speech delivered Tuesday night in Iowa.
As she live-tweeted the former Arkansas governor’s speech at a fundraiser for Iowa’s Faith and Freedom Coalition on Tuesday in Waukee, Iowa, Des Moines Register columnist Kathee Obradovich passed along this line.
.@GovMikeHuckabee says men like to go hunt/fish with other men. “Women like to go to the restroom with other women.” #iapolitics #iacaucus — Kathie Obradovich (@KObradovich) April 9, 2014
“Yes, he really said that,” Obradovich said in an email to TPM on Wednesday, adding that she ultimately did not write a column about the event.
The comment has received little coverage. The Register covered the event, but its news report didn’t include the line.
Radio Iowa also covered the event and provided audio of Huckabee’s speech.
His joke about women going to the restroom together came after he challenged those in attendance to stand for their convictions, even if they have to do it alone.
You see, I have a concern that one of the reasons we lose battles we should win is because we wait to see whether or not the crowd is going to be with us. My question to you tonight — it’s nice to see a nice, full crowd of folks here in this wonderful Point of Grace Church — but I just wonder if you were the only one who showed up tonight, would you still be ready to take on the cause? Because the fact is we don’t like to do things by ourselves. We really don’t. Guys like to go fishing with other men. They like to go hunting with other men. Women like to go to the restroom with other women. I don’t get that. I can tell you this much: if I ever say, ‘I have to go to the restroom’ and some guy says, ‘I’ll go with you,’ he ain’t goin’ with me. That much I know.
This post has been updated.Since the birth of photography almost 180 years ago, the relationship between a photographer and a camera has remained mostly unchanged. You open a shutter and capture an image. Though you might manipulate lenses, exposures, and chemicals–or, in recent years, bits–there was a nearly one-to-one relationship between what the lens saw and what you captured. But you’ve likely taken thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pictures in recent years that break that relationship without knowing it.
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Computational photography takes a swarm of data from images or image sensors and combines it algorithmically to produce a photo that would be impossible to capture with film photography or digital photography in its more conventional form. Image data can be assembled across time and space, producing super-real high-dynamic range (HDR) photos–or just ones that capture both light and dark areas well. Multiple cameras’ inputs can be fused into a single image, as on some Android phones and the iPhone 7 Plus, allowing for crisper or richer images in a single shot and a synthetic zoom that looks nearly as good as one produced via optical means. But as much as computational photography has insinuated itself into all major smartphone models and some standalone digital cameras, we’re still at the beginning. Google, Facebook, and others are pushing the concept further, and researchers in the field say there are plenty of new ideas circulating that will make their way into hardware–mostly as part of smartphones, the biggest platform for taking pictures and leveraging innovative imaging techniques. The coming developments will allow 3D object capture, video capture and analysis for virtual reality and augmented reality, better real-time AR interaction, and even selfies that resemble you more closely. [Photo: Unsplash user Redd Angelo Smartphones Ate Cameras In recent years, we’ve watched the just-good-enough cameras in smartphones become better-than-good-enough, eating the heart out of what was once a fast-growing market for point-and-shoot digital cameras. While smartphones can’t beat the combination of lens, high-count sensors, and other factors that make digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras the pinnacle of the market, they continue to creep up the curve, with computational photography providing some of the tricks. When HDR first appeared in the iPhone’s iOS 4.1 release in 2010, it followed a typical practice by professional and serious photographers of bracketing shots: taking multiple images manually or with automatic settings at different exposures or other settings. Before image-editing software, photographers would pick among their photos and sometimes use darkroom techniques to combine them. Photoshop and other apps could mix multiple exposures of the same space to great effect, and some iOS apps were already offering this as a feature when iOS 4.1 shipped. Having HDR built directly into a smartphone OS transformed it from a trick into a mainstream technique, even though the early versions weren’t great. (Android followed the iPhone’s lead and added it as a core feature.) Apple gradually shifted from capturing three bracketed images to what photo app developers tell me is a much more elaborate set of captures and adjustments that are analyzed and fused in software to produce the HDR result.
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2014’s HTC One M8 had a “Duo” camera And that’s where things mostly stalled for years, despite a proliferation of academic investigation. Gordon Wetzstein, a professor who leads the Stanford Computational Imaging Group, an interdisciplinary research group at Stanford University, says that of hundreds of papers in the field on computational photography, it “boils back down to one, two, maybe three different incarnations that end up being simple enough that they’re actually useful.” This is partly because of power constraints, phones’ and cameras’ form factors, and other elements that limit practical use. Adding multiple rear-facing cameras was an idea that kicked around for quite a while. While the first dual-camera phone shipped was the HTC One (M8) in early 2014, its abilities were ahead of the software and image-processing hardware. The potential started to be realized with the Huawei P9 (April 2016), which combined color and grayscale cameras, and Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus (October 2016), which has a wide-angle and nominally telephoto pair. In both cases, the multiple cameras’ images capture different aspects simultaneously, which software combines for an arguably better result. With two cameras combined with software that performs object recognition in scene, a system can extract depth. The iPhone 7 Plus uses this with Apple’s still-in-beta Portrait mode, which fillets a subject in the foreground from all the background layers, allowing it to pleasingly blur the background and thereby create the effect known as bokeh. This look simulates the one that a photographer would previously get by using a DSLR paired with a lens with a very short depth of field. A photo taken with the iPhone 7 Plus’s depth-effect mode Wetzstein notes the potential for the depth recognition to have an impact behind photographic effects. By analyzing objects in a scene by depth, a two-camera system could automatically produce better pictures, building on the face, smile, and blink recognition features that are standard in cameras and smartphones today. But if two lens/camera combos are good, surely more are better? Researchers have tested cobbled-together multi-input systems, sometimes quite elaborate, as with the Stanford Multi-Camera Array, which sported 128 separate cameras. These were fixed installations and not practical for commercial (or amateur) use. The low cost of smartphone-size lenses may change that. Instead of using a single, large expensive lens, as on a DSLR, performing computation on photos collected from many smaller lenses and integrating the results computationally could achieve high-quality results. This is the thinking behind the L16, cited by Wetzstein as an example. It’s a camera made by a company simply called Light, with 16 camera elements across three focal lengths. (The $1,700 device isn’t shipping yet and its preorder allotment sold out.)
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Depending on lighting and zoom factor, the L16 fires off a different combination of 10 of those lenses across three focal lengths to fuse a 52-megapixel image using a package not much bigger than a smartphone or typical digital snapshot camera. It may be a gimmick or it may be a way to pack a wallop in one’s pocket; we’ll know when it hits photographers’ hands. A different hardware approach brought Lytro to the market, a single-lens camera that could refocus a photograph after it was taken and produce 3D images. Lytro’s technology relies on a large image sensor, the elements of which were grouped into super-pixels that allowed its software to capture a light field, effectively knowing the incoming direction of light as it hit the sensor. This light field could be reconstructed by its software later. The system never caught on in either its original prosumer or later professional model, and the company adapted its approach to VR capture hardware. Here’s a refocusable photo taken with Lytro’s ultimately unsuccessful consumer camera: Going Deep Rather than capturing light fields or combining image data, some experimental efforts in the hands of developers rely on a synchronized infrared (IR) sensor that captures depth information. Google’s Tango is a practical testbed for this approach, allowing the capture of structured light and time of flight. Structured light relies on projecting a pattern onto a scene that a sensor then reads and uses to estimate distance and surface displacement. Time of flight, by contrast, measures the time between projecting a signal and its reflection, omitting a grid and providing more direct measurement. IR is invisible to the naked eye, and is most commonly used.
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Microsoft’s Kinect sensor add-on for the Xbox started with structured light and shifted to time of flight, and in both versions were the first mainstream uses, but in a fixed location and for a single purpose: capturing motion for gaming and other inputs. Tango, while still a work in progress relevant to developers rather than the masses, brings the technology to mobile devices in a practical form. It’s already available in Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro smartphone. At first glance, these types of depth-finding may not seem to meet the definition of computational photography. In effect, an IR sensor (paired with an emitter) is a camera, paired with a standard photographic camera to build a depth and object map. Any method of obtaining depth plays right into advancing augmented and virtual reality systems and practicality by allowing a mobile device to better identify what’s in its visual field. The more immediate benefit is for AR: Overlaying an existing scene with information requires vastly less computational power than generating VR’s full-blown 3D graphics and letting people interact with that world. Wetzstein says that structured light is a power-hungry technique because it requires the constant projection of a grid. Time of flight should have greater impact, but he says it will require years more development to make it fully capable. 3D VR photographic capture could come at some point from a combination of multiple lenses and depth perception, but probably not any time soon. Wetzstein says that although phones can capture panoramas easily enough, creating both video and stereo panoramas that can be stitched together and remain synchronized currently requires gear in the $15,000 to $30,000 range, such as that used with Facebook 360 and Google Jump, relying on more than a dozen cameras and huge apparatuses. Solving The Shoebox Problem Besides its role in AR and VR, computational photography could help solve much more routine problems by marrying itself with computer vision (the study of machine-based perception) and machine learning (teaching machines to recognize what they perceive).
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By better analyzing the contents of a scene, photo software could automatically identify the best pictures. Irfan Essa, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, heads the school’s Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning. He says that an ever-stronger connection among those areas “has grown into more object-centric thinking.” Computational photography moves beyond just capturing pixels, he says, into capturing light, which allows it to extract the geometry of a scene. “If you know where the object is and what surface it’s on, you can do more with it,” he says. This helps with depth, as noted above, but also with one of the most common problems facing average smartphone owners: It’s easier to take photos than manage them. “We’re just capturing too many pictures,” Essa says. “I take pictures at the dinner table with my family and I end up having 40 to 50 pictures.” By better analyzing the contents of a scene, photo software could automatically identify the best pictures. Some third-party apps already do this, and Apple’s burst mode in its Camera app tries to detect the “best” pictures of a set taken in fast succession. But these early stabs at the idea rely on a handful of cues instead of full-blown recognition. As the photographic tech in smartphones gets better, researchers will be able to take the idea further, Essa says. Essa also expects to see improvements in color matching, tone adjustment, and selfie correction. He notes that despite the decades of work that Adobe and Kodak have put into technologies to allow the same color to appear in the same way everywhere, it’s only recently that these ideas have hit the mass market. Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad Pro, for instance, introduced what Apple calls “True Tone,” a sensor that measures ambient light color and conditions and adjusts the display to provide a consistent set of colors to the viewer, no matter the temperature of the light in which they’re using the tablet.
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Better color management relies on better cameras as well as better displays, and Essa says it will ultimately produce a pipeline that computational photography will aid by integrating similar sampling technologies into the image-creation chain. He notes that skin tone is an area where the most improvement could come. “Most selfies look like crap, but they’re getting better,” he says. One of the pioneering academics of computational photography, Marc Levoy, taught at Stanford, inspired and advised the founders of Lytro, and released an early iPhone app that created faux bokeh. He’s now at Google, and deferred my questions to the firm’s press relations department, which didn’t respond to a request for an interview. This isn’t unusual: Many researchers in this field have founded or joined startups or become part of teams at computer companies and dotcoms. That’s a reminder that there’s likely a fair amount more happening behind the scenes at smartphone makers, some of which will find its way into our hands.©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Sam Burley.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Chase Stone.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Titus Lunter.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Greg Opalinski.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Grzegorz Rutkowski.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Chris Rallis.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Wesley Burt.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Greg Opalinski.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Chase Stone.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Sidharth Chaturvedi.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Yeong-Hao Han.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Tyler Jacobson.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Sara Winters.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Svetlin Velinov.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Chris Rallis.
©2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Chris Rallis.
Magic: The Gathering dives into classic Egyptian mythology in, its second expansion set of the year after Aether Revolt. The new set is released today, April 28, and you're strongly encouraged to go along to your local game store (or open up Magic Online) and give it a whirl.
Of course, if you want to read about the set before you spend some money, we've got you covered as well. We've been playing with the new cards for a couple of weeks—here's our review.
The world of Amonkhet looks awfully like Egypt...
Magic takes place in a series of originally-created worlds, but often these worlds are inspired by real-life cultures and myths. In some cases the influences are subtle—Kaladesh’s Indian motifs, for example—but in others, the source material strongly shines through, such as in Theros, a 2013/14 block that pulled from Greek mythology.
Amonkhet is explicitly based on Egyptian mythology, and from glancing at a few opened booster packs, many of the classic tropes jump out from the art. There’s a bunch of giant stone sphinx-like monuments, animal-headed wizards, and even some revered cats, all far higher quality than you might expect from small card frames. Modern Magic has a well-deserved reputation for a great level of polish in its art, and Amonkhet is no exception.
The real joy, though, is the sinister undercurrent slowly revealed through looking at the full set, especially the flavour text—the sentence or two of italics at the bottom of some cards (see right). Open a pack or two and there’s no clear narrative, but the feel of the world is one of glorious combat training within a clean, peaceful city. Several hastily-torn-apart booster packs later, hints abound at the sinister purpose of the training, the imminent return of the world’s draconic “god”, and the steep price of failing the ominous combat trials.
It’s continuing a trend for Magic sets over the last few years, but it bears repeating: the game’s creators have done well to provide a rich, multi-level story considering the limited medium they have to work with. For most players, the feel of the world is well communicated through what’s on the cards, and there’s resources available online on the Magic website if you want to read more lore. Conversely, if you only care about reading enough rules text to smash your opponents, you’ll still find that the distinctive art helps with recognizing and memorizing cards.
The mechanics
As the first expansion of a new block, Amonkhet is full of original mechanics, but also |
DeMarcus Cousins, is an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season. In each case, the availability of the player at the Feb. 8 trade deadline would be determined by the direction in which the teams are headed.
The 2018 crop of free agents is very top heavy with George, Cousins, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Isaiah Thomas, Chris Paul, DeAndre Jordan. The next tier includes Aaron Gordon (restricted), Avery Bradley, Clint Capela (restricted), Jabari Parker (restricted), Zach LaVine (restricted), Rodney Hood (restricted) and Jusuf Nurkic (restricted). But unless the Heat clear cap space they will not be a player during free agency next summer. Miami’s projected payroll is about $10 million above the projected salary cap.
From @ChrisHypeTrain: Has Josh Richardson become the Heat’s best player?
He has been this year. Richardson not only has blossomed offensively but he continues to be a lockdown defender and he’s durable (Richardson is one of three Heat players to have played every game). Richardson is averaging 17.8 points 3.8 rebounds and 2.6 assists in December while shooting.550 from the field and.475 on 3-pointers. He has had four games of at least 24 points in the month, including topping his career-high twice. Entering Tuesday’s game against Orlando, Richardson was limiting players he’s defending to 38.1 percent shooting, 6.6 percent below than their combined average shooting percentage.
[Miami Heat need fully engaged/healthy Hassan Whiteside to succeed]
[Five takeaways: Hassan Whiteside returns, but it was his teammates that carried Heat to win over Magic]
With team in need, Heat’s James Johnson took risk in returning Saturday, now he’s out again]
[Heat’s Dion Waiters will consider ankle surgery after the season]
[Want more Heat news sent directly to your Facebook feed? Make sure to like our Heat Facebook page](CBS 8) - This story could go into the "San Diego's Dumbest Criminals" file. A Lakeside man goes to visit his son in a Colorado prison and ends up behind bars himself on suspicion of smuggling drugs.
Convicted felon Donald Curtis, 56, was arrested by FBI agents Friday at a Florence, Colo. federal lockup after plotting over a monitored phone with his imprisoned son for two months.
According to an FBI agent's report, Denney planned to smuggle a golf ball-sized chunk of black tar heroin he had wrapped in plastic and hid in his rectum.
Authorities say Denney was going to transfer the drugs by giving his 29-year-old son, who has the same first name, a mouth-to-mouth kiss during a visit.
"I felt so disgusted and would never imagine taking something out of my butt and putting it in my mouth in the first place, but to kiss my own child -- it wouldn't happen," neighbor Mike V. said.
Denney's son, known as the "Hard Hat Bandit", was serving a seven-year prison sentence for a three-week-long San Diego County bank robbery spree in September and October 2008 from Kearny Mesa to Alpine. Now he's facing more charges in the wake of the alleged smuggling conspiracy involving his father, who's now also behind bars.
As far as how much the pair could have gained if the transfer had been successful, phone transcripts from monitored calls in court records revealed this exchange:
Son: I can raise $7,000 before you know it.
Father: The business venture would come out to $16,000 altogether or more.
Son: $20,000 cash… $10,000 to you and $10,000 to me, no more no less… that's what I struck up.
"I don't see how they thought they wouldn't get caught, talking about it on multiple calls all summer on what exactly you're going to do," Mike said.
Colorado authorities say Donald Curtis Denney has pleaded not guilty to the possession and attempted distribution charges and will be returning to federal court next Monday.With Andrew Breitbart’s death this week, one of the most persistent falsehoods has resurfaced, the claim that the original tape released of Shirley Sherrod’s speech to an NAACP Chapter was misleading or defamatory in that it did not reveal that Sherrod’s discrimination against a white farmer was long ago, that she ended up helping him, and that she had since changed her view.
The AP, in its story about Breibart’s death, gave this description:
In 2010, though, Breitbart’s credibility had been burned after his website posted video excerpts of a 40-minute NAACP speech by U.S. Dept. of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod that appeared to show her making racist comments. Breitbart drew heat when the speech was published in full, showing that selectively edited video had taken the remarks out of context–and Sherrod had been fired for it. (The White House later apologized for dismissing Sherrod, a longtime USDA official, and Sherrod sued Breitbart for defamation, a suit that was ongoing when he died.)
Similarly Josh Gerstein at Politico, in discussing the ongoing defamation lawsuit, made similar claims:
While the clips and analysis posted at Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com seemed to indicate that Sherrod was racist, the full video of of Sherrod’s speech included her indicating she had learned a lesson from her earlier predispositions and had come to reject racial stereotyping.
Other times the narrative is invoked not casually, but as part of an effort to smear Bretibart as either racist or at least willing to use racism to his political advantage, as in this post by David Frum soon after Bretibart’s death:
Because President Obama was black, and because Breitbart believed in using every and any weapon at hand, Breitbart’s politics did inevitably become racially coded. Breitbart’s memory will always be linked to his defamation of Shirley Sherrod and his attempt to make a national scandal out of back payments to black farmers: the story he always called “Pigford” with self-conscious resonance.
Whether innocent or malicious, the narrative is wrong.
I originally analyzed the alleged falsehoods when the controversy first broke in July 2010, The Original Sherrod Clip Was Not “False”:
The original Sherrod clip certainly gave enough of a flavor that Sherrod was talking about something in the past, and had changed (watch the clip beginning at 1:50, where Sherrod mentions that she no longer views race as the real issue). The full speech gives an even more complete version of that supposed transformation, but that does not make the shorter version “false.” Even Breitbart’s original descriptionof the tape — before the full tape was available, actually disclosed Sherrod’s transformation (emphasis mine): In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer. To the extent the original clip and Breitbart’s description portrayed Sherrod as having engaged in a racist act in the past, such implication literally was true, as Sherrod admits. The actions people in the Obama administration took, and the conclusions the media drew from that literal truth may have been unfair and precipitous, but that does not make the clip defamatory.
In February 2011, after Sherrod had sued Breitbart and co-defendant Larry O’Connor, I analysed the tape in even greater detail, literally frame by frame, Dissecting Shirley Sherrod’s Complaint Against Andrew Breitbart.
Once again I demonstrated that in fact each of the elements of Sherrod’s story which legend has it was not on the “edited” tape in fact was on the tape. Read the post for the full sequence, but here are some images which demonstrate that the full scope of Sherrod’s story was in the “edited” tape.
For example, the fact that Sherrod eventually helped the white farmer was on the tape:
So too that Sherrod later realized she was wrong to have those feelings:
There was a possible inaccuracy in the original tape in that it did not initially make clear that while Sherrod at the time of the speech worked for the federal government, at the time of her dealings with the white farmer she worked for state government. A correction was added to the tape soon after its release.
The reaction to the tape did not take into account what actually was on the tape. A spokesman for the NAACP denounced Sherrod and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack fired her.
When the complete video was released, everyone acted as if her redemption from her racist feelings was being revealed for the first time, and the NAACP rallied around her and Vilsack offered her her job back (which she refused).
This supposed revelation on the full version of the tape was a handy excuse, but the facts had been revealed in the original tape had anyone listened or watched carefully.
What really was going on was that the crowd reaction to Sherrod’s comments caught on the tape was very damaging to the NAACP and those who attacked the Tea Party movement as racist. The crowd cheered when Sherrod recounted her long-ago hostility to the white farmer, and that crowd reaction was the real story. Focusing the debate on the editing of the tape was a convenient distraction.
So let’s put to bed the claim that the original Sherrod tape was misleading, defamatory or reflective of racial codes or racism on the part of Breitbart.
Andrew Breitbart is not around to defend himself anymore, and we owe it to him to push back, hard.A Toronto resident is searching for a “Good Samaritan” who called 911 after he tumbled down a TTC staircase while rushing to an appointment on Saturday afternoon, sustaining a head injury.
Yves Allard fell down a flight of stairs in Bathurst Station around 4 p.m. while he was making his way to the subway platform.
“I must have lost my footing somehow,” Allard told CTV News Toronto. “I was in a panic and I tried to catch my footing on my own.”
When he arrived at the bottom, Allard says he looked up and saw a trail of blood lining the staircase.
“As soon as I fell I panicked,” he explained. “My extremities were numb … I was in shock and I was scared.”
That’s when a man standing on the platform rushed to his aid until emergency crews arrived.
“He kept me conscious so once in a while he would tap my face to make sure I didn’t pass out,” Allard said.
He was rushed to hospital where he was treated for a deep gash wound on the back of his head, receiving eight staples.
He is now recovering at home, but believes his injuries could have been much worse.
“Had there not been someone – a first responder who was as active as he was – I could have had a brain hemorrhage, I could have gone into a coma, I could have gotten a concussion, I could have gotten severe brain damage, but because of his first response I’m standing here and I’m talking,” Allard said.
Now he wants to thank the stranger in person and has started an online search, posting to social media “letting my guardian angel know I’m okay and that he saved my life.”
The “Good Samaritan” is described as a shorter man, believed to be in his late 20s or early 30s, with dark hair.
“I don’t know how to reach him or too much about him … [but] all I want is to thank this man from the bottom of my heart for helping me through a severe trauma,” Allard wrote in his online post.With the pilgrimage of the Hajj about to reach its pinnacle on Eid al Adha – a day hold most sacred in Islam as it marked God’s mercy towards Abraham as he readied his son for sacrifice, Muslims have been painfully reminded of the violence and oppression they have had to face by the hand of the Saudi regime.
Ever since the House of Saud claimed for itself the title of Custodian of the two Holy Mosques: Mecca and Medina, pilgrims have seen their rights and to a great extent their faith, hijacked by Wahhabism – a violent and ascetic interpretation of Islam which dogmatism was rejected by Sunni Islam’s most prominent authority, the Grand Mufti of al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al–Tayeb earlier this September.
While the issue has seldom been reported due to political entanglements, and maybe disinterest, Western capitals have more often than not proven lenient towards their allies as to preserve their own strategic interests. The issue of the Hajj and Islam altogether have seen now pitted a faith against one theocracy: Saudi Arabia.
For the sake of accuracy, it needs to be said that for all the many claims the kingdom may have formulated over the centuries, Wahhabism neither speaks, nor represents Islam as a whole. If anything, Wahhabism has taken a sledgehammer to Islam by laying waste its historical heritage, branding communities under the label of apostasy to together exert control and claim righteousness.
Many religious scholars have argued Wahhabism to stand in negation of Islamic principles. As Mohamed Daadaoui puts it: “The greatest threat to Islam emanates from the relatively modern phenomenon of Wahhabism, a cancer that has been allowed to fester and metastasize for several centuries.”
On the matter, I believe that Dr John Andrew Morrow, the author of The Covenants Of The Prophet Muhammad With The Christians Of The World, has been particularly thorough and vocal in his denunciation of Wahhabism inherent radicalism and propensity to bloodshed.
As I mentioned earlier, this quiet war within the Islamic world has reached boiling point ― so much so, in fact, that Muslims across continents have joined in together to denounce Riyadh’s theocratic tyranny. “No more will we tolerate for our faith to be redacted and our traditions disappeared to the radicalism of Wahhabism,” said Dr Riaz Karim, the Director and Founder of the Mona Relief Organization.
“Ninety-eight percent of Islamic heritage has been destroyed at the hands of Wahhabism. No longer will we tolerate this cultural genocide. No more will we permit the peaceful message of Islam to be hijacked, and our history annihilated at the hands of Wahhabi terrorists,”said the Baqee Organization in exclusive comments.
Parallel to Wahhabi-inspired radicals’ vicious campaign against the world religious heritage, Saudi Arabia has vetoed millions of Muslims out of their pilgrimage – essentially violating an entire religious community’s most basic human rights, and most paramount religious duty.
Beyond a simple case of religious oppression, Saudi Arabia has overseen the destruction of most of Mecca’s 1000-year-old historical landmarks, single-handedly redacting History to claim a truth which is a fabrication.
“Failure to protect them [holy sites] from destruction is the biggest tragedy for the Islamic architectural heritage. The Saudi royal family claims to be guardians of the holy places of Islam, and profit hugely from the centuries by visiting believers to Mecca and Medina for pilgrimage. And yet, they are party to this barbaric desecration of the holiest sites in the Islamic world.”
Money and politics, more than faith, might lie at the core of the matter.
According to the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies in London, the Hajj and Umra pilgrimages are Saudi Arabia’ second source of income after Oil, with an estimated $12 billion per annum. This figure was echoed by economists and Saudi officials.
Today, Saudi Arabia is aggressively looking to maximisz its “Islamic” revenue as to bridge its increasing deficit and finance its transformation of Islam landscape into a Vegas-looking-type grand capitalist complex.
In this dystopian religious reality, Muslims are no longer entitled to their faith – rather they must abide by Wahhabism’s intrinsic extremism and bow in submissive acceptance to an increasingly vindictive Wahhabi clergy.
For those who dare still hold true to such principles as compassion, justice, pluralism and tolerance, the Hajj has simply been closed.
Jeremy Taylor best summarized Saudi Arabia’s attitude towards Islam’s holiest of sites when he wrote for The Independent: “Historic and culturally important landmarks are being destroyed to make way for luxury hotels and malls.”
Undeniably, there has been a disturbing trend whereby Wahhabism has promoted the destruction of all religious landmarks across the region, arguing idolatry, while at the same time working to capitalize God.DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – There is a movement in the Texas Democratic Party to decriminalize marijuana. The move has already happened in other states, and the party says that it is time for it to happen in Texas as well. According to the party’s written platform — on page 29 — Democrats in Texas are urging the President, the Attorney General and Congress to support the move.
The platform states that 85 percent of the arrests made related to marijuana have been for possession only, and there is no evidence that marijuana is a gateway drug. Prohibiting marijuana use, the party says, puts the control of marijuana production and distribution in the hands of drug cartels and street gangs.
The Texas Democratic Party would rather see the drug regulated like alcohol and tobacco. “Decrimination of marijuana does not mean we endorse marijuana use, but it is only a call for wiser law enforcement and public health policy,” the platform states. “Recent polls show over 50 percent of Americans believe marijuana should be decriminalized.”
Supporters of the movement said that having a marijuana drug charge on a person’s record scars them for life, and that is wrong. “When you get a job, you always have to be honest about your past,” said Brownsville resident Bill McMillan, “but it’s something you have to live with for the rest of your life.”
“You shouldn’t put a criminal stigma on these young folks for the rest of their lives,” said Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, “and affect their ability to get jobs and their ability to have a meaningful career.”
Opponents argue that marijuana can be abused, and can lead to frequent overuse. Republicans have already killed similar measures in a number of other states, and are expected to do the same in Texas.
The Colorado Democratic Party also added legalizing marijuana to its platform earlier this year.
Also Check Out:WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyer Neil Eggleston could be looking toward a comfortable retirement on the generous nest egg he built through high-stakes representation of prominent Washington officials and corporate clients. Instead, he’s returning to a grueling post at a White House under siege on multiple legal fronts.
The 61-year-old Eggleston has come on as chief counsel as President Barack Obama faces congressional investigations, pushback from the Supreme Court, and House Speaker John Boehner’s announcement last month that he intends to sue the president over his stepped-up use of executive orders.
Among the myriad sensitive matters requiring Eggleston’s expertise, Boehner’s suit is an unexpected challenge he must prepare for without knowing exactly the legal arguments it will make. In his first interview since coming to the White House this spring, Eggleston predicted the matter will be quickly dismissed by a judge for a lack of legal standing.
“As I used to tell clients in private practice, anybody can sue anybody over anything,” Eggleston told The Associated Press from his West Wing corner office. “The fact that he’s going to say that he’s going to bring some lawsuit is not going to affect what the president is going to do.”
Eggleston’s guidance of the legal limits of Obama’s executive actions draws from experience working across all three branches of government early in his career. He clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative chosen by President Richard Nixon, and later worked for the House Select Committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. He was in President Bill Clinton’s counsel’s office during oversight hearings into the Whitewater real estate transactions and later helped fight subpoenas of presidential aides in the Monica Lewinsky investigation.
In private practice, he represented white-collar clients, including the outside directors at Enron after the company’s financial collapse. His political clients included Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a witness in the corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He also represented former Cabinet secretaries Federico Pena and Alexis Herman when they were facing investigations that did not result in charges.
Sara Taylor Fagen, President George W. Bush’s former political director, hired Eggleston when she was subpoenaed in a congressional investigation into White House involvement in the firings of U.S. attorneys. The White House advised her not to testify, but Eggleston escorted her to Capitol Hill and sat by, telling her which questions she could answer without violating Bush’s claims of executive privilege.
“He completely led the White House counsel out of a tricky situation when it should have been the other way around,” Fagen said.
Obama didn’t know Eggleston until outgoing counsel Kathy Ruemmler recommended him as her replacement. After he was chosen, she arranged a Camp David retreat for administration lawyers to get to know Eggleston. She “played Charlie Rose,” interviewing him before the group about growing up the son of a lawyer in Indiana, his experiences with Clinton and his management style.
Eggleston advises Obama on diplomatic policy, congressional investigations and judicial nominations, including preparation for a possible Supreme Court vacancy. He’s also a national security adviser on issues such as counterterrorism operations, like the capture of terrorism suspect Ahmed Abu Khattala, and the fallout of government surveillance disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Eggleston’s financial disclosure report shows he has assets worth between $15 million and $43 million. He says part of how he’s built that wealth is that he is not much of a spender — he has one home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and drives an 8-year-old car. He paid college tuition only for his daughter, a member of the Teach For America corps in Rhode Island, while his son is attending Eggleston’s alma mater, Duke University, on a soccer scholarship. He traveled to Tuscany last year as part of a cycling group he helps organize, but his other summer trips have been to the more modest destinations of Vermont and Iowa.
Eggleston said he has no qualms about coming back into government service amid so many challenges.
“To me, that’s even better,” he said with a smile.
___
Follow Nedra Pickler at http://twitter.com/nedrapickler
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Will justice be served? Will the refugees and their families be deported?
Source: Refugees Admit Sex Attack on Disabled Girl in Idaho – Breitbart
by Katie McHugh
Three boys from Iraq and Sudan who were invited into the country via refugee programs pled guilty to charges of sexually brutalizing a five-year-old American child in Twin Falls, Idaho, last year.
A seven-year-old Iraqi boy, plus 14-year-old and 10-year-old Sudanese boys, reportedly cornered the tiny victim in a laundry room at the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls, Idaho, on June 2. They stripped her naked, sexually assaulted her, urinated all over her body and in her mouth, and videotaped the attack, according to witnesses.
The attack sparked another national uproar among Americans — but only dismissive responses from managers in President Barack Obama’s administration and among the groups which support the federal programs that delivered the foreign boys to the girl’s apartment building.
According to 7KTVB, the Third-World refugees—identified merely as “boys” in the headline—agreed to plead guilty to serious felonies:
One defendant pleaded guilty to felony sexual exploitation of a child and misdemeanor battery. The second defendant pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting felony lewd conduct and aiding and abetting misdemeanor battery. The third boy pleaded guilty to accessory to the commission of a felony.
“I’m pleased that we were able to resolve this case in a way that was approved and agreed to by the victim’s family and their attorney. This continues to be a serious and sad case, but it was resolved properly,” Twin Falls Prosecutor Grant Loebs said Tuesday.
Last July, Loebs slammed the local citizens who were horrified by the crime against the girl, who is developmentally disabled. “There is a small group of people in Twin Falls County whose life goal is to eliminate refugees, and thus far they have not been constrained by the truth,” he said of initial rumors surrounding the attack. “There were no Syrians involved, there was no knife involved, there was no gang rape,” he then declared.
Routinely, Americans are deliberately misled about refugee programs by politicians working hand-in-hand with secretive refugee resettlement program directors. The refugee programs often also work with locally important business groups to supply cheap labor to agricultural employers, including slaughterhouses and dairy farms.
The penalty for the felony sexual exploitation of a child carries a sentence of up to 30 years in prison under Idaho law. It’s not clear when the sentencing will take place. The prosecutor’s office would not say.
Had a retired nurse not reported seeing the oldest refugee recording the attack and giving instructions to the younger boys, the attack on the victim could have been much worse. “The worst thing was the way they peed all over her clothes and on her, too, and I thought that was one of the meanest things I’ve ever saw done,” retired nurse Jolene Payne said at the time to World Net Daily. She continued:
The little girl had no clothes on. The boys took them off. The littlest boy said: ‘We didn’t do it. He told us to,’ pointing to the older boy. They’re just kids that have a mother and they moved here from overseas. The women don’t even talk any English, some of them do, but others don’t. They wear long dresses and long black things on their heads.
“They stripped her naked and urinated in her mouth,” another community resident, David Odell, told Fox News in June.
Breitbart News spoke with the victim’s father in August, who saw roughly thirty seconds of the refugees’ recording of the sex attack, and said his daughter had been both orally and anally raped. Before nurse Payne stopped the attack, another refugee boy was reportedly undressing and preparing to rape the victim as well. He continued:
Thirty seconds showed them in the laundry room, they pulled my daughter around, pushed her up against the wall, pulled her pants off, he dropped his pants, he was trying to get her from behind, you know, they only … no, for the boy that was trying to do it he was, you know, he was only seven to nine years old, so not a lot of… he didn’t know what he was really doing, as you’d expect.
The victim tried to escape her refugee tormentors as they danced around her and laughed at her, the father said. “My daughter didn’t really, was trying to fight him a little bit,” he continued. “[S]he finally got away, pulled her pants up, ran around to the side of a corner, ran inside a washing machine, hunched down, shaking in fear, while he danced around with his pants down, laughing at her, pointing at her, with all the other boys – you could hear them in the background, doing the same thing – and that’s all I watched.”
The video continued for another couple minutes, he said, but could not bring himself to watch it. “I know there was a lot more that happened that was told to me by the prosecutor who had watched the video,” he said. “More after that, you know, he went back to her, tried doing the front, he, um… oral sex with, you know, oral with her, he shoved it in her mouth,” which is considered rape, the victim’s mother added as he spoke. “He peed all over her in her mouth, all over her body, her face, head… totally defiled her.”
After the attack, the Muslim refugee families of the boys collectively swarmed their victim’s apartment and urged the parents not to call police after the attack, he said.
For the next ten months, the victim’s family and citizens who were outraged by the crime were derided by politicians and dismissed by the establishment press.
An Obama administration official also threatened to prosecute and punish private citizens discussing the crime and refugee resettlement. “The spread of false information or inflammatory or threatening statements about the perpetrators or the crime itself reduces public safety and may violate federal law. We have seen time and again that the spread of falsehoods about refugees divides our communities,” said U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson last June. She later repackaged her threat into a warning about “harassing communications” against public officials, which is not illegal activity.
Leo Hohmann writes: Town where Muslims assaulted 5-year-old wants more refugees
Twin Falls police refused to hand over the full police reports, and the local hospital has still not released the little girl’s medical records to her parents.
Activists say the city officials’ concern for the tiny victim still seems to take a back seat to their efforts to make sure refugees feel welcome.
Councilman Talkington suggested, during a Twin Falls meeting Monday, the city should adopt a resolution declaring Twin Falls a “welcoming city.”
Welcoming cities lay out the red carpet for immigrants – legal and illegal – and embrace the transformation of their demographics through refugee resettlement.
Only two other cities in Idaho have declared themselves “welcoming” – Boise and Ketchum.
“It’s one that has shown that Idaho has gotten a lot of bad press, that we are open communities, we welcome everybody, and it would be a step forward for Twin Falls to consider the welcoming community potential for a resolution,” Talkington said.
“Thank you councilman,” Mayor Shawn Barigar said. “We will certainly consider having that on a future agenda.”
On Tuesday, the day after that idea was introduced at the council meeting, the Twin Falls county prosecutor’s office issued a press release saying the refugee families and attorney of the family of the 5-year-old victim approved the settlements reached in each of the three cases, alleviating the need for a trial.
What the boys pleaded guilty to
The three boys pleaded guilty to the charges as follows:
Defendant No. 1 pleaded guilty to felony sexual exploitation of a child and misdemeanor battery.
Defendant No. 2 pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting felony lewd conduct and aiding and abetting misdemeanor battery.
Defendant No. 3 pleaded guilty to the charge of accessory to the commission of a felony.
Grant Loebs declined to comment on camera…
‘We have just begun to clean house in Idaho’
Julie DeWolfe, a local activist in Twin Falls and friend of the victim’s family, said she was relieved by the long-awaited outcome.
“I am relieved for Jayla’s family that all three youths pleaded guilty, but I know that the sentencing will answer our question as to whether or not Idaho takes gang-rape seriously,” DeWolfe said.
“The issue cannot be fully resolved until we address the broken refugee program, the numerous failures of Idaho state laws regarding underage rapists, the careless and inaccurate interview comments made by the Twin Falls County prosecutor, and address the gross apathy of our elected officials which led one local councilman to publicly defame the father of the rape victim,” she added. “We have just begun to clean house in Idaho.”
Creeping Sharia was one of the first to bring this case to light and were among those derided for having the countries of origin of the Muslim perpetrators wrong.
Keep reading and keep sharing to expose the elected and un-elected officials determined to bring more Muslim invaders to your towns. Future generations will thank you.
PS: The guilty Muslim refugees were released into the custody of their parents shortly after the attack.Office of Government Commerce Logo
The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) was a UK Government Office established as part of the HM Treasury in 2000. It was moved into the Efficiency and Reform Group of the Cabinet Office in 2010, before being closed in 2011.[1]
The OGC operated through the Government Procurement Service, an executive agency now known as the Crown Commercial Service.
The purpose of the OGC was to support the procurement and acquisition process of public sector organisations in the UK through policy and process guidance and the negotiation of overarching service and provision frameworks. This was intended to improve value for money to the taxpayer, optimising the level of taxpayers equity directed towards the delivery of services. Similar organisations can be found in most western European countries, for instance Hansel Ltd. in Finland and Consip in Italy.
The OGC supported initiatives to encourage better supplier relations, sustainable procurement, the benefits of utilising smaller suppliers and the potential of eProcurement. Representing the UK at the European Union (EU), the organisation assisted the public sector application of EU procurement rules within the United Kingdom.
The OGC was a member of Procurement G6, an informal group leading the use of framework agreements and e-procurement instruments in public procurement.
Best practice models [ edit ]
The organisation used to act as sponsor for best practice of project, programme, risk and service management:
Managing Successful Programmes (MSP)
Projects in Controlled Environments (PRINCE2)
Management of Risk (M_o_R)
Portfolio Management (MoP)
Value Management (MoV)
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices (P3O)
These areas of best practice are now owned jointly by the UK government and Capita, being managed by Axelos.
Logo [ edit ]
The problematic logo.
On 24 April 2008 it was reported in the Daily Telegraph that a new logo for OGC had been introduced at the cost of £14,000. The logo caused embarrassment because, when rotated 90° clockwise, it has a sexual connotation.[2]
See also [ edit ]Disney Feels The Heat As Children Lead The Cord Cutting Revolution
from the adapt-or-perish dept
For a while now we've noted that it's actually the youngest among us that are leading the cord cutting revolution. Viacom has watched channels like Nickelodeon experience a ratings free fall for several years now as streaming alternatives have emerged as a useful alternative to strictly-scheduled, commercial-bloated Saturday morning cartoons. Toddlers don't really care if they're watching the latest and greatest "True Detective" episode or not, and parents, like everybody else, are tired of paying for bloated cable bundles filled with channels they never watch.
Like Viacom, Disney has been feeling the brunt of this evolution, especially since cable TV accounted for 30% of its revenue and 43% of profits last fiscal year. But, as evident by the ongoing subscriber exodus at Disney-owned ESPN, the company really hasn't really done a very good job adapting to the changing market. The same thing is occurring at Disney's kid-oriented networks like the Disney Channel, Disney Jr., and Disney XD, all of which are, well, not faring particularly well under this new streaming paradigm:
"For the first six months of this year, the commercial-free Disney Channel's ratings among in its core 2-11 and 6-14 demographics fell 23% in prime time and 13% and 18%, respectively, during the full day, compared with the same period a year ago. Ratings are also down at the smaller Disney Jr. and Disney XD networks, which fall under Mr. Marsh's Disney Channel umbrella.
Cable revenue at Disney is relatively flat, and operating income is down 6% in the first half of the current fiscal year. That has contributed to a freak out or two among Wall Street analysts, which have in recent months finally, truly woken up to a trend they spent years both ridiculing and denying. That's in large part thanks to the fact that 2016's 1.7% decline in traditional cable TV viewers was the biggest cord cutting acceleration on record. The second quarter is expected to be notably worse, with most analysts predicting a 1 million subscriber decline (or greater).
And that fear on Wall Street has, in turn, forced traditionally myopic cable executives to finally realize that they need to stop trying to defend the traditional bloated cable TV cash cow -- and begin offering cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives:
"Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger has said that strengthening online accessibility for television programs is a priority and that the company is preparing to offer its channels, in part or whole, directly to consumers online rather than just through costly cable packages. Profits for Disney Channel and Freeform are driven in part by long-term contracts with cable companies, but the erosion in ratings is likely to ultimately hit the bottom line unless the networks can generate substantial new digital revenue."
Of course, like the Millennials ahead of them, most of these kids will grow up (correctly) believing its bizarre and punitive to force people to buy oodles of often-horrible cable TV channels at outrageous prices. And contrary to some cable and broadcast executives who still think this is all just a temporary blip on a radar screen, this rise in competition and the resulting massive shift toward cheaper, more flexible viewing options isn't going anywhere.
Filed Under: cord cutting, streaming
Companies: disneyPolice are calling it one of the most sophisticated drug organizations involving fentanyl and carfetanil in Canada and it has been shut down by the RCMP.
Dubbed “project E-Neophile”, Kelowna RCMP have arrested two people.
Police say the accused are a 35-year-old Kelowna man and a 28 year-old Kelowna woman.
Global Okanagan has learned their identities.
James Nelson and his spouse Cassie Bonthoux were arrested in connection with the investigation, but there has not been a decision whether charges are warranted. They’re not in custody but have a court date scheduled for December.
They own a street/urban clothing store on Pandosy Street in Kelowna called Duke and Duchess Apparel. The store was raided on August 10. It was shut down after the raid but has since reopened. Police also raided their home in the Black Mountain area. The City of Kelowna posted a ‘do not occupy or enter’ poster on the door of the home because it had been used as a controlled substance operation.
Police say the pair were allegedly using the dark-web — a layer of the internet where criminals have been known to sell their wares.
“The drugs were then trafficked utilizing the dark-web throughout Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia,” Corporal Jesse O’Donaghey said.
The investigation began in September 2016 when police allege the two suspects were mailing packages across North America.
Police say the alleged criminal activity went silent up until July 2017 when police allege the suspects created a new account on the dark-web and resumed selling drugs.
Several police enforcement agencies became involved in the investigation including Calgary Police and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Police allege the suspects were selling fentanyl and carfentanil from a business they own in downtown Kelowna and from their home.
“It was as many as 25 packages that were seized by our investigators and they were allegedly destined for Canadian addresses, as well as internationally through the United States, Europe and Australia. Two unsecured firearms were also seized during the execution of those search warrants along with $68,000 in Bitcoin,” O’Donaghey said.
Police say the arrest will put a significant dent in the selling of fentanyl and carfentanil.
“This may |
— a fact that has gone unrecognized by Party leaders and professional Republicans.
Pew found that only a vanishing 11 percent of Republican voters believe that so-called “free-trade” will raise wages. By a nearly 5-to-1 margin, Republican voters believe that so-called “free trade” depresses wages, rather than increases wages, and by a greater than 3-to-1 margin, Republican voters believe that “free trade” will kill jobs, not create them.
Yet despite polling data, Republican Party leaders worked tirelessly to give President Obama expanded trade powers.
In 2015, Ryan acted as President Obama’s “partner” in his effort to fast track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In a 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Ryan described the TPP as a “historic” agreement, which “would mean greater access to a billion customers for American manufacturers, farmers, and ranchers.”
Ryan was the leading champion for fast tracking the TPP even though Wisconsin suffered a net loss of nearly 40,000 jobs in 2015 alone due to the U.S. trade deficit with TPP countries, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
In his open primary on August 9th, Ryan will likely face some of the very voters whose views Ryan believes the GOP needs to “repudiate.” According to exit polling data, a majority of GOP Wisconsin voters believe foreign trade deals “take away” jobs.
Nehlen, who opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, has warned that Ryan’s trade agenda “will be the fundamental undoing of America.”
Nehlen has warned that the TPP would be “worse than NAFTA. It sets up a super-national organization similar to the European Union. We know all too well what the European Union is doing right now, and we don’t want that to happen here.”
This “massive, job-killing international ‘trade’ deal,” Nehlen writes, “sells out American workers. It sells out American business and industry. It will kill the economy in this district, never mind the rest of the country.”
Nehlen has previously said that Ryan’s support for these multinational trade deals seems to stem from Ryan’s ties to globalist donors, such as the donors whom Ryan presumably spoke to at the Koch Brothers retreat — although, as the Washington Post reports, the complete list of donors Ryan spoke to at the event is not available to the public. “News outlets were invited to cover portions of the Koch seminar, on the condition that they did not name donors in attendance without their permission,” the Washington Post writes.
Nehlen said: “Paul Ryan isn’t representing our district. He’s representing the big businesses and big banks that pour money into his campaign coffers. It’s their agendas he’s carrying forward with his votes in Congress… not ours.”
Ryan’s remarks at the Koch Brothers retreat come on the heels of new reports indicating that the Koch Brothers are refusing to run negative ads against Hillary Clinton — which some have suggested will only help the success of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Ryan’s remarks also come in the immediate aftermath of his decision to join in on Clinton’s latest attacks against his Party’s nominee.
Ryan’s recent statements and actions, which seem designed to undermine the GOP nominee, have led some to speculate that Ryan might perhaps prefer to see Hillary Clinton in the White House than Donald Trump.
Indeed, several reports have documented that Ryan would likely accomplish more of his legislative goals on foreign trade, foreign migration, and foreign wars if Hillary Clinton were president than if Donald Trump were.
Should Ryan win his re-election and Trump lose, it is likely that — as Tim Kaine has predicted — amnesty will be enacted within the first 100 days, the TPP will be implemented, and criminal sentencing laws will be reduced, potentially resulting in an increase in the amount of violent crime and recidivism in U.S. communities.
All of these policies are supported by Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, and the globalist special interests who fund both the Clinton campaign and Ryan.
Listen to Julia Hahn’s discussion of this article on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM:Six men affiliated to the CPI(M) were arrested in connection with the murder of BJP worker Santosh in Kannur district of Kerala. Santosh (52) was alone at home when he was attacked by a gang of unidentified men late Wednesday night in Andalur, close to chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s Dharmadam constituency. Even though the victim was taken to hospital by police and neighbours, he had succumbed to injuries by then. Santosh, a booth worker of the BJP, is survived by his mother, wife and two children.
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The district unit of the BJP, outraged at Santosh’s murder, had organised a hartal in Kannur Thursday and squarely put the blame for the incident on the ruling CPI(M). They also demanded an explanation from Vijayan, who hails from Kannur.
At least six murders of party workers were reported in Kannur last year with casualties on both the CPI(M) and the RSS sides. The district is politically sensitive and has been witness to frequent clashes between the CPI(M) and the RSS-BJP.EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2017 (AEO2017), released this morning presents updated projections for U.S. energy markets. This AEO is the first to have projections through 2050 in the AEO tables.
The United States becomes a net energy exporter in most AEO2017 cases as petroleum liquid imports fall and natural gas exports rise. Exports are highest, and grow throughout the projection period, in the High Oil and Gas Resource and Technology case, because favorable geology and technological developments result in the production of oil and natural gas at lower costs.
The High Oil Price case provides favorable economic conditions for crude oil and natural gas producers while restraining domestic consumption, enabling the most rapid transition to net exporter status. In all cases but the High Oil and Gas Resource Technology case, which assumes substantial improvements in production technology and more favorable resource availability, U.S. energy production declines in the 2030s, which slows or reverses projected growth in net energy exports.
The eight cases considered in AEO2017 incorporate different assumptions that reflect market, technology, resource, and policy uncertainties that affect energy markets. Other key findings include
Energy consumption is consistent across all AEO cases, bounded by the High and Low Economic Growth cases. In the Reference case, total energy consumption increases 5% between 2016 and 2040. Because a significant portion of energy consumption is related to economic activity, energy consumption is projected to increase by approximately 11% from 2016 to 2040 in the High Economic Growth case and remain nearly flat in the Low Economic Growth Case. In all AEO cases, the electric power sector remains the largest consumer of primary energy.
Energy production ranges from nearly flat in the Low Oil and Gas Resource and Technology case to growth of nearly 50% over 2016–40 in the High Oil and Gas Resource and Technology Case. Unlike energy consumption, which varies less across AEO cases, projections of energy production vary widely. Production growth is dependent on technology, resource, and market conditions. Total energy production increases by more than 20% in the Reference case from 2016 through 2040, led by increases in crude oil and natural gas production.
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions decline in most AEO cases, with the highest emissions projected in the No Clean Power Plan case. All AEO2017 cases except the No Clean Power Plan case assume the Clean Power Plan is implemented.
To better focus EIA’s resources on expanding its understanding of rapidly evolving energy markets and to better represent new information in EIA’s models and publications, EIA has adopted a two-year release cycle for the AEO. Like AEO2015, AEO2017 is a shorter edition of the AEO. A full edition of the AEO, including Issues in Focus articles, in-depth updates on changes in Legislation and Regulations, and a larger set of side cases with browser tables and spreadsheets for all cases is produced every second year.
In years between the full editions, a shorter edition provides a smaller number of cases summarized in annotated presentation slides with the standard set of AEO browser tables and spreadsheets containing the detailed modeling results. EIA will continue to update and refine the market dynamics and technologies in future AEOs, especially for the projections between 2040 and 2050. Projections from the AEO2017 Reference and alternative cases are available on the Annual Energy Outlook website.
Principal contributor: EIA StaffCompanies lagging in their digital transformation or not even trying to become digital, face the risk of losing substantial portions of their sales, IT leadership, and senior management. About 30% of senior vice presidents, vice presidents, and director-level executives who don’t have adequate access to resources and opportunities to develop and thrive in a digital environment are planning to leave their company in less than one year.
This is one of the key finding of a new research report, Aligning the Organization for its Digital Future. It is based on a worldwide survey of 3,700 business executives, managers, and analysts, conducted for the fifth year in a row by MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with Deloitte.
There is remarkable across the board agreement about digital disruption which 87% of those surveyed believe will impact their industry. This is considerably up from last year’s survey, where only 26% said that digital technologies present a threat of any kind. Regardless of the much-increased anticipation of digital disruption, only 44% think their organizations are adequately preparing for it. Similarly, a recent Gartner survey of IT professionals found that 59% said that their IT organization is unprepared for the digital business of the next two years.
“Digital” has a strong external orientation, according to the reported objectives of the digital strategy of the organizations surveyed. 64% “strongly agree” with improving customer experience and engagement as a key objective. Only 41% cite “fundamentally transform business processes and/or business model.”
While the orientation of companies’ digital strategy is primarily external, the perceived obstacles to digital success are primarily internal. The biggest barrier impending the organization from taking advantage of digital trends is too many competing priorities, followed by lack of organizational agility. “Disruption,” to these respondents, begins at home, not with the startups promising to disrupt their industry.
Understanding technology is a required but not the most important skill for success in a digital workplace. Says the report: “In an open-ended question, respondents said that the ability to steer a company through business model change is the most important skill, cited by 22%.” They also think that there are not enough people with the right skills. Only 11% say that their company’s current talent base can compete effectively in the digital economy.
The report goes beyond the raw data to assess “companies’ sophistication in their use of digital technologies.” Explaining the methodology for this assessment, it says:
For the past two years, we have conducted surveys in which we asked respondents to “imagine an ideal organization transformed by digital technologies and capabilities that improve processes, engage talent across the organization, and drive new value-generating business models.” We then asked them to rate their company against that ideal on a scale of 1 to 10. Respondents fall into three groups: companies at the early stages of digital development (rating of 1-3 on a 10-point scale, 32% of respondents), digitally developing companies (rating of 4-6, 42% of respondents), and businesses that are digitally maturing (rating of 7-10, 26% of respondents).
The assessment of whether a company is digitally mature or not is a subjective assessment by the respondents, not by outside observers applying objective criteria. It may well be that the respondents who rated their companies low on the digital maturity scale simply are not happy with their current employer—not enough opportunities to develop, generally incompetent leaders, too much hierarchy and not enough collaboration.
Notwithstanding the issue of how digitally mature companies were identified, the report’s conclusion—and prescription—is that to succeed in a digital world you must adopt a digital culture. It says:
A key finding in this year’s study is that digitally maturing organizations have organizational cultures that share common features…The main characteristics of digital cultures include: an expanded appetite for risk, rapid experimentation, heavy investment in talent, and recruiting and developing leaders who excel at “soft” skills.
Sounds to me very much like the prescriptions for business success emanating from business schools for at least half a century, way before “digital” has become a set of new technologies, processes, and attitudes companies must invest in and take advantage of to stay competitive.
The importance of becoming digital today is a good enough reason to read the report carefully and take note of how business executives in 131 countries and 27 industries answered the questions posed to them. The Sloan Management Review and Deloitte should be commended for conducting a large annual survey probing the state-of-the-art of digital transformation.
But for a more convincing assessment of what constitutes “digital maturity” we will have to wait until Sloan and Deloitte (or someone else) conduct research that compares objectively companies that have invested heavily in “digital” with companies that have invested only lightly in this new new thing. A difficult research challenge, no doubt, as very few companies willingly admit to falling behind the times.
The findings will be even more meaningful if the research will compare objectively successful companies (e.g., profitable) not investing in digital with not-so-successful companies (e.g., losing money, market share) that have totally embraced digital. Aren’t there out there today companies that are hierarchical, risk-averse, and do not invest in talent and digital but still that make a ton of money? Can we be absolutely confident that these will not be the characteristics of (at least some) successful companies in the future?by Judith Curry
Politicians, activists and journalists have stimulated an ‘availability cascade’ [link] to support alarm about human-caused climate change.
Climate change may exacerbate environmental problems that are caused by overpopulation, poorly planned land-use and over-exploitation of natural resources. However, for the most part it is very difficult to separate out the impacts of human caused climate change from natural climate change and from other societal impacts.
Nevertheless, climate change has become a grand narrative in which human-caused climate change has become a dominant cause of societal problems. Everything that goes wrong then reinforces the conviction that that there is only one thing we can do prevent societal problems – stop burning fossil fuels. This grand narrative misleads us to think that if we solve the problem of climate change, then these other problems would also be solved.
Politicians, activists and journalists have stimulated an ‘availability cascade’ [link] to support alarm about human-caused climate change. An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation that triggers a self-perpetuating chain reaction: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and greater alarm. Because slowly increasing temperatures don’t seem alarming, the ‘availability entrepreneurs’ push extreme weather events and public health impacts as being caused by human-caused climate change, more of which is in store if we don’t quickly act to cool the planet by reducing fossil fuel emissions.
A deconstruction of this availability cascade is needed to avoid bias in our thinking and to better understand the true risks of human caused climate change:
The basis for this cascade originates from the 1992 UNFCCC treaty, to avoid dangerous human caused climate change through stabilization of CO2 emissions. Note, it was not until 1995 that the IPCC 2 nd Assess Report identified a discernible human influence on global climate.
Assess Report identified a discernible human influence on global climate. Then, the UNFCCC changed the definition of climate change to refer to a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity. This leads to the perception that all climate change is caused by humans.
Sea level rise and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, drought and heat waves are attributed to climate change, which are de facto assumed to be caused by human-caused climate change.
Human health impacts, national security risks, etc. that are exacerbated by extreme weather events are then inferred to be caused by human-caused climate change.
A critical link in this cascade is the link between human-caused climate change and extreme weather. In 2012, the IPCC published a Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX). The Report found low to medium confidence of a trend in droughts in some regions and the frequency of heavy rains in some regions, and high confidence of a trend in heat waves in Australia. There is no trend in hurricanes or wild fires. Attribution of any trend in extreme weather events to human caused climate change cannot be done with any confidence. With regards to the perception (and damage statistics) that severe weather events seem more frequent and more severe over the past decade, there are several factors in play. The first is the increasing vulnerability and exposure associated with increasing concentration of wealth in coastal and other disaster-prone regions. The second factor is natural climate variability. Many extreme weather events have documented relationships with natural climate variability; in the U.S., extreme weather events (e.g. droughts, heat waves and hurricanes) were significantly worse in the 1930’s and 1950’s.
As a specific example of this cascade, consider the recent announcement from the White House that it will start a new initiative to focus on the health effects of climate change, with a draft report from the USGCRP [link]. Several years ago, the Cato Institute addressed this issue in their impact assessment of climate change on the U.S.[link]. The Cato Report concluded that the health effects of climate change on the U.S. are negligible today, and are likely to remain so in the future. They found that 46 percent of all deaths from extreme weather events in the U.S. from 1993-2006 were from excessive cold and 28 percent were from excessive heat, and that overall deaths from extreme weather events have declined in the U.S. They also found that diseases transmitted by food, water and insects have been reduced by orders of magnitude in the U.S. over the past century, and show no sign of resurgence.
Specifically with regards to asthma, which is an issue that influenced President Obama: the argument is that increasing heat waves will exacerbate smog, which exacerbates asthma. However, according to the EPA, smog levels have dropped 33% since 1980 [link]. Further, heat waves in the U.S. have not been increasing; the EPA’s analysis of the heat wave index for the U.S. [link] shows that the index during the 1930’s reached levels almost an order of magnitude greater than the recent decade. While asthma rates have been climbing, the cause cannot be global warming. Nevertheless, a recent survey [link] of the American Thoracic Society members found that 77% of the respondents observed an impact from climate change on increases in chronic disease severity from air pollution.
The availability cascade that leads to belief that climate change is exacerbating chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma misleads us away from a deeper investigation of the true causes of public health problems and from addressing these problems in a more meaningful way. And then multiply this consequence across the whole range of issues that climate change is allegedly making worse. The availability cascade of climate change as apocalypse acts to narrow the viewpoints and policy options that we are willing to consider in dealing with complex issues such as public health, weather disasters and national security. Should we be surprised when reducing CO 2 emissions does not ameliorate any of these problems?
Is climate change making us stupid? I fear that the answer is ‘yes.’ This problem is exacerbated by politically correct climate change orthodoxy, enforced by politicians, advocates and the media in an availability cascade, which is destroying our ability to think rationally about how we should respond to climate change. As a result, we have created a political log-jam over this issue, with scientists caught in the cross-fire.
JC note: this is a draft of something I’m writing, I would appreciate any feedback.Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms takes place during World War I and relates the experience of the war through the first-person account of an American serving in the Italian Army. The narrator is an ambulance driver, holds the rank of lieutenant, and supervises a small squad of fellow paramedics serving on the Italian front. This is all revealed slowly over the course of the book, and it isn’t until about halfway through that we learn his name is Frederic Henry. Early in the book, Henry is wounded and spends time in a hospital in Milan, where he meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse.
A Farewell to Arms is the first novel I’ve read by Hemingway, although I have read some of his short stories. I generally prefer older books of naturalist and romanticist literature, and I was worried he might be too modern for my tastes. To my pleasant surprise, Hemingway uses modernist techniques like stream of consciousness sparingly, only in the most emotionally tense moments, when it is most appropriate. A Farewell to Arms is quite modernist, however, in another respect: its deliberate avoidance of drama. It is almost as if Hemingway goes out of his way to deprive his audience of any satisfying dramatic moments, as if to deliver a thrill or a tear would be a cliché. The narrator relates the most frightening and stressful moments of life like war, birth, and death with a delivery so deadpan he could be reading the phone book. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened—in feelingless monotone. I don’t require a war novel to contain combat scenes, but there ought to be some moments of emotional power that illustrate the effect that war has on human lives, instead of just a series of meals and pointless conversations. At one point, a person is shot and killed (not by the enemy) and the event is merely glossed over in a sentence or two as if nothing ever happened. That should have been a shocking moment in the character’s development, but to shock would be too conventional, so instead it is treated as a commonplace occurrence.
This deliberate eschewing of emotional stimulation is most evident in Henry’s romance with Barkley. They have sex, drink wine, and engage in terrible dialogue which makes her sound stupid. Henry repeatedly says he loves her, but it is difficult for the reader to see why, other than she’s beautiful and available. It is not easy to care for such a thinly drawn character, which makes any scene in which the two are in danger that much more difficult to become emotionally invested in. All bets are off in the final chapter, however, which is far more visceral and moving than the book that precedes it, even though it has nothing to do with the war. Though the outcome is predictable, Henry’s reaction to it is the best writing in the book. If the entire novel were as good as its final chapter, its status as a masterpiece of American literature would be easier to understand.
The novel is based on Hemingway’s own experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy, which would explain why he chose such an unusual perspective on the First World War, rather than something more indicative of the typical Doughboy’s experience. For all its faults, A Farewell to Arms is a pretty good war novel. It is worlds better than John Dos Passos’s boring and overly poetic World War I novel Three Soldiers, yet doesn’t succumb to the sensationalistic macho excesses of Norman Mailer’s World War II epic The Naked and the Dead. To some extent, I don’t see what all the fuss is about, and given Hemingway’s reputation, I doubt this is his best work, but it is good enough to make me want to give For Whom the Bell Tolls a try.Green Party, Libertarian candidates speak at LSC-Kingwood forum
James Veasaw, Kathie Glass and Scott Ford answer questions about their  visions for office if elected this November during a candidate forum held at Lone Star College-Kingwood Oct. 11. James Veasaw, Kathie Glass and Scott Ford answer questions about their  visions for office if elected this November during a candidate forum held at Lone Star College-Kingwood Oct. 11. Photo: Melanie Feuk Photo: Melanie Feuk Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Green Party, Libertarian candidates speak at LSC-Kingwood forum 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
Students gathered in the Student Conference Center at Lone Star College-Kingwood Oct. 11 to listen to four candidates running for various offices discuss their visions if elected Nov. 8.
The candidate forum featured Hal Ridley Jr., Green Party candidate running for U.S. House District 36; Kathie Glass, Libertarian Party candidate running for Texas Supreme Court, Place 3; James Veasaw, Libertarian Party candidate running for U.S. House, District 2; and Scott Ford, Libertarian Party candidate running for Texas State Representative, District 127.
Each candidate was given approximately seven minutes to introduce themselves.
Hal Ridley Jr.
"I'm not a politician," Ridley said. "I don't really have a campaign. I don't ask for donations. Mostly what I'm trying to do is spread ideas because you can lose, but your ideas can still win. A lot of times, your ideas, once they're out, they go on their own. Somebody will pick them up."
Ridley hopes to bring positive change to the U.S. through invention and innovations.
"I am a musician, a songwriter, semi-retired truck driver, but mostly I'm an inventor," Ridley said. "Invention, innovation and entrepreneurial acumen are all we have to pull up from this spiral. A lot of the technologies and innovations are already here."
He conveyed his vision for a personal robotic revolution to localize the economy.
"Bring the economy back: localized," Ridley said. "Everything we need is here. We just need to look around, pick the projects that work and help advance the situation."
Kathie Glass
Having practiced law for more than 30 years, Glass said her reason for running is to fight to mend a legal system she feels is not fulfilling its purpose.
"I want to run for Supreme Court because I think a free people need a functioning legal system and we don't have one currently: not on the civil side; not on the criminal side," Glass said. "I've been a civil trial lawyer for over 30 years and it's what I was born to do.
"Washington is broken and the two-party system is corrupted by cronyism. The well-connected people have controlled and corrupted all of our processes including our legal process.
I saw justice was not being done, but I want to change that."
James Veasaw
Veasaw focused on fighting for constitution rights, specifically the Second Amendment.
"When they go after your Second Amendment rights, you have no other recourse," Veasaw said. "That's the one thing that stands between us and the government. The constitution gives us this right and when they redefine your right to carry weapons and defend your family and property; we've lost it.
"We've become servants of the tyrant."
Scott Ford
Ford said, with approximately 15 years of experience as an educator, he is concentrating on the need for educational reform and his intention to make a difference at the state level.
"Educational policy is handled predominately at the state level," Ford said. "How many of you felt like your public school really prepared you for life? Education is very important to me. Statewide, this is where this is handled."
Questions and answers
Ridley left before the question-and answer-session.
A question was posed to Glass concerning how her political views influenced her interpretation of the law.
"I think you have an inalienable natural right to live your life the way you want to, provided that you're not interfering with the identical rights other people have; interfering by force or fraud, with their right to live their life," Glass said. "I think that is a fundamental bedrock principle that our legal system was enacted to uphold and should be, but often is not."
Ford was asked about his thoughts as a Libertarian and educator on abolishing the Department of Education at the federal level.
"The Department of Education at the federal level is an absolute disaster," Ford said. "Education should be controlled at the local level with some state involvement. This is different than a traditional Libertarian platform and different from even a traditional Republican platform, but I think there is a place for public education, but we need to change it. We need to rip it up from the ground up."
What are the candidates' ultimate goals if elected?
"Ultimately, I would love to see us get back to our constitutional roots," Ford said. "I don't care what you do with your personal life as long as it doesn't hurt me or what I do with my personal life. I want you to keep as much money as you can, but I want to limit government as much as humanly possible."
Glass said she would vote to hear more cases, have more written opinions and dissent. "Discretionary review means that (the Supreme Court) doesn't have to take anything they don't want to and the pattern seems to be that they take cases where the cronies lost so they can fix that," Glass said. "If the cronies won, they don't take the case. They also don't write opinions as much as they should. Sometimes they just issue 'petition granted,' 'petition denied' and you don't know why, so you don't have any confidence that the rule of law is being applied."
Veasaw said he would go after corruption and cronyism.
"If you can't get a government job, one of the reasons is that you're not given a fair chance," Veasaw said. "The fix is already in and most of the money that we're spending in taxes is going to corruption. If we could just clean up the corruption that's in Washington, D.C., we can solve most of our financial problems."
Ford was then asked what government programs he would like to see trimmed down and how he would propose to fix issues with education.
In addition to his career as an educator, Ford spent time working for government agencies including the FBI and CIA. He said he would like to see across-the-board budget cuts at the state and federal levels.
"In regards to education, I would love to at least get rid of STAAR," Ford said. "In testing preparation you are told what to do if a student gets so scared they throw up on their testing booklet. We're taking children who should have a love of learning and we're driving that love out of them. Step one is to get back to making these kids love education."
Importance of Forums
Seth Howard, assistant director for the Center of Civic Engagement at Lone Star College System, explained the importance of hosting political forums like this at the college level.
"Part of my job is to engage students to become more engaged citizens," Howard said. "We try to provide those opportunities to become more engaged, more powerful and more skillful actors so that (students) can make the change (they) want to see within the community today rather than tomorrow."
For more information about Lone Star College-Kingwood visit www.lonestar.edu/kingwood.htm.There's a saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, a poetic way of noting that it's difficult, perhaps even ill-advised, to translate an auditory medium to a silent page. But that's exactly what writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie have been doing in the world of comic books for nearly a decade, with music-themed series like Phonogram, a cult favorite comic about music as magic, and The Wicked and the Divine, a title where pop stars are literal gods.
"We quite like making things hard for ourselves," says Gillen. "Especially when we started, we were arrogant: 'This is impossible to do, let's try it.'"
It seems to have worked; The Wicked and the Divine not only earned three Eisner Award nominations last year, but attracted the attention of Hollywood, where it was recently optioned for television.
But the most recent issue of the series takes on a challenge just as daunting: detailing the horrors of online harassment, and how misogyny circumscribes the lives of women in the public eye, whether they're walking down the street or performing in front of millions.
The comic, which recently published its second volume, follows a pantheon of 12 gods who take human form every 90 years and transform their teenage hosts into charismatic icons with the power to change the world who burn bright but die two years later. In the modern era that means that deities like Amaterasu, Lucifer, and Baal have become pop stars, many of whom evoke shades of Rihanna, Björk, and Florence Welch.
Most of the characters in the comic are women, and the most recent issue focuses on Tara, a masked character whom we know almost nothing about. She's one of the modern-day gods, but the primary detail attached to her is the knee-jerk catchphrase tossed off at her by the other characters and the public at large: "Fucking Tara."
Image Comics
In the latest issue, we get a glimpse of what this sort of casual cruelty looks like when directed en masse at a visible woman online—and it's an ugly thing to behold. There's a devastating two-page spread designed to look like an iPad rotated on its side, displaying a Twitter feed of Tara's mentions. This is what Tara sees, a cumulative look at what the world tells her about herself, and it's an ugly thing to behold.
By design, the only thing that the audience has learned about Tara until this moment is that she is to be dismissed and mocked; like so many women in media and online, she is a target, a catchphrase, and a hashtag—not a person.
"In a real way, by this point people have been talked into a hate mob against a character they don’t know anything about," says Gillen. "Many WicDiv fans are complicit with the hate mob, and that's kind of the point: It's very easy to make people join hate mobs."
Drawing From Real World Harassment
It’s a phenomenon that has been elevated into the public eye often over the last year, particularly within the world of videogames. Gillen, who worked as a videogame critic before his shift into comic book writing, knows many of the targets of recent harassment campaigns against women online and has spent a lot of time reading the horrible social media attacks hurled at them.
"I had to sit down and spend an entire afternoon [with] those things, and I researched them," says Gillen. "I let that poison into my head because I wanted to be aware of what people were going through. Digging into that pit is not fun to do. I know that's nothing compared to experiencing it, but it was hard. It was a traumatic issue to do."
The comic also doesn't depict harassment as a problem exclusive to famous women. In another scene, for example, we see Tara walking down the street at age 11 as a car of men shouts sexual obscenities at her. "There are multiple statements in that issue," says Gillen. "Many of the works of art I love are saying several things simultaneously. And that is what life is like: if you boll anything down to a message on a card, it's not really saying anything."
Image Comics
Multiple meanings come up a lot when Gillen talks about Phonogram as well, his first collaboration with McKelvie and the book that helped make his name in the comics industry. First published in 2006, it imagined a world where music was quite literally magic, and fans called "phonomancers" used Britpop songs from the '90s as conduits for supernatural powers. It was, as Gillen says, "a weird fucking book," and while it never achieved mainstream popularity, it became a cult hit with a devoted following.
It's often been observed that Gillen looks a bit like *Phonogram'*s protagonist David Kohl, and he readily admits that there are clear autobiographical elements in both Phonogram and the The Wicked and the Divine. For years, he was an prominent critic who wrote about music and videogames—even coining the term "new games journalism"—before shifting into comic books, where he started creating entertainment of his own and made his way from cult indie titles to scripting flagship books like Uncanny X-Men for Marvel.
"Phonogram is about my 20s; it's about the consumption of art and how that changes you. It's aggressively not interested in musicians," says Gillen. "But The Wicked and the Divine is about my 30s. It's about that happened to me since Phonogram came out—that transition from somebody who is both a fan and a critic to a creator. And how you adapt when you get in that space. And why the hell would anyone want to be a writer or artist or musician in any way whatsoever?"
The newest volume of Phonogram hits shelves today, nearly six years after the last one, and almost a decade after the original book debuted. It's a bit odd now for Gillen and McKelvie to look back at their earlier work for reference, in part because so much time has passed. "If you ask me and Jamie to sign a copy of Phonogram, we do this great thing where we start flipping through it and mocking ourselves," laughs Gillen. "'Oh, isn't that a nice big caption!'"
They've changed personally as well as creatively; the first issue of Phonogram dropped when Gillen was 31, and now he's rounding the bend to 40. An earlier issue featured a character named Emily Aster declaring that "nostalgia is an emotion for people with no future." The new volume, The Immaterial Girl, not only casts a glance back at the classic MTV era of music videos, but returns to find Aster growing older and feeling the nostalgia she once derided in others starting to creep in.
Cosplay for Gods That Don't Exist
There are aspects of The Wicked and the Divine that measure the passage of time as well, though a bit more quietly. Gillen notes that most of the parents we meet in the book are now closer to his age, and he describes his 17-year-old protagonist Laura—who worships the pop star pantheon and would do almost anything to become one of them—as being both a bit like his child, and a bit like someone he used to be.
"She's a fan who wants to move from one world to the other," says Gillen.
And now that Gillen has completed his own transformation from fan to successful creator, the stories he tells about fandom do something strangely recursive and almost magical: They inspire fandoms of their own, simply by being told.
"The fan culture around each book is a pretty intense mirroring of what the book itself is," says Gillen. Where Phonogram developed a small but tight-knit scene of fans, the audience for The Wicked and the Divine is appropriately bigger and brighter, demonstrating their love with everything from tattoos and cosplay. Gillen says they've explicitly told readers to imagine the god they would become in the pantheon, and now some fans show up at conventions cosplaying as those personalized deities.
"We're almost trying to coach people into thinking about themselves a bit like Laura," says Gillen. "I love that people have started to cosplay these gods that |
i 11. There’s also zero signage or a door. If you want to get in, you need to find the payphone booth and punch in the correct password.
A Bangkok itinerary with a scavenger hunt? Yes, please!
If you can get all the right, you’ll be allowed to enter a retro Cuban-style bar complete with distressed decor and one of the best mojitos in town.
Call 0614503750 to get the entry code.
Drinks: Starting from around 200 THB (R 92.00)
Address: Sukhumvit Rd. Soi 11, Bangkok, Thailand
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday from 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. and Sunday from 6:00 p.m. to midnight.
Bangkok Itinerary Day 3: Ghosts, Pampering and Michelin-rated Phad Thai
Pamper Yourself with a Thai Massage
No Bangkok itinerary would be complete without at least one massage.
Start your day off by visiting one of the many spas around the city. Choose from a no-frills Thai massage or splurge on an aromantic session complete with a foot massage and facial.
For an affordable, yet bougie experience, head over to Health Land. You can get a two-hour traditional Thai massage for 600 THB (R 270.00) and treatment packages start from 5,200 THB ( R 2,300) for couples.
Or you can browse spa package deals with Klook.
Address: 120 North Sathorn Rd., Silom, Bangrak, Bangkok
Opening Hours: Monday to Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to midnight.
Lunch at Hom Duan
Don’t have time to visit Chiang Mai? Get a taste of northern Thailand at Hom Duan.
This eatery boasts an array of Isaan dishes that you and your wallet will love. A bowl of khao soi costs 65 THB ( R 30.00), and a choice of Thai curries will only set you back 45-65 THB ( R 20-30.00).
The dishes are pre-made, so you can only order what is on display. While it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you’re craving, it will force you to try different dishes, and you can expect something new every day.
Address: 70/2 Soi Ekkamai, Sukhumvit 63 | Klangtan Nuea, Wattana, Bangkok
Opening hours: Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Climb Bangkok’s Abandoned Skyscraper
Back in 1997, the Thai Baht collapsed during Asia’s 1997 Financial Crisis.
And a luxury apartment building meant for Bangkok’s upper middle class turned into one of the city’s most haunted places.
Locals believe the “Ghost Tower” is located on an ancient burial ground and it’s the epicentre of superstitious folklore.
But if you can get past the general creepiness of the building, the rooftop boasts incredible views of Bangkok’s skyline and Chao Phraya River.
It should take you about 30 minutes to reach the top and it’s one of the best sunset spots in the city.
Entrance Fee: 500 THB (R 230.00)
Opening Hours: Monday to Sunday from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Dinner at Thip Samai Pad Thai
Are you looking for the BEST Phad Thai in the city? Then add Thip Samai to your Bangkok itinerary. It’s a Michelin-rated street stall that always has a line of drolling customers.
It’s the perfect stop for a midnight snack after a night of bar hopping on Khao San road. But keep in mind that a plate of food can take anywhere from 10 minutes to one hour.
Address: 313-315 Maha Chai Road, Khwaeng Samran Rat, Khet Phra Nakhon Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, 10200, Thailand
Opening Hours: Monday to Friday from 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.
Have a Drink on Khao San Road
It wouldn’t be a Bangkok itinerary without a stop at Khao San Road.
The street is full of dirt cheap backpackers, bars, clubs, restaurants, and street food vendors.
There’s always something going on any day of the week, and you won’t have to look hard for decent drink specials.
Head to The Brick Bar if you’re a fan of ska music or Adhere on 13th for live blues bands. Day of the Dead Bar is known for its loud rock music, Mexican food, and a karaoke floor.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Your 3-Day Bangkok Itinerary
Phew!
That is one beast of a post! Here’s a nice copy-and-paste list of my entire Bangkok itinerary for you to keep on hand.
Day 1:
Check into your hotel
Explore the Grand Palace
Visit Wat Pho’s Reclining Buddha
Lunch at Chamlong Asoke
Climb up to the Golden Mount
Dinner at May’s Veggie Home
Drinks at Iron Fairies
Day 2:
Breakfast at your hotel/hostel
Shopping at Chatuchak Weekend Market
Visit the Tailing Floating Market
Lunch at the Unicorn Cafe
Go on a Tour of the Jim Thompson House
Dinner at Brocolli Revolution
Drinks at Havana Social
Day 3:
Breakfast at your hotel/hostel
Indulge in a Thai massage
Lunch at Hom Duan
Explore Bangkok’s Ghost Tower
Dinner at Samai Phad Thai
Drinks at Khao San Road
Which part of my 3-day Bangkok itinerary are you DYING to explore? Drop me a comment below! Is it the cheap street food, beautiful temples, hidden bars or creepy ghost stuff? You didn’t miss that part about the unicorn cafe, did you?? Scroll back up! Drop me a comment below.
Psst… Want more Thailand travel inspiration? Check out my other posts below:
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Syrian rebels won't be getting arms from the European Union – at least for now.
EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels rejected a bid to alter an arms embargo on Syria that would have allowed them to send arms to rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad. Here's more from the meeting:
"The Council agreed to renew the restrictive measures against Syria for a further three months, amending them so as to provide greater non-lethal support and technical assistance for the protection of civilians. The Council will actively continue the work underway to assess and review, if necessary, the sanctions regime against Syria in order to support and help the opposition."
The "non-lethal support" and "technical assistance" may have been a nod to Britain, which wanted the rebels exempt from the arms embargo currently in place.
"Most states were opposed to any amendment of the embargo and today we have amended it in a very important way, in a couple of very important ways," British Foreign Secretary William Hague said.
His comments were reported by The Associated Press.
Separately, President Obama has already rejected the idea of arming the rebels despite a push to do just that by top officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The U.S. gives the Syrian opposition more than $300 million in humanitarian aid, The New York Times reports.
In a story Monday, The Times reported that the Obama administration could be running out options as Assad clings to power in Syria. Here's more from the story:
"With conditions continuing to deteriorate, officials could reopen the debate over providing weapons to select members of the resistance in an effort to break the impasse in Syria. The question is whether a wary Mr. Obama, surrounded by a new national security team, would come to a different conclusion."
"This is not a closed decision," a senior administration official told the newspaper. "As the situation evolves, as our confidence increases, we might revisit it."
The deliberations over arming the Syrian opposition come the same day a U.N. commission said both the rebels as well as the Assad regime had committed atrocities and should be brought to justice.
But it added: ""The violations and abuses committed by anti-Government armed groups did not, however, reach the intensity and scale of those committed by Government forces and affiliated militia."
The commission said 70,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since the conflict began in March 2011.Flames lick the sky in Alfred Waud's sketch of the Union Army burning the Shenandoah Valley in 1864. "All food for man, or beast," wrote Virginia veteran John N. Opie after the war, was "consumed or wantonly destroyed....Which is the worst...to burn a barn, or kill a fellow man?"
David Rodes and Norman Wenger step out of Wenger’s red Ford Explorer to look at an old farmhouse in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. “At the time of the Civil War, this place was owned by Abraham Heatwole,” Rodes says. “And he had a wife named Magdalenah and she was a pretty sassy lady.”
Rodes knows about Magdalenah’s sassiness because she was his great-great-great-grandmother and he grew up hearing stories about her. “She was always saying, ‘I told you so,’ ” he says. “And one day Abe came in and told her, ‘Maddy, the cow ate the millstone.’ And she said, ‘I told you she’d do that.’ And then she realized she’d been had.” He laughs. “That’s the kind of person she was.”
Rodes heard many family stories about Abe and Magdalenah, but he never heard that they smuggled draft dodgers and deserters out of the Confederacy through a secret pro-Union movement operating in Virginia during the Civil War. He didn’t learn about that until he and Wenger began researching their family histories at the National Archives and discovered, to their amazement, that they both had ancestors who were activists in the movement.
“My sympathies were altogether on the side of the Union from beginning to end,” Abraham Heatwole testified in one of the documents that Rodes and Wenger discovered. “My house was a sort of rendezvous for refugees and deserters from the rebel army making their escape from the Confederacy.”
“He kept at our house a great many refugees and helped them to escape,” Magdalenah Heatwole said in another document. “We were in constant danger from having so many come to our place for concealment and refuge while getting ready to go north.”
Now, standing in front of the Heatwole house, Norman Wenger flips through the pages of a book—one of the six volumes of documents that he and Rodes have published about the Unionist underground. He reads from the deposition of Abe’s brother-in-law, John Rodes: “His house was a kind of depot for refugees and deserters. He had a very good place for concealing them where they could not be found. It was one of the terminals of the Underground R.R., which was the means of conducting several thousand persons from the Confederacy during the war.”
Several thousand persons. When Rodes and Wenger read that, they realized they’d stumbled upon a story that was far bigger than family history. They’d discovered proof of a secret Virginia-based, pro-Union movement previously unknown even to Civil War historians.
“We started this to find out about our families,” Rodes says, “And then we started seeing this overall pattern about an underground railroad.”
“Family stories never mentioned that,” Wenger says, “but the documents prove it.”
A mortar and pestle and book of remedies are among the surviving artifacts from the life of Elder John Kline, an influential Brethren minister and herbalist in Rockingham County, Va. A staunch opponent of the Civil War, Kline was murdered by Confederate militiamen in 1864. (Patty Kelly)
Their search began in 1998, when Rodes and Wenger—who both grew up in Mennonite families in Rockingham County, Va.—read a slim volume calledand spotted footnotes that hinted at untold stories about their ancestors. “There was a footnote in there about my great-grandfather Jacob Wenger,” says Wenger. “It quoted one of his neighbors testifying to his loyalty to the Union: ‘He seemed to rejoice at the approach of the Union Army and said we ought to go roasting turkeys for them.’ That caught my eye.”
Rodes noticed a footnote that quoted his great-great-great-grandmother, Fannie Bowman Rodes. “I’m going to use the language that she used, OK?” he says as he tells the story. “She quoted what the Confederates said about her family. She said, ‘They said we were lower than niggers.’ That caught my eye. To be lower than slaves—to be lower than property! Property had some value. We had no value.”
Intrigued by those footnotes, Wenger and Rodes decided to do more research. Neither man is a professional historian—Rodes, now 60, runs a gift shop and Wenger, 61, is the general manager of a farmers cooperative—but their curiosity propelled their search. The footnotes quoted documents from the Southern Claims Commission, so Wenger and Rodes traveled to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to search through the commission’s records.
The Southern Claims Commission was established in 1871 to judge petitions filed by Southerners asking to be paid for their property—usually crops or livestock—that had allegedly been seized by Federal soldiers during the Civil War. Before paying any claim, the commission required that claimants prove two things—that they had remained loyal to the Union and that the U.S. Army had confiscated their property. Both propositions were difficult to prove, and consequently most of the 22,000 claims were denied. But every recorded claim, whether approved or not, illuminates what life was like for civilians in Civil War battle zones. “Sometimes we’d have tears in our eyes as we read those claims,” Rodes recalls.
First, Wenger and Rodes searched for claims filed by their ancestors, but they soon decided to dig up every claim filed by residents of Rockingham County. There were plenty of them because the county is located in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley—the breadbasket of the Confederacy—and General Phil Sheridan’s Union army systematically plundered and burned the Valley’s crops in the fall of 1864 in an effort to starve Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army.
During their 15 or 20 trips to the Archives, Wenger and Rodes photocopied 298 claims from Rockingham County—more than 12,000 pages of documents, some containing tales of murder, betrayal, hatred and heroism. Fascinated by the stories, they decided to publish all of the claims. Between 2003 and 2012—aided by grants from local historical groups and the expertise of Dr. Emmert F. Bittinger, a sociology professor at Bridgewater College in Virginia—they published the documents in the six-volume series Unionists and the Civil War Experience in the Shenandoah Valley. “Our mission was to preserve these documents,” Wenger says. “We haven’t made any money. It’s a labor of love.”
But not everyone in the Valley shares that love. Some folks don’t want to hear about local people who supported the Union during what they sometimes call “the War of Northern Aggression.”
“When Volume 1 came out, we gave a talk on our research and got a real chilly reception,” Wenger recalls. “I made the comment that if you were a third- or fourth-generation native of Rockingham County, chances are you had a relative who was a Unionist. And a guy got up and said, ‘I really resent that remark!’ ”
“And we found out later that one of his ancestors was involved in the underground railroad,” Rodes adds, smiling. “I called him to tell him that but he wouldn’t accept it.”
“I did all I could to assist refugees and deserters from the rebel army to escape from the Confederacy,” a farmer named John Brunk told the claims commission in 1875. “I am a Mennonite and had charge of a Mennonite church near my place where I concealed them.”
Roughly two-thirds of the claims uncovered by Rodes and Wenger were filed by Mennonites or by members of the Church of the Brethren, also known as “Dunkers.” These pacifist Christian sects opposed slavery, and their members—most of them farmers of German descent—were appalled at the South’s rush to secession after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860.
“Secession means war; and war means tears and ashes and blood,” Elder John Kline, the leader of the Brethren in Rockingham County, wrote in his diary on January 1, 1861. “It means bonds and imprisonment and perhaps even death to many in our beloved Brotherhood, who I have the confidence to believe, will die rather than disobey God by taking up arms.”
Elder Kline’s ominous predictions soon proved true. On May 23, Virginia held a referendum to decide if the state should secede from the Union. The Rockingham Register urged a unanimous vote for secession, and local rebels visited the farms of Mennonites and Brethren to demand their support. “The day before the election, two men came to my place from Harrisonburg,” John Brunk testified, “and while talking about the election said if I voted for the Union I would be hung—and if I did not vote, I would be driven from the county and my property confiscated.”
The next day, armed secessionists, some carrying nooses, surrounded the polling places. Inside, voters learned that the ballot wasn’t secret: They had to announce their votes aloud. In the town of Mount Crawford, a man named Harrison defied the mob, voted for Union and then headed home. “This company of men went after him and got him and brought him back,” a farmer named Joel Garber told the claims commission, “and said they were going to hang him.”
Harrison agreed to change his vote, and Garber, who’d planned to cast a ballot for Union, instead voted to secede: “I was afraid for my life.” The threats worked. Of more than 2,000 votes cast in the county, only 22 favored staying in the Union.
Secession meant war, as Elder Kline had predicted, and soon Confederate recruiters interrupted services at Mennonite and Brethren churches to demand that all men between the ages of 18 and 45 report for service in the army. Some men complied, secretly vowing that they’d never fire their weapon at another human being. Others refused to serve and were imprisoned. And many fled through the mountains, heading north or west, pioneering what would soon become a well-organized stream of refugees.
Commandeered tobacco warehouses made up Richmond's notorious Castle Thunder Prison, a dumping ground for political prisoners early in the war. But the jailed religious dissenters had their supporters. "They are good and harmless citizens in times of peace," wrote the editor of the Staunton Spectator in 1862, "and we cannot believe them to be traitors in times of war." (Library of Congress)
In March 1862, a group of about 70 men—most of them Mennonites or Brethren—were captured in the mountains and hauled to Richmond’s infamous Castle Thunder prison. Elder Kline and two other religious leaders were also arrested and sent to Castle Thunder. They were released about a month later, after the Confederate Congress passed a law permitting religious dissenters to avoid military service by paying a $500 fine. Some wealthy Mennonites and Brethren paid their fines and kept working their farms. But $500 was a huge sum in that era and many farmers couldn’t afford it. Those men also fled through the mountains, stopping to eat and rest at the farmhouses and churches that made up the underground railroad.
Elder Kline continued his ministry as a circuit-riding preacher, visiting Brethren churches in Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Some Rockingham County Confederates considered Kline’s trips to the North evidence that the pacifist preacher was a Yankee spy. On June 15, 1864, Kline was riding home after repairing a neighbor’s clock, when he passed two Confederate militiamen lying in ambush. One of them fired a bullet into Kline’s back. The preacher tumbled from his horse and lay gasping on the path. The soldier stepped forward, stood over the man who’d predicted that secession would kill some of his congregation, and delivered the coup de grâce: a single shot to Kline’s heart.
“This house looks pretty much like it did in the Civil War era,” Norman Wenger says, as he and Rodes stand in front of an old white house with a tin roof. During the Civil War, Jacob Miller owned this farmhouse. “Miller took over the leadership of the Brethren church when John Kline was killed,” he says. That was a terrifying job: Miller’s brother Daniel testified that Confederate soldiers threatened to kill Jacob shortly after Kline’s murder: “I heard them say he would be killed next and several more would be killed soon.”
Now, Wenger flips through Volume 2 of his Unionist books and reads from Miller’s deposition: “My name is Jacob Miller. I am 61 years old. I am a farmer and preacher in the Dunker church.... I aided and assisted a large number of refugees and deserters to escape from the Confederacy. I have kept them concealed or have fed them and sent them to other agents and guides. I have had them come to my house from distant counties in the night. My house was one of the Depots of the underground RR, as it was called.”
Wenger stops reading and looks up. “I was surprised to see people use the term ‘underground railroad’ in the depositions,” he says. “I thought that was a term people came up with a hundred years later. But they called it that themselves.” He adds that he and Rodes found no connection between the underground railroad in Rockingham County during the Civil War and the famous Underground Railroad that aided escaped slaves before the war.
Miller’s deposition is just one of dozens that mention Rockingham County’s underground railroad. Poring through thousands of pages, Wenger and Rodes pieced together a picture of how the operation worked. It was, they say, a “highly organized system,” run mainly by Mennonites and Brethren, and designed to guide men seeking to avoid Confederate service to safety behind Union lines. The underground devised its own code: A “refugee”—a draft dodger or deserter—would be taken to a “terminal” or “depot,” usually somebody’s farm, where groups of men would gather to wait for a “pilot” to guide them over obscure mountain paths to safety. The usual destination was New Creek, now known as Keyser, W.Va., the Union state on Rockingham’s border, where refugees could catch a B&O Railroad train to Northern towns.
Wenger and Rodes say they’ve identified more than 30 depots in Rockingham County. And they found references to 12 different pilots. “Mr. Keester and Mr. Ruderson were the principal pilots,” Andrew Lindsey, an active member of the underground, testified. “Mr. Keester told me he had taken about 2,000 men through [the mountains] during the last two years of the war.”
At first, most refugees were local Mennonites and Brethren, but by the end of the war, men came from farther south. “There are depositions that mention people coming from Georgia and North Carolina,” Wenger says. “I believe if you looked at all 22,000 claims in the National Archives, you’d find that this underground railroad was organized—loosely organized—in the entire South.”
Wenger’s speculation could well be true, says Dr. Victoria Bynum, professor emeritus of history at Texas State University and author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War, a study of pro-Union dissidents and guerrilla fighters in Confederate states.
“It is a reasonable supposition that a study of the Southern Claims Commission files would likely reveal other pockets of religious resistance to the Confederacy,” Bynum said in a recent e-mail interview. “There is evidence of secret networks of Unionists, and harboring of draft-age men, in other areas of the South. In North Carolina, the ‘Heroes of America,’ also known as the ‘red strings,’ are a perfect example. This [pro-Union] group had clear religious ties with Quakers, Wesleyan Methodists and perhaps the Moravians of central North Carolina.
“Southern Unionists,” she added, “are a vital topic of study among historians of the Civil War.”
Elder John Kline's home still stands in Broadway, Va., and has become a heritage center that explores Kline's life and the Brethren faith that guided many of the religious dissenters in the Shenandoah Valley. (Patty Kelly)
Skeptics sometimes ask Wenger and Rodes the barbed question: How do you know that the people who filed these claims weren’t lying or exaggerating their pro-Union activities in order to convince the claims commission to give them money? It’s certainly possible that some people lied, the men respond, but highly unlikely that dozens of witnesses—including many who didn’t file claims—fabricated matching stories over nearly a decade about the underground railroad.
“The stories fit,” says Rodes.
“I was a Depot Agent,” John Harshbarger testified. “We would harbor parties and feed them in our barn and in the woods until we could get a small company to our pilot.”
“I would prepare their rations and they would start for the mountains at night,” Margaret Rhodes told the commission. “We had a place under the floor under the house where we would conceal persons when necessary. It was entered by a trap door in my bedroom and covered by a carpet so no one would suspect anything.”
“When the refugees would come in for food, my brothers would watch for the coming of rebels while the refugees were eating,” Mary Gangwer testified. “We had a closet with a trap door to a large place behind a chimney where we concealed them.”
Despite the best efforts of the Unionist underground, not all the refugees reached the North. “Others were captured by the [Confederate] scouts, and their orders were to shoot them,” John F. Lewis, who later served as a United States senator from Virginia, told the commission. “Whenever a man was caught attempting to make his escape through the lines, they shot him.”
But the Confederate Army wasn’t the only danger to the Valley Unionists. The Union Army was also a threat. When General Sheridan rode through the Valley in the fall of 1864 with orders to destroy crops in the Confederacy’s breadbasket, his soldiers didn’t care about the political views of individual farmers. They stole the livestock and burned the barns of secessionists and Unionists alike.
Rodes’ great-great-great-grandparents, Abraham and Magdalenah Heatwole, operated one of the most active depots on the underground railroad, but that didn’t stop Sheridan’s soldiers from confiscating five of their horses, two saddles, 75 pounds of butter, 10 gallons of molasses, 40 gallons of apple butter, two barrels of flour and three bushels of sweet potatoes, according to Abe Heatwole’s deposition. They also stole, killed and butchered two sheep, two hogs and two cows outside the family barn. “I got a piece of one of the sheep and of one of the hogs,” Magdalenah testified, “and cooked it for our own family.” Her cooking must have smelled good: When she finished, the soldiers confiscated that meat, too.
Seven years later, in 1871, Abraham Heatwole filed a claim requesting $996.25 to pay for his losses. He and his wife told the commission about their role in the underground railroad, but they also admitted that Abe was so terrified by the mob outside the polling place in 1861 that he voted for secession. His claim was denied. “We regard the vote for a dissolution of the Union as the highest kind of disloyalty,” the commissioners wrote. “We therefore reject the claim.”
David Rodes stops the car again, this time in front of an old two-story brick house near the tiny town of Linville. Green ivy crawls up the house’s red brick columns. During the Civil War, the house belonged to Jacob Geil and his wife, Mary Wenger Geil.
“Mary Geil, she’s a sister of Jacob Wenger, so she would be my great-grand-aunt,” says Norman Wenger. He’s standing outside the old house, thumbing through another of his books until he finds Mary Geil’s deposition. “She says, ‘During the war we had at our house a great many refugees, which my husband kept and fed and harbored until the guides would come and take them to the mountains.’ ”
Mary’s husband stayed home on the day of the secession vote, which no doubt helped him with the claims commission. Geil requested $761 to pay for the horse, cattle, oats and hay seized by Sheridan’s soldiers. In 1877, the commission awarded him $480.
That’s interesting information but it’s not what Norman Wenger is looking for right now. He wants to find a phrase that Mary used in her deposition—a phrase that has become a running joke between Wenger and Rodes. He finds it a few lines down the page: “Our place was called by the secessionists as a ‘damned Union hole.’ ”
“A damned Union hole,” Rodes repeats, laughing.
Wenger says he never heard that story when he was growing up. “Most of these stories were never passed down,” he says, “because in the generation after the war, they didn’t want to talk about these things.”
In fact, some people still don’t want to talk about them. And Rodes eagerly tells a story about that. “I was interviewed by the newspaper, and I quoted Mary Geil saying the Confederates called this place a ‘damned Union hole,’ ” he says. “And a woman came into my gift shop and yelled across the room—15 people probably heard it—‘How dare you call my precious ancestor’s home a damn Union hole!’ And I said, ‘Ma’am, I didn’t call it that, but your great-great-grandmother did.” He bursts out laughing. “And if you’ve got a problem with that, you’ll have to talk to her.” n
Peter Carlson is a regular contributor to American History. His most recent book is Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey (PublicAffairs).
Sponsored Content:UPDATE: Here's a screengrab that shows what went wrong. The URL for the image Markell's office wanted to send is just one character different from the URL for a model's bondage photo. h/t: @webster
Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) apologized for sending out a picture of an unidentified woman in bondage gear from his official Twitter account Thursday.
The tweet was intended to be harmless, boilerplate politician stuff: "At Warner E.S. in #WilmDE to announce new initiative to support many of #netDE's most disadvantaged students."
Here's the tweet, via Politwoops:
But things got a little weird. The photo attached to the tweet was an apparent screengrab of a photo of a woman in bondage garb:
Markell — or the person running @GovernorMarkell, anyway — swiftly deleted the tweet and apologized on Twitter. "An inappropriate photo was inadvertantly [sic] sent out earlier. We are looking into how this occurred but apologize to anyone who was offended," the tweet said.
An inappropriate photo was inadvertantly sent out earlier. We are looking into how this occurred but apologize to anyone who was offended. — Gov. Jack Markell (@GovernorMarkell) September 4, 2014
The governor's office released a fairly inscrutable statement blaming the mix-up on the photo link, which Markell's staff said had been accidentally altered somehow:
During this morning's event, a tweet was composed with a link to what was supposed to be a picture that had just been uploaded to the internet of the Governor's education announcement. While the tweet was being edited, the auto-generated link for the picture was inadvertently altered. As a result, the picture linked to the tweet was a random, unrelated, and inappropriate picture that has been on the internet since 2010, and not the just-uploaded picture of the event. The tweet was deleted and we apologize for the error. The lessons here are don't compose tweets too quickly and there is a lot of odd stuff on the internet. We just wish the accidental link had been a cat video.
Here you go, governor:
(h/t AP)WASHINGTON — Under pressure to do more to confront the Ebola outbreak sweeping across West Africa, President Obama on Tuesday is to announce an expansion of military and medical resources to combat the spread of the deadly virus, administration officials said.
The president will go beyond the 25-bed portable hospital that Pentagon officials said they would establish in Liberia, one of the three West African countries ravaged by the disease, officials said. Mr. Obama will offer help to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia in the construction of as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in the region, with about 1,700 treatment beds.
Senior administration officials said Monday night that the Department of Defense would open a joint command operation in Monrovia, Liberia, to coordinate the international effort to combat the disease. The military will also provide engineers to help construct the additional treatment facilities and will send enough people to train up to 500 health care workers a week to deal with the crisis.
Officials said the military expected to send as many as 3,000 people to Africa to take charge of responding to the Ebola outbreak.RESTON, VA -- The Coalition for a Planned Reston, a group that unites a number of local advocacy organizations, held a meeting Monday night that involved a number of proposed changes for the Reston Master Plan, including a population cap of 120,000 people.
The proposal comes in the wake of Fairfax County's push to raise the density limit in Reston, which opponents argue would cause development to explode without the infrastructure in place to support it. CPR's "One Reston" proposal would call for a "Reston-wide population cap at 120,000 people, including affordable and bonus market housing," the report states.
That would still represent a doubling of the population over the next 40 years, the plan notes.
Opponents of Fairfax County's proposal to raise density limits claim that Reston's population could triple or more under the proposal. Specifically, the "One Reston" proposal claims that the density limit increase would cause the Planned Residential Community (PRC) area in Reston to jump to 115,000 alone, and the population in Reston areas outside the PRC could balloon to 100,000 as well.
The entire presentation has been posted by Reston 20/20 Committee co-chair Terry Maynard here.
Image via Fairfax CountyPresident Barack Obama says Americans are so uninterested in the rest of the world because they are “lazy” and don’t feel like knowing about “other people.” His remarks have not gone unnoticed at home, where angered Americans suggested he stay abroad.
“[…] We are such a big country we haven’t always had to know about other parts of the world,” Obama told a Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) town hall. “If you are in Laos, you need to know about Thailand and China and Cambodia, because you are a small country and they are right next door and you need to know who they are.”
“If you are in the United States,” Obama continued, “sometimes you can feel lazy and think, ‘You know we are so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.’”
“That’s part of what I’m trying to change,” Obama added.
At the same time, Obama did not forget to flatter Laotians. After calling Americans “lazy” twice, once in reference to acting on climate change, he said that Laos has the “youngest population” and the fastest growing economy, which Americans could in fact learn from.
“If we are not here interacting and learning from you, and understanding the culture of the region, then we will be left behind,” Obama said. “We will miss an opportunity, and I don't want that to happen. Okay?”
Sabaidii, Laos! Honored to be the first U.S. president to visit Laos and to begin a new partnership between our countries. — President Obama (@POTUS) September 6, 2016
While the Laos town hall exploded in applause, the internet burned in anger.
Americans turned to Twitter to let their frustration out, accusing the president of being “anti-American.”
Some people on the social media have even suggested that maybe Obama should stay in Laos if he likes it so much.
SO DONE WITH @POTUS and his lies to Americans. Has the nerve to call us racist & lazy in Laos. Stay there Obama. AMERICA doesn't want you!! — Kathy Orozco (@kathyorozco25) September 7, 2016
Anti-American and Cowardly Obama Waits Until He’s Overseas to call the American People... https://t.co/FAhvM4P67mpic.twitter.com/Wx1KA3YCNT — Obama Updates (@obamolizer) September 7, 2016
Others have said that Obama just hates Americans…
Obama hates Americans - calls us lazy https://t.co/ejXqULbqLn — Prudence (@DearPrudence310) September 7, 2016
Think Obama can't offend and disparage America any more than he already has? Think again!... https://t.co/1lj3GMSbIY — Chip Woods (@chipwoods) September 7, 2016
Obama in Laos calls Americans lazy because we're not falling for his climate change crap? The sight & sound of this wicked man is repulsive! — Take Back USA (@SetUSAFree) September 7, 2016
There were also those who suggested that Obama really meant just himself, as they recalled him golfing on vacation while Louisiana was going underwater during the recent flooding.
CORRECTION, OBAMA IS THE LAZY ONE. PLAYING GOLF AND LAVISH VACATIONS DURING OFFICE SEEM TO BE HIS PRIORITY. https://t.co/qoUzoq5hbr — Angie (@votetrumpvote) September 7, 2016
How dare obama say Americans are lazy! We're not the ones playing golf during a natural disaster that |
daughter-in-law. He even tried to rape her. ASP Sunil Kumar Singh has ordered SO Jarwal Road police station.Acquia retrospective 2016
As my loyal blog readers know, at the beginning of every year I publish a retrospective to look back and take stock of how far Acquia has come over the past 12 months. If you'd like to read my previous annual retrospectives, they can be found here: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009. When read together, they provide a comprehensive overview of Acquia's trajectory from its inception in 2008 to where it is today, nine years later.
The process of pulling together this annual retrospective is very rewarding for me as it gives me a chance to reflect with some perspective; a rare opportunity among the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day. Trends and cycles only reveal themselves over time, and I continue to learn from this annual period of reflection.
Crossing the chasm
If I were to give Acquia a headline for 2016, it would be the year in which we crossed the proverbial "chasm" from startup to a true leader in our market. Acquia is now entering its ninth full year of operations (we began commercial operations in the fall of 2008). We've raised $186 million in venture capital, opened offices around the world, and now employ over 750 people. However, crossing the "chasm" is more than achieving a revenue target or other benchmarks of size.
The "chasm" describes the difficult transition conceived by Geoffrey Moore in his 1991 classic of technology strategy, Crossing the Chasm. This is the book that talks about making the transition from selling to the early adopters of a product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) to the early majority (the pragmatists). If the early majority accepts the technology solutions and products, they can make a company a de facto standard for its category.
I think future retrospectives will endorse my opinion that Acquia crossed the chasm in 2016. I believe that Acquia has crossed the "chasm" because the world has embraced open source and the cloud without any reservations. The FUD-era where proprietary software giants campaigned aggressively against open source and cloud computing by sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt is over. Ironically, those same critics are now scrambling to paint themselves as committed to open source and cloud architectures. Today, I believe that Acquia sets the standard for digital experiences built with open source and delivered in the cloud.
When Tom (my business partner and Acquia CEO) and I spoke together at Acquia's annual customer conference in November, we talked about the two founding pillars that have served Acquia well over its history: open source and cloud. In 2008, we made a commitment to build a company based on open source and the cloud, with its products and services offered through a subscription model rather than a perpetual license. At the time, our industry was skeptical of this forward-thinking combination. It was a bold move, but we have always believed that this combination offers significant advantages over proprietary software because of its faster rate of innovation, higher quality, freedom from vendor lock-in, greater security, and lower total cost of ownership.
Creating digital winners
Acquia has continued its evolution from a content management company to a company that offers a more complete digital experience platform. This transition inspired an internal project to update our vision and mission accordingly.
In 2016, we updated Acquia's vision to "make it possible for dreamers and doers to craft the digital world". To achieve this vision, we want to build "the universal platform for the world's greatest digital experiences".
We increasingly find ourselves at the center of our customer's technology and digital strategies, and they depend on us to provide the open platform to integrate, syndicate, govern and distribute all of their digital business.
The focus on any and every part of their digital business is important and sets us apart from our competitors. Nearly all of our competitors offer single-point solutions for marketers, customer service, online commerce or for portals. An open source model allows customers to integrate systems together through open APIs, which enables our technology to fit into any part of their existing environment. It gives them the freedom to pursue a best-of-breed strategy outside of the confines of a proprietary "marketing cloud".
Business momentum
We continued to grow rapidly in 2016, and it was another record year for revenue at Acquia. We focused on the growth of our recurring revenue, which includes new customers and the renewal and expansion of our work with existing customers. Ever since we started the company, our corporate emphasis on customer success has fueled both components. Successful customers mean renewals and references for new customers. Customer satisfaction remains extremely high at 96 percent, an achievement I'm confident we can maintain as we continue to grow.
In 2016, the top industry analysts published very positive reviews based on their dealings with our customers. I'm proud that Acquia made the biggest positive move of all vendors in this year's Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. There are now three distinct leaders: Acquia, Adobe and Sitecore. Out of the leaders, Acquia is the only player that is open-source or has a cloud-first strategy.
Over the course of 2016 Acquia welcomed an impressive roster of new customers who included Nasdaq, Nestle, Vodafone, iHeartMedia, Advanced Auto Parts, Athenahealth, National Grid UK and more. Exiting 2016, Acquia can count 16 of the Fortune 100 among its customers.
Digital transformation is happening everywhere. Only a few years ago, the majority of our customers were in either government, media and entertainment or higher education. In the past two years, we've seen a lot of growth in other verticals and today, our customers span nearly every industry from pharmaceuticals to finance.
To support our growth, we opened a new sales office in Munich (Germany), and we expanded our global support facilities in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia), Portland (Oregon, USA) and Delhi (India). In total, we now have 14 offices around the world. Over the past year we have also seen our remote workforce expand; 33 percent of Acquia's employees are now remote. They can be found in 225 cities worldwide.
Acquia's offices around the world. The world got more flat for Acquia in 2016.
We've also seen an evolution in our partner ecosystem. In addition to working with traditional Drupal businesses, we started partnering with the world's most elite digital agencies and system integrators to deliver massive projects that span dozens of languages and countries. Our partners are taking Acquia and Drupal into some of the world's most impressive brands, new industries and into new parts of the world.
Growing pains and challenges
I enjoy writing these retrospectives because they allow me to chronicle Acquia's incredible journey. But I also write them for you, because you might be able to learn a thing or two from my experiences. To make these retrospectives useful for everyone, I try to document both milestones and difficulties. To grow an organization, you must learn how to overcome your challenges and growing pains.
Rapid growth does not come without cost. In 2016 we made several leadership changes that will help us continue to grow. We added new heads of revenue, European sales, security, IT, talent acquisition and engineering. I'm really proud of the team we built. We exited 2016 in the market for new heads of finance and marketing.
Part of the Acquia leadership team at The Lobster Pool restaurant in Rockport, MA.
We adjusted our business levers to adapt to changes in the financial markets, which in early 2016 shifted from valuing companies almost solely focused on growth to a combination of growth and free cash flow. This is easier said than done, and required a significant organizational mindshift. We changed our operating plan, took a closer look at expanding headcount, and postponed certain investments we had planned. All this was done in the name of "fiscal fitness" to make sure that we don't have to raise more money down the road. Our efforts to cut our burn rate are paying off, and we were able to beat our targets on margin (the difference between our revenue and operating expenses) while continuing to grow our top line.
We now manage 17,000+ AWS instances within Acquia Cloud. What we once were able to do efficiently for hundreds of clients is not necessarily the best way to do it for thousands. Going into 2016, we decided to improve the efficiency of our operations at this scale. While more work remains to be done, our efforts are already paying off. For example, we can now roll out new Acquia Cloud releases about 10 times faster than we could at the end of 2015.
Lastly, 2016 was the first full year of Drupal 8 availability (it was formally released in November 2015). As expected, it took time for developers and the Drupal community to become familiar with its vast array of changes and new capabilities. This wasn't a surprise; in my DrupalCon keynotes I shared that I expected Drupal 8 to really take off in Q4 of 2016. Through the MAP program we committed over $1M in funds and engineering hours to help module creators upgrade their modules to Drupal 8. All told, Acquia invested about $2.5 million in Drupal code contributions in 2016 alone (excluding our contributions in marketing, events, etc). This is the most we have ever invested in Drupal and something is I'm personally very proud of.
Product milestones
The components and products that make up the Acquia Platform.
Acquia remains an amazing place for engineers who want to build great products. We achieved some big milestones over the course of the year.
One of the largest milestones was the significant enhancements to our multi-site platform: Acquia Cloud Site Factory. Site Factory allows a team to manage and operate thousands of sites around the world from a single console, ensuring all fixes, upgrades and improvements are delivered responsibly and efficiently. Last year we added support for multiple codebases in Site Factory – which we call Stacks – allowing an organization to manage multiple Site Factories from the same administrative console and distribute the operation around the world over multiple data centers. It's unique in its ability and is being deployed globally by many multinational, multi-brand consumer goods companies. We manage thousands of sites for our biggest customers. Site Factory has elevated Acquia into the realm of very large and ambitious digital experience delivery.
Another exciting product release was the third version of Acquia Lift, our personalization and contextualization tool. With the third version of Acquia Lift, we've taken everything we've learned about personalization over the past several years to build a tool that is more flexible and easier to use. The new Lift also provides content syndication services that allow both content and user profile data to be reused across sites. When taken together with Site Factory, Lift permits true content governance and reuse.
We also released Lightning, Acquia's Drupal 8 distribution aimed at developers who want to accelerate their projects based on the set of tested and vetted modules and configurations we use ourselves in our customer work. Acquia's commitment to improving the developer experience also led to the release of both Acquia BLT and Acquia Pipelines (private beta). Acquia BLT is a development tool for building new Drupal projects using a standard approach, while Pipelines is a continuous delivery and continuous deployment service that can be used to develop, test and deploy websites on Acquia Cloud.
Acquia has also set a precedent of contributing significantly to Drupal. We helped with the release management of Drupal 8.1 and Drupal 8.2, and with the community's adoption of a new innovation model that allows for faster innovation. We also invested a lot in Drupal 8's "API-first initiative", whose goal is to improve Drupal's web services capabilities. As part of those efforts, we introduced Waterwheel, a group of SDKs which make it easier to build JavaScript and native mobile applications on top of Drupal 8's REST-backend. We have also been driving usability improvements in Drupal 8 by prototyping a new UX paradigm called "Outside-in" and by contributing to the media and layout initiatives. I believe we should maintain our focus on release management, API-first and usability throughout 2017.
Our core product, Acquia Cloud, received a major reworking of its user interface. That new UI is a more modern, faster and responsive user interface that simplifies interaction for developers and administrators.
The new Acquia Cloud user interface released in 2016.
Our focus on security reached new levels in 2016. In January we secured certification that we complied with ISO 27001: the international security and compliance standard for enterprise cloud frameworks. In April we were awarded our FedRAMP ATO from the U.S. Department of Treasury after we were judged compliant with the U.S. federal standards for cloud security and risk management practices. Today we have the most secure, reliable and agile cloud platform available.
We ended the year with an exciting partnership with commerce platform Magento that will help us advance our vision of content and commerce. Existing commerce platforms have focused primarily on the transactions (cart systems, payment processing, warehouse/supply chain integration, tax compliance, customer credentials, etc.) and neglected the customer's actual shopping experience. We've demonstrated with numerous customers that a better brand experience can be delivered with Drupal and Acquia Lift alongside these existing commerce platforms.
The wind in our sales (pun intended)
Entering 2017, I believe that Acquia is positioned for long-term success. Here are a few reasons why:
The current market for content, commerce, and community-focused digital experiences is growing rapidly at just under 20 percent per year.
We hold a leadership position in our market, despite our relative market share being small. The analysts gave Acquia top marks for our strategic roadmap, vision and execution.
Digitization is top-of-mind for all organizations and impacts all elements of their business and value chain. Digital first businesses are seeking platforms that not only work for marketing, but also for service, compliance, portals, commerce and more.
Open source combined with the cloud continue to grow at a furious pace. The continuing rise of the developer's influence on technology selection also works in our favor.
Drupal 8 is the most significant advance in the evolution of the Drupal and Drupal's new innovation model allows the Drupal community to innovate faster than ever before.
Recent advances in machine learning, Internet of Things, augmented reality, speech technology, and conversational interfaces all coming to fruition will lead to new customer experiences and business models, reinforcing the need for API-first solutions and the levels of freedom that only open source and cloud computing offer.
As I explained at the beginning of this retrospective, trends and cycles reveal themselves over time. After reflecting on 2016, I believe that Acquia is in a unique position. As the world has embraced open source and cloud without reservation, our long-term commitment to this disruptive combination has put us at the right place at the right time. Our investments in expanding the breadth of our platform with products like Acquia Lift and Site Factory are also starting to pay off.
However, Acquia's success is not only determined by the technology we back. Our unique innovation model, which is impossible to cultivate with proprietary software, combined with our commitment to customer success has also contributed to our "crossing of the chasm."
Of course, none of these 2016 results and milestones would be possible without the hard work of the Acquia team, our customers, partners, the Drupal community, and our many friends. Thank you for your support in 2016 – I can't wait to see what the next year will bring!PanARMENIAN.Net - The construction of Armenian Genocide Museum in Uruguay was launched on Wednesday July 17. The Museum, organized by the Ministry of Education and Culture and members of the Armenian community, will open on April 24, 2015, on the Genocide Centennial Anniversary.
The Museum will be the first one created by initiative of a State outside the territory of Armenia.
Uruguayan Undersecretary of Education, Oscar Gomez, said that the initiative “ratifies the Uruguayan policy of defense of human rights”. Gomez recalled that Uruguay was the first country in the world to recognize the Genocide in 1965.
“The Museum will not only refer to the Armenian Genocide, but also to the defense of human rights in general and the recognition of other genocides, such as the Holocaust or the Africans genocide during slavery”, he added.Home surveillance startup Dropcam has been purchased by Google’s Nest reports Re/Code. Nest, which was recently acquired by Google, will pay $555 million in cash for the company.
The Dropcam name and products will be part of the Nest brand and the acquisition took place outside of Google. In other words, Nest bought Dropcam, not Google. But of course Google owns Nest.
In a blog post about the acquisition, Nest Founder, Matt Rogers wrote the following:
Once the deal closes, we’ll incorporate Dropcam into how we do business at Nest. That includes how we handle everything from customer support to customer privacy. Like Nest customer data, Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too.
Nest was purchased by Google for $3.2 billion. The deal was finalized back in February. That was Google’s big play to get into the connected home. Now with Dropcam, the company is expanding that play.Last week, Mike Adams, the founder and editor of NaturalNews.com–a favorite site of Dr. Oz and anti-GMO campaigners, from Vandana Shiva to Center for Food Safetey’s Andrew Kimbrell to the Food Babe to Jeffrey Smith, but also dubbed by scientists and journalists as the number one anti-science site in cyberspace–launched an all out offensive against crop biotechnology.
Adams posted a screed on his website (this pre-censored post, since sanitized by Adams, has been preserved on the wayback machine archives) attacking supporters of genetic engineering as modern day Nazis, suggesting that anti-GMO activists should consider murdering scientists and journalists for their crimes against humanity. Adams then alerted readers to another site, Monsanto Collaborators, which was more or less a handy online list of these so-called ‘Nazi perpetrators”–aka scientists, journalists and news organizations that believe biotechnology can play a constructive role in farming–for crazies who might want to follow Adams’ marching orders and begin assassinations. I was prominently mentioned by Adams, no doubt because of the scathing Adams profile and fact sheet summary GLP posted in April.
Adams alerted readers to this new “collaborators” site, claiming he had nothing at all to do with it, but urging everyone to read it nonetheless. Not surprisingly, anti-GMO philosopher Vandana Shiva, linked to the Adams story on one of her sites (Shiva took down the incendiary Adams post on July 28, but an archived version of it has been preserved here.)
Needless to say, the last week and Adams’ anti-GMO offensive have not unfolded as Adams had anticipated. Keith Kloor, a science writer with a blog on Discover, has written a series of articles on the Adams fiasco, documenting the train wreck as it unfolded: here, here, and here.
But more interesting is the fact that it’s now clear that Adams was behind the Monsanto Collaborators site. Analyses by the GLP, geneticist Karl Haro von Mogel and most extensively by the website This Week in Pseudo Science have demonstrated that the NaturalNews.com coding signatures–akin to a DNA match–are all over the Monsanto Collaborators site, which was actually registered hours before Adams’ first attack column was published. In sum: Adams has been busted. He published both sites. He’s also launched two other slander and pseudo sites designed to promote himself and his products while trying to hammer critics.
Adams tried to cleanse his original NaturalNews.com post calling for the killing of scientists and journalists and is now blocking access to the Monsanto Collaborators site, which he claims was actually set up by Monsanto and its supporters to discredit him and other anti-GMO activists, but the truth is out and the damage has been done.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, besieged by complaints from targets and the science and journalism communities, immediately launched an investigation of Adams and the site, with Adams facing possible felony charges of inciting violence (if he lived in a Europe or a Commonwealth country like the U.K., he would probably already have been served).
As the list of cyber stories on this still developing story, posted below, illustrates, the condemnation of Adams by mainstream journalists and scientists, including Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Journalism Tracker, has been overwhelming. Consensus: Adams is (in the words of scientist and blogger David Gorski) an uber-quack.
The issue here, of course, is not Adams. He is well known for his wildly popular fringe and inflammatory views, as his anti-science web site garners millions of hits every month. The real scandal is that what Adams writes about GMOs, including hyping the long discredited myth that GMOs are causing farmer suicides in India—is standard gruel for even so-called ‘mainstream’ and “responsible” anti-GMO activists.
In other words, Mike Adams is not an outlier in the anti-GMO movement…he is as mainstream as the Institute for Responsible Technology, Center for Food Safety, and sadly, even some environmental publications, on this issue, like Mother Jones. Their positions are grounded in ideology rather than science. That’s the scandal.
Below are the links, including to archived posts that Adams tried to but failed to purge, of the growing Adams dust-up.
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Original Monsanto Collaborators site (blocked/taken down by Adams):
Adams’ follow up post on NaturalNews saying he’s not responsible for Collaborators page before he sanitized it: http://web.archive.org/web/20140725133815/http://www.naturalnews.com/046147_Monsanto_Collaborators_false_flag_operation_GMO_skeptics.html
Also preserved in slightly altered form here: Tree of Liberty: http://www.thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showthread.php?t=202889
Adams busted: Analysis of coding of Monsanto Collaborators site showing a ‘digital DNA match’ between NaturalNews.com and the Collaborators site, meaning that Adams created the Collaborators site that he first disavowed, then blamed on Monsanto, then took down:
http://www.twipscience.org/news/2014/7/25/mike-adams-builds-a-naturalnews-nazi-time-machine
Attack articles on Adams-created propagandists, site, in which Jon Entine listed along with Magic Johnson and others: http://propagandists.org/
Attack article on Jon Entine on Adams-created collaborators website, the first linked from Monsanto Collaborators page:
—http://truthwiki.org/Jon_Entine
—http://propagandists.org/propagandists/jon-entine/
Adams sets up two other propaganda sites to promote himself and attack critics: http://newsvoice.se/2014/07/28/mike-adams-starts-naturalwiki-and-truthwiki/
Adams again attacks GMOs, and Entine: http://www.naturalnews.com/046194_agricultural_holocaust_GMOs_environmental_destruction.html
****
Adams junk science circulated by Vandana Shiva:
Vandana Shiva’s Seed Freedom: http://seedfreedom.in/biotech-genocide-monsanto-collaborators-and-the-nazi-legacy-of-science-as-justification-for-murder/, http://seedfreedom.in/tags/monsanto-collaborators/ [NOTE: Shiva took down mirrored site on on July 29, but a jpg of her pages on her site and on her Facebook site are preserved below]
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General articles and response on Adams fiasco:
Keith Kloor response (1) article http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/07/22/mike-adams-monsanto-nazis-disturbing-article/
Keith Kloor response (2): http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/07/24/mike-adams-elevates-ugly-anti-gmo-campaign/
Keith Kloor response (3): http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/07/25/mike-adams-capitalizes-myth-spread-vandana-shiva/#.U9KkgIBdX0I
Genetic Literacy Project follow: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/07/24/naturalnews-huckster-mike-adams-asks-anti-gmoers-to-kill-scientists-supporters-of-crop-biotech/
GLP Updated Adams profile: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/glp-articles/most-dangerous-anti-science-gmo-critic-meet-mike-adams-conspiracy-junkie-runs-alternative-health-empire/
GLP Updated Fact Sheet on Adams: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/glp-facts/mike-adams/
Genetic Literacy Project Follow that Adams busted: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/07/25/mike-adams-claims-monsanto-set-up-kill-gmo-supporters-website-as-scientists-journalists-face-death-threats/
Additional articles on unfolding Adams story:
RealClearScience: http://www.realclearscience.com/2014/07/24/anti-gmoer_asks_followers_to_kill_scientists_260167.html,
Kevin Folta Illumination blog “Do Not Stop Adams and Intimidation – Exploit It”: http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2014/07/do-not-stop-adams-and-intimidation.html
Kevin Folta on Adams and Shiva: http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2014/07/do-you-stand-with-adams-and-shiva.html
Paul Raeburn, Knight Science Journalism at MIT: https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2014/07/are-these-science-writers-and-publications-facing-death-threats-for-covering-gmos/
David Ropeik’s reflections: http://bigthink.com/risk-reason-and-reality/a-current-example-of-frightening-extremism-in-the-name-of-our-beliefs
Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/07/popular-conspiracy-site-likens-pro-gmo-journalists-nazi-collaborators
Forward Progressive “Natural News Founder Accuses Scientists of Genocide, Hints They Should be Killed, http://www.forwardprogressives.com/natural-news-founder-scientists-genocide-hints-killed
Forward Progressive after Adams was busted for claiming he had no connection to ‘kill GMO suporters” site: http://www.forwardprogressives.com/natural-news-owner-may-created-fake-holocaust-website-smear-critics/
Joni Kamiya, Hawaii Farmer’s Joni Kamiya, Hawaii Farmer’s Daughter: http://hawaiifarmersdaughter.com/2014/07/29/afamilyfullofmisinformation/
Steven Novella/Neurologica: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/mike-adams-is-a-dangerous-loon/
David Gorski response (1): http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/07/25/how-they-view-us-mike-adams-and-kent-heckenlively-edition/
David Gorski response (2): http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/how-they-view-us-mike-adams-goes-off-the-deep-end/
Progressive Contrarian: http://theprogressivecontrarian.com/2014/07/24/mike-adams-crazy-train-goes-off-the-tracks/
Ronald Bailey, Reason: http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/25/anti-biotech-nutcase-mike-adams-may-or-m
Sharon Hill, Doubtful News: http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/07/mike-adams-insinuates-some-scientists-should-be-killed-then-looks-like-a-bigger-idiot/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mike-adams-insinuates-some-scientists-should-be-killed-then-looks-like-a-bigger-idiot
Dan Mitchell, Modern Farmer: http://modernfarmer.com/2014/07/natural-news-put-us-hit-list/
Mason Bilderberg, Illuminutti: http://illuminutti.com/2014/07/28/mike-adams-crossed-the-line-and-in-a-way-that-cant-be-ignored/
Nathanael Johnson, Grist: http://grist.org/food/heres-why-natural-news-is-neither/#.U9gTluZaiE0.twitter
Jenny Hopkinson, Politico: http://www.politico.com/morningagriculture/0714/morningagriculture14830.html
Center for Consumer Freedom: http://www.consumerfreedom.com/2014/07/will-anti-gmo-activist-spark-violence/
MuckRack: http://muckrack.com/link/oHM1I/mike-adams-elevates-his-ugly-anti-gmo-campaign
io9: http://io9.com/anti-gmo-activist-mike-adams-who-last-week-called-for-1611494619
Briefing Room, http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php?topic=144353.0
Lipstick Alley: http://www.lipstickalley.com/showthread.php?p=18535513,
Democractic Under Ground http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025285078
Underground Forum http://www.mixedmartialarts.com/thread/2347751/Natural-News-Mike-Adams-makes-death-threats/?pc=2
Soap Box: http://thesoapboxrantings.blogspot.com/2014/07/mike-adams-crossed-line-and-in-way-that.html
Swallowing the Camel: http://swallowingthecamel.wordpress.com/2014/07/26/the-health-ranger-might-want-to-kill-you/
Violent Metaphors: http://violentmetaphors.com/2014/07/26/mike-adams-goes-too-far/Three Delaware theaters to screen 'The Interview'
A trio of independently run Delaware movie theaters has agreed to show "The Interview" after Sony Pictures Entertainment announced the controversial comedy would be released in some theaters beginning Christmas Day.
Wilmington's Penn Cinemas Riverfront, Middletown's Westown Movies and Rehoboth Beach's Movies at Midway will all screen the film beginning Thursday.
The movie provoked an international incident with North Korea and outrage over its canceled release before Sony announced it would let theaters that requested it show the movie Thursday.
Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton said the company is continuing its efforts to release the film on more platforms and in more theaters.
"We have never given up on releasing 'The Interview,'" Lynton said in a statement. "While we hope this is only the first step of the film's release, we are proud to make it available to the public and to have stood up to those who attempted to suppress free speech."
Penn Cinema managing partner Penn Ketchum said he added the film after discussing it with representatives from Sony.
"We're really excited to bring this film to Delaware. We got a lot of support from our customers who really wanted to see it and were disappointed when we canceled plans," he said. "The concerns we previously had about security have all been addressed. There's no reason for anyone to be concerned, whatsoever."
While some fans will decide to watch the film at home on demand, Ketchum predicts a "positive, party vibe" at the public screenings of the talked-about film.
"Comedies are a lot more fun with tons of people," he said. "This film has really taken on a life of its own and taken on a patriotic feel. We saw a real backlash from customers who did not appreciate having their choices limited."
Penn's Christmas "Interview" showtimes are 1 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Following Penn Cinema's lead, management at Westown Movies and Atlantic Theaters' Movies at the Midway announced Tuesday they would also show the film.
Westown will screen the film at 2:10 p.m., 4:40 p.m., 7:10 p.m. and 9:40 p.m. on Christmas Day. Movies at the Midway will show the film at 9:25 p.m. on Christmas and expand to two showings a day starting on Friday.
It is unclear if movie chains like Regal Cinemas, Cinemark and AMC Theaters will screen "The Interview." The Wrap, an entertainment news website, reported the film also will be released on demand.
Rick Roman of Roman Theatre Management, which runs Westown, says the theater will waive its rule of not showing films that are also available on demand.
"We are making an exception to the policy for 'The Interview,'" Roman said. "Freedom of speech and expression needs to be protected, and to do our part, we are playing 'The Interview.'"
Ever since the film was pulled from theaters, a majority of customers has been in support of the film being shown, Roman said.
"The amount of feedback we have received on social media has been like what we would get for a blockbuster movie," he said.
For Sony, the decision was the culmination of a gradual about-face: After initially saying it had no plans to release the movie, the company began softening its position after it was broadly criticized.
Moviegoers celebrated the abrupt change in fortune for a film that appeared doomed as "The Interview" began popping up in the listings of independent theaters across the country Tuesday. The film stands to open in as many as a few hundred theaters on Thursday, the day it was originally set for wide release.
One of the loudest critics of the film's shelving – President Barack Obama – hailed Sony's reversal.
"The president applauds Sony's decision to authorize screenings of the film," said Obama spokesman Eric Schultz. "As the president made clear, we are a country that believes in free speech and the right of artistic expression. The decision made by Sony and participating theaters allows people to make their own choices about the film, and we welcome that outcome."
Seth Rogen, who stars in the film he co-directed with Evan Goldberg, made his first public comments in a surreal ordeal that began with hackers leaking Sony executives' emails and culminated in an ongoing confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea. The FBI has said North Korea was behind the hacking attacks.
"The people have spoken! Freedom has prevailed! Sony didn't give up!" said Rogen on Twitter.
"VICTORY!!!!!!!" said James Franco, who co-stars in the film. "The PEOPLE and THE PRESIDENT have spoken."
The people have spoken! Freedom has prevailed! Sony didn't give up! The Interview will be shown at theaters willing to play it on Xmas day! — Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) December 23, 2014
VICTORY!!!!!!! The PEOPLE and THE PRESIDENT have spoken!!! SONY to release THE INTERVIEW in theaters… http://t.co/0KyZQAB6cf — James Franco (@JamesFrancoTV) December 23, 2014
North Korea's Internet was shut down in an apparent attack Monday, and continued to be roiled by intermittent outages Tuesday. That followed President Barack Obama's vow of a response to what he called North Korea's "cyber vandalism" of Sony. The White House and State Department have declined to say whether the U.S. government was responsible for North Korea's outages.
After hackers last Wednesday threatened terrorist attacks against theaters showing the film, the nation's major multiplex chains dropped "The Interview." Sony soon canceled the film's release and removed mention of it from its websites.
But that decision drew widespread criticism, including from Obama, who chastised Sony for what he deemed "a mistake" that went against American principles of free speech. George Clooney also led a chorus pressuring for the movie's release and rallying against alleged corporate self-censorship.
The unusual release will give independent theaters a chance to debut the most talked-about movie in the country. James Wallace, creative manager for Texas' Alamo Drafthouse, said the theater received word from Sony on Tuesday morning that Thursday's showings were a go. Among other touches, the theater will offer a patriotic menu featuring burgers, "freedom fries" and apple pie.
"You better believe it's going to be all-American," Wallace said.
Releasing "The Interview" could potentially cause a response from the hackers, who called themselves the Guardians of Peace. In a message last week to the studio, the hackers said Sony's data would be safe so long as the film was never distributed. There have been no more data leaks of Sony emails since the movie's release was delayed.
Independent theaters had shown a stronger appetite to screen "The Interview." Art House Convergence, which represents independent exhibitors, sent a letter Monday to Sony saying its theaters (comprising about 250 screens) wished to show the film.
In recent days, Sony has been trying to secure digital partners to help distribute "The Interview" either through streaming or video-on-demand. Such a multiformat release would be historic for Hollywood, whose studios have long protected the theatrical-release window.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Contact Ryan Cormier on Facebook @ryancormier, on Twitter @ryancormier or on Instagram @ryancormier.
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Staff at the White House are wearing purple today, to celebrate LGBT anti-bullying event Spirit Day.
Each year, celebrities, media outlets, brands, landmarks, sports leagues, faith groups, school districts, universities, and everyday individuals join GLAAD on Spirit Day to go purple in a united stand against bullying and to show their support for LGBTQ youth.
Pop superstar Britney Spears used her Wednesday night concert at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas to enlist her fans in participating in Spirit Day, including providing the audience with Spirit Day swag and replacing her regularly multi-coloured confetti with all-purple confetti as she closed the show.
President Obama’s staff also took part in the event today, posing for a group photo in purple.
A spokesperson said: “We are all more free when we are treated as equals. Today, White House staff stand against bullying and in support of LGBTQ youth.”
Target is participating in Spirit Day 2016 by turning up their #TakePride platform on Spotify with a special playlist to fill the world with positive vibes. Listeners can |
79th street shooting 79th street shooting
CHICAGO (Fox 32 News) - Surveillance video shows a shooting in the city’s Chatham neighborhood erupting at a busy shopping plaza Sunday afternoon.
The shooting happened at about 11:30 a.m. in the first block of W. 79th St.
A 23-year-old man was taken to Stroger with a gunshot wound to the left shoulder and arm, police said. He was in stable condition.
According to audio from surveillance video, more than two dozen rounds were fired. A witness said that inside the Boost Mobile store in the shopping plaza, in the direction of which the shots were fired, there were at least 10 people who were able to escape injury.
Storefront windows at the Boost Mobile remained shattered with bullet holes by Sunday afternoon.
However, it was not the first shooting at the shopping plaza. Police said a man was killed and two others were injured when a gunman went inside the Subway restaurant at the same location and began shooting.We've detected you are on Internet Explorer. For the best Barrons.com experience, please update to a modern browser.
Barron's This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com. http://www.barrons.com/articles/why-wont-millennials-embrace-the-stock-market-1501533989 Next Why Won’t Millennials Embrace the Stock Market? Text size The stock market continues to reach new highs, with the bull market in its ninth year, yet individual investors, especially millennials, are not buying it. The S&P 500 is near record highs, but millennials are by and large staying out of the stock market. We step into Times Square to uncover their biggest hesitations. According to a recent survey from Bankrate, 28% of U.S. adults said real estate would be their preferred investment for money they don’t need for more than 10 years. Only 17% picked the stock market, even less than cash, which 23% favored as their long-term investment. The result isn’t necessarily a surprise. Bankrate has been polling people for the past five years, and the stock market has never placed higher than third. (The survey is based on a representative sample of 1,002 U.S. adults living in the continental U.S.) Stocks are even less popular among millennials -- only 13% of them said they’d invest their money in the stock market, trailing real estate (30%), cash (30%), and even gold (17%). In comparison, their grandparents’ generation, the baby boomers, are much more positive about the stock market. For baby boomers, stocks are No. 2 for preferred long-term investment, behind only real estate. The love for real estate is somewhat perplexing when you consider the numbers: The S&P 500 has risen over 75% in the past five years, while growth for the Case-Schiller National Home Price Index is just half that. A study by professors at the London Business School found that from 1900 to 2011 the housing market returned 1.3 percent per year after inflation, while stocks tended to perform more than four times better. Survey: How would you invest money you don’t need for 10 years? Compared to baby boomers, more millennials prefer cash over stocks as their long-term investment. Bonds None Don't know Stock Real Estate Gold Millennials Cash Generation X Baby Boomers
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It’s clear that people aren’t making their financial decisions based solely on numbers. The field called “behavioral finance” tries to explain people’s financial decisions and market anomalies through psychology.
To start with, real estate is tangible, people can touch it, live in it, and enjoy it, notes Ric Edelman, chairman of Edelman Financial Services and the author of several personal finance books.
People generally feel more secure when they can see something right in front of their eyes, compared to equity investments, Paper gains from stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs don’t carry the same visceral excitement, at least until they get sold for cash.
The real estate market can also create a false impression of less volatility since the price change is not presented to people everyday, in the form of blinking numbers on TVs and smartphones.
What’s more, people tend to view investment performance through their personal experience rather than from a macro view, Edelman says.
So what’s a typical millennial’s personal experience been like? Folks in their 20s and 30s graduated high school with the tech-bubble bursting in 2000, around the 9/11 attack, or with the financial crisis and stock market crash in 2008. “Their entire adult life is dominated by these three events,” says Edelman, “Plus, the election last year and the division of the country. The last thing they would say is ‘The stock market is a safe place.’”
Contrast that to baby boomers, who have been exposed to the market for 30 to 40 years and have grown more comfortable with its ups and downs. “They saw the crash in 1987 and the bear market in 1992 but also the recovery afterwards,” Edelman says. “They know if just they give it time, it will all work out.”Finally, it has arrived: The Day of the Doctor.
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That’s the title of the much-anticipated Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special, as revealed today.
Perhaps The Day of the Doctors, plural, might have been more appropriate, with the BBC confirming what fans already knew – that Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith will be joined by his predecessor David Tennant along with John Hurt, who was introduced as a previously unknown incarnation of the Time Lord at the end of the last series.
The celebratory episode will be feature-length, not quite running to the 90 minutes fans might have expected after Steven Moffat told us a while back that it would be “film length”, but still constituting a healthy 75 minutes.
It will air 50 years to the day since Doctor Who first hit TV screens, on Saturday 23 November.
The story is also set to feature the return of classic Who monsters the Zygons, as well as Daleks, Cybermen and the Doctor’s allies UNIT.
Danny Cohen, Director of BBC Television, said: “It’s an astonishing achievement for a drama to reach its 50th anniversary. I’d like to thank every person – on both sides of the camera – who has been involved with its creative journey over so many years.”
Moffat added: “50 years has turned Doctor Who from a television show into a cultural landmark. Personally I can’t wait to see what it becomes after a hundred.”
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Follow @RadioTimesIslanders promote party to watch brawl-filled game
The NHL is "looking into" the New York Islanders' promotion of a Friday party for fans to watch the re-airing of a Feb. 11 brawl-filled game against the Pittsburgh Penguins that resulted in multiple suspensions and the Islanders being fined $100,000.
"We do not approve of the use, based on what we know," NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said.
There were 346 penalty minutes and 15 fights in the 9-3 Islanders win, and after the NHL handed out 23 games in suspensions, Penguins owner Mario Lemieux criticized the league for not sending an even stronger message. He also said he needed to "rethink" whether he wanted to be part of the league.
On the Islanders' website, with a headline of "#Isles vs. Pens rewind," the team had this message: "The night of February 11, 2011 was memorable for Isles fans. Whether you were in the stands at the Coliseum or watching on TV, you were on your feet through all the ruckus cheering for the Islanders to beat the Penguins. On August 19th, MSG Plus will re-air the game and we want the fans to join us for a viewing party at Champions. Same awesome deal as usual, raffles, prizes and more. RSVP now and remember to there early and get a table with your friends. Stay tuned to #Isles and #IslesMeetup for all the latest and for more information."
The Penguins have issued no official statement, but general Ray Shero was asked about the Islanders' party plan during a press gathering about Sidney Crosby.
According a transcript provided by the team, Shero said: "The Islanders have a good, young hockey team and that's what I think we should be talking about. They should have a good year there for themselves. What they're doing off the ice - if they want to revisit (that game), that's fine. But that's not a game we're going to revisit. We're going to put that behind us. We're not proud of it. It's time to move on."
In that game, Islanders forward Trevor Gillies was suspended nine games for elbowing then punching a dazed Eric Tangradi and later taunting him as he got up. Tangradi (concussion) didn't return last season.
New York's Matt Martin was suspended four games for grabbing Max Talbot from behind and punching him. Pittsburgh's Eric Godard received a 10-game suspension for leaving the bench to protect goalie Brent Johnson as an Islanders player skated toward him.
The Penguins were upset because the fights seemed premeditated, a reaction to a Feb. 2 game in Pittsburgh in which Talbot's hit gave Blake Comeau a concussion and Johnson injured Islanders goalie Rick DiPietro (broken orbital bone) during a fight.
Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.comJuly 15, 2017 Severe storms to roar back across Upper Midwest into Saturday night
By Kyle Elliott, AccuWeather meteorologist July 15, 2017, 2:28:15 PM EDT
Following sunshine and a much-needed break from flooding rainfall, severe thunderstorms will return to the Upper Midwest to close out Saturday.
A storm system moving southward from Canada is forecast to trigger isolated but powerful thunderstorms across much of Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa into Saturday evening.
“Some of these thunderstorms will have the potential to become severe and feed off the warm, humid air that will briefly make a comeback,” AccuWeather Meteorologist Ryan Adamson said.
Many locations in the Upper Midwest have received 2 to as much as 6 inches of rain in the past week, with the heaviest, repeated rainfall inundating areas stretching from northern Iowa to southwestern Wisconsin and northern Illinois.
It would take as little as 1.5 to 2 inches of additional rainfall in a short amount of time in these areas to result in flash flooding of streams, creeks and rivers. Lives and property may be at risk as the potential exists for washed-out area roadways.
Major flooding is in progress on both the Fox and Des Plaines rivers in northeastern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin.
On Saturday, the Des Plaines River near Gurnee, Illinois, rose above its previous record crest of 11.95 feet from Sept. 27, 1986. Water levels are forecast to slowly decline on these rivers next week.
The main threats from the storms into Saturday evening will be damaging winds and hail. A stray tornado cannot be ruled out.
Even with the isolated nature of the storms, highly localized flooding is possible.
Any additional heavy rainfall will only exacerbate ongoing flooding issues, threaten to delay recovery efforts in areas where waters have begun to recede and put even more homes and property at risk for significant water damage.
Rochester, Minnesota, and Madison and Green Bay, Wisconsin, are just a few of the cities at risk for severe weather.
Motorists traveling across Interstates 90 and 94 throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota should be prepared for travel delays and reduce speeds in heavy downpours, as it only takes a small amount of water on roadways to increase the risk for vehicles to hydroplane.
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Sporadic power outages are possible where the strongest winds occur, and trees can easily be uprooted or blown down when battered by gusty winds for as short as a few minutes.
Adamson stated that as the storms push southward and eastward overnight, they should begin to weaken before reaching Chicago.
Residents living within the threat zone should seek shelter if thunder is heard or lightning is seen and keep a weather radio handy to monitor the latest severe weather alerts.
Dry weather should return to the Upper Midwest on Sunday. However, another round of locally damaging thunderstorms and potentially heavy rainfall will quickly return on Monday.
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February 27 2019 at 9:26:00 AMSAN ANTONIO — The Eagle Ford Shale oil field had an $87 billion effect across South Texas last year — nearly equal to the San Antonio area's entire gross domestic product, according to the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The university's latest report on the oil boom, released Tuesday, shows that South Texas' traditional ranching, farming and hunting economy is increasingly eclipsed by the region's sudden reinvention as an oil field.
The study calculated the direct economic effects of oil and gas exploration, as well as the so-called indirect and “induced” economic activity created from things such as suppliers building warehouses or workers spending their paychecks.
The report found:
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UTSA report|http://iedtexas.org/images/documents/2014_EFS_Release_Oct.pdf
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The direct effect alone is enormous: The study counted 51,652 people directly employed in the oil industry in 2013. That's about 5,600 more jobs than in 2012.
The overall economic effect of the field increased by 43 percent in one year, up from $61 billion in 2012.
The Eagle Ford paid an estimated $6.8 billion in royalties in 2013, assuming that mineral owners get a 20 percent slice of the oil and gas that comes out of the ground.
A huge infrastructure build-out continues. Around 427 miles of pipeline, much of it for crude oil, were laid in 2013 at a cost of $504 million.
By 2023, UTSA projects a $137 billion effect from the field. But there would be fewer jobs directly involved in the oil patch as there are now, as companies get more efficient and the field shifts from drilling to production mode. Around 38,767 people would be working directly for oil and gas companies.
Eagle Ford crude oil production started from basically nothing — 352 barrels per day in 2008 — but is expected to cross the 1-million-barrel mark this year.
The report was paid for by America's Natural Gas Alliance, the South Texas Energy & Economic Roundtable and Shale Oil & Gas Business Magazine. This is the fourth time UTSA has updated its Eagle Ford study, and each time the numbers get larger.
“The Eagle Ford Shale in general continues to surprise us to the upside,” said Thomas Tunstall, principal investigator for the report.
UTSA looked at 15 of the busiest counties in the Eagle Ford region: Atascosa, Bee, DeWitt, Dimmit, Frio, Gonzales, Karnes, La Salle, Lavaca, Live Oak, Maverick, McMullen, Webb, Wilson and Zavala. Six neighboring counties with significant oil and gas business activity — but not drilling — were included: Bexar, Jim Wells, Nueces, San Patricio, Uvalde and Victoria. Those communities have become staging and office areas for the Eagle Ford.
The San Antonio area has been among the biggest beneficiaries. The study pegs full-time jobs in Bexar County attributable to the Eagle Ford at 13,919 in 2013, which could grow to 19,332 in a decade.
Port cities Corpus Christi and Victoria are shipping crude oil and other goods such as sand for hydraulic fracturing.
State revenue from the boom, including severance taxes paid when oil and gas are “severed” from the Earth, was more than $2.2 billion in 2013.
The study takes the first stab at trying to count the number of RV parks and worker camps, known more commonly as “man camps,” that have appeared in South Texas.
UTSA counted 320 RV parks and worker camps with 7,600 units. There were an estimated 50 RV parks just in the city of Three Rivers.
Man camps and RV parks to house workers sprouted virtually overnight a few years ago when the sudden drilling activity filled up all the hotel rooms in the region. They're everywhere, but hard to count. The report says there are “no accurate means” to determine the number of RV parks and no centralized data source on the number of things such as septic tank permits. Some enterprising South Texas residents have cleared a patch of brush and added six to 10 RV slots as a way to capitalize on the boom.
But it isn't all good news and easy money in the region. Rents have increased 300 percent in Cotulla, the report says, and local officials have noted that increasing air pollution is an issue. Longtime residents and those who don't or can't work in the oil field are struggling to pay rent and elevated prices.
Those who can leave their current jobs for the oil field often do. An estimated 30 percent of the city employees in Pleasanton have quit to take oil and gas jobs.
Employment in Atascosa County rose from 9,760 workers in 2011 to 13,012 in 2013, according to the report. In McMullen County, per capita income was $64,826 last year.
Workforce training is still an issue, even as colleges and universities have scrambled to add or enlarge programs for the oil and gas industry. “Now hiring” signs, especially for those with a commercial driver's license, are common across the region. Signs stapled on the sides of buildings and on telephone poles in Cotulla recently offered drivers a $1,500 signing bonus.
“Even now, there is so much activity that the existing South Texas workforce simply cannot supply all of the industry's needs,” the report says.
At a recent breakfast event, Leodoro Martinez, head of the Eagle Ford Consortium, showed aerials images of Cotulla. It's humming with activity, but was once known mainly as the poor community where a young Lyndon Baines Johnson first taught school.
“We used to have two little hotels in Cotulla,” Martinez said. “Now we have 24.”
People have stopped asking whether the Eagle Ford was really going to happen. Martinez said the question is now, “How long is this going to last?”
To that end, Tuesday's report notes that by some accounts, Texas already has more than 1,000 ghost towns and that “it is clear that the state does not need any more.”
UTSA recommends everything from geothermal energy exploration to olive growing to bird watching to history tourism as a way to diversify beyond oil. El Camino Real de los Tejas, the route the Spanish used to move between Mexico City and what's now northern Louisiana, runs across much of the Eagle Ford. Gonzales, with its “Come and Take It” motto, is among the communities positioned to do well beyond the oil boom, the study said.
But even with branching out beyond drilling, it's clear that the continued economic activity at anything approaching the current level depends on hydrocarbons — in the Mexican side of the Eagle Ford Shale that has yet to be extensively explored or in the export of what the shale in Texas is already producing.
Eagle Ford operators are pushing for the export of crude oil (currently banned), light oil condensate (which is beginning to be allowed) and liquefied natural gas (in the federal permitting stage).
jhiller@express-news.netGirl, 11, robbed at knifepoint on San Francisco sidewalk
File photo of police squad car at night. Patrol car with lights flashing File photo of police squad car at night. Patrol car with lights flashing Photo: Ron Chapple, Getty Image Photo: Ron Chapple, Getty Image Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Girl, 11, robbed at knifepoint on San Francisco sidewalk 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
An 11-year-old girl waiting for her mother on a San Francisco sidewalk was robbed of her cell phone at knifepoint, police said Friday.
The mugging happened just after 7 p.m. Thursday at Persia Avenue and Paris Street in the Excelsior neighborhood, said Officer Robert Rueca, a police spokesman.
“She was alone on the sidewalk waiting for her mom who was nearby to come,” Rueca said of the young victim. “The suspect just saw this 11-year-old and decided to rob her.”
The assailant approached the girl from behind, held a knife against her back and demanded her phone, Rueca said. She immediately handed over the phone, and the robber ran off, he said.
The girl, whose name was not released, was not injured. No arrest was made and police did not release a detailed description of the robber.
Bill Hutchinson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: bhutchinson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Bill_HutchinsonUser Info: hexacoto hexacoto 1 year ago #1
Overall
0 Long distance BRV attacks' contact with stage adjusted
EX Skill
- Brave Magnet cooldown increased to 45 secs from 30 secs
Battle Score
+ Points for winning before Times Up increased
- Overall points for victory decreased
Firion
Brush Lance
- Hitbox radius originating from Firion reduced to 70% of original.
Onion Knight
Blizzaga
- Final explosion size reduced to 67% of original
Firaga
- Final explosion size reduced to 70% of original
Cecil
Searchlight
- Damage reduced to 64 from 128. However, summoning core breaking ability remains unchanged
Soul Eater
- Damage reduced to 160 from 288. However, summoning core breaking ability remains unchanged
- Lunging movement readjusted
- Range decreased by 1m, both ground and air
Bartz
Blue Mage
0 The bug where if you're at the edge of a stage and the missile fails to appear has been fixed
Exdeath
100 Gs
- Vertical angle reduced by 2.5 degrees
- Tracking ability down
- Threshold where tracking stops increased by 3m
Reverse Polarity
- Keep value of just before the warp removed (12 frames worth)
- If the attack does not hit, BRV attack cancel slowed down by 20 frames
Kefka
Swelling Thundaga
- Stun time down by 10 frames
- Range reduced by 2.5m
- Tracking ability down
- Threshold where tracking stops increased by 2m
- Kefka's reorientation ability during consecutive firing reduced
Zidane
Scoop Art
+ Lunge distance increased by 1m
Steal
+ Now deals BRV damage (80)
+ Can now be used to break summoning cores (5 hits to break it)
Shantotto
Freeze
+ Size of icicle increased by 1.22X
Tornado
+ Magic size up
+ Time to reach biggest size reduced by 10 frames. At the same time, the tornado's initial speed attrition readjusted
Flare
+ Magic size up by 1.25X
Flood
+ Vertical angle improved by 10 degrees
Ace
Fire RF
- Threshold where tracking stops increased by 1.5m
Shiva
Diamond Dust
+ The size of the part where it tracks till it explodes increased by 1.5X
+ Tracking speed increased by 1.33X
Ramuh
Judgment Bolt
- Radius of the 4 pillars reduced by 0.25m
Odin
Zantetsuken
+ The aura now has a vacuum effect
Bahamut
Mega Flare
+ Laser tracking ability improved by 1.25X
+ Damage reaction when hit by laser readjusted
+ The aura of where the attack will strike is reduced by 30 frames Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVszYPR2V200 Long distance BRV attacks' contact with stage adjusted- Brave Magnet cooldown increased to 45 secs from 30 secs+ Points for winning before Times Up increased- Overall points for victory decreasedBrush Lance- Hitbox radius originating from Firion reduced to 70% of original.Blizzaga- Final explosion size reduced to 67% of originalFiraga- Final explosion size reduced to 70% of originalSearchlight- Damage reduced to 64 from 128. However, summoning core breaking ability remains unchangedSoul Eater- Damage reduced to 160 from 288. However, summoning core breaking ability remains unchanged- Lunging movement readjusted- Range decreased by 1m, both ground and airBlue Mage0 The bug where if you're at the edge of a stage and the missile fails to appear has been fixed100 Gs- Vertical angle reduced by 2.5 degrees- Tracking ability down- Threshold where tracking stops increased by 3mReverse Polarity- Keep value of just before the warp removed (12 frames worth)- If the attack does not hit, BRV attack cancel slowed down by 20 framesSwelling Thundaga- Stun time down by 10 frames- Range reduced by 2.5m- Tracking ability down- Threshold where tracking stops increased by 2m- Kefka's reorientation ability during consecutive firing reducedScoop Art+ Lunge distance increased by 1mSteal+ Now deals BRV damage (80)+ Can now be used to break summoning cores (5 hits to break it)Freeze+ Size of icicle increased by 1.22XTornado+ Magic size up+ Time to reach biggest size reduced by 10 frames. At the same time, the tornado's initial speed attrition readjustedFlare+ Magic size up by 1.25XFlood+ Vertical angle improved by 10 degreesFire RF- Threshold where tracking stops increased by 1.5mDiamond Dust+ The size of the part where it tracks till it explodes increased by 1.5X+ Tracking speed increased by 1.33XJudgment Bolt- Radius of the 4 pillars reduced by 0.25mZantetsuken+ The aura now has a vacuum effectMega Flare+ Laser tracking ability improved by 1.25X+ Damage reaction when hit by laser readjusted+ The aura of where the attack will strike is reduced by 30 frames
User Info: Sony_7 Sony_7 1 year ago #2 He needed a little molding of course; what kid doesn't? But in time, we came to love him as our own. Say hello J.J. Why on earth was Exdeath nerfed?
User Info: PK_Gaming PK_Gaming 1 year ago #3 I am thou...Thou art I...The time has come...Open thine eyes...And call forth what is within!
~Izanagi Cecil nerfs, lol
User Info: I eat food I eat food 1 year ago #4 100Gs had stupidly accurate homing.
Also ouch poor Cecil, Searchlight's strength got cut right in half.
User Info: ManaYuka ManaYuka 1 year ago #5 Best show: Game of Thrones Best game: Tactics Ogre Let us Cling Together
Best Graphic Novel: Dance of the Sun and Moon Why would Cecil need a nerf? Isnt he awful like he was in the first two games?
User Info: SirDood18 SirDood18 1 year ago #6 ManaYuka posted...
Why would Cecil need a nerf? Isnt he awful like he was in the first two games?
I know they buffed him because he was unpopular then after he rose they kick him down again.. "Embrace your dreams, and... whatever happens, protect your honor... as SOLDIER!" I know they buffed him because he was unpopular then after he rose they kick him down again..
User Info: mr369248 mr369248 1 year ago #7 SirDood18 posted...
ManaYuka posted...
Why would Cecil need a nerf? Isnt he awful like he was in the first two games?
I know they buffed him because he was unpopular then after he rose they kick him down again..
Didn't they say they wouldn't just buff up unpopular characters because they were unpopular? They might as well buff up Cloud to the max if that were really the case, lol. Didn't they say they wouldn't just buff up unpopular characters because they were unpopular? They might as well buff up Cloud to the max if that were really the case, lol.
User Info: I eat food I eat food 1 year ago #8 SirDood18 posted...
ManaYuka posted...
Why would Cecil need a nerf? Isnt he awful like he was in the first two games?
I know they buffed him because he was unpopular then after he rose they kick him down again..
Cecil's damage is pretty damn high in general, Dark Knight is basically an artillery with how powerful and accurate Darkness is and Paladin is probably the most maneuverable midair vanguard character. But his formshift is kind of clunky especially compared to Lightning's on demand paradigm shift. Cecil's damage is pretty damn high in general, Dark Knight is basically an artillery with how powerful and accurate Darkness is and Paladin is probably the most maneuverable midair vanguard character. But his formshift is kind of clunky especially compared to Lightning's on demand paradigm shift.
User Info: ManaYuka ManaYuka 1 year ago #9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsC8io4w1sY
Im also a Cecil user.....so f*** SE lol Best show: Game of Thrones Best game: Tactics Ogre Let us Cling Together
Best Graphic Novel: Dance of the Sun and Moon Well I know SE is new to the fighting game scene but I adhere to this with fighting games:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsC8io4w1sYIm also a Cecil user.....so f*** SE lolFOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Chad Ochocinco dubbed it heaven. Albert Haynesworth wouldn't disagree.
Fresh off his first action in a Patriots uniform, Haynesworth gushed about his short time in New England, calling it a "career-saving place" and suggesting he'd have given up all the money he earned with the Washington Redskins if he could have come to the Patriots sooner.
Defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth was on the field for 16 plays Thursday in his first preseason action with the Patriots. Greg M. Cooper/US Presswire
"(Fellow former Redskins defensive lineman Andre Carter and I) were talking, just about how different it is, how we really like this place," said Haynesworth. "For me, it's a career-saving place for me to come. I had no idea it would be like this. It's unbelievable. I wish I kinda took two years ago and came here."
When it was noted that he earned a handsome pay day for his time -- as turbulent as it was -- with the Redskins, Haynesworth added, "You know what, when all is said and done, hell, I'd give that money back and I'd come here."
Haynesworth, obtained for a fifth-round pick in a July swap with Washington, played 16 first-half snaps and registered two tackles (both of which drew loud cheers from the crowd when his name was announced over the stadium PA).
On the game's first play, Haynesworth manhandled one of the Giants' second-string guards, helping blow up a play that resulted in the Giants fumbling the ball away (and setting up a 1-yard touchdown run by BenJarvus Green-Ellis just 20 seconds in). Haynesworth's only disappointment? Not getting to the quarterback.
"Hell, I wanted to get the sack," said Haynesworth. "(Giants quarterback) David Carr always gives me sacks, his whole life. That's what I was working at, trying to get a sack."A plan to stage an American theater company’s gay-themed play in Moscow, with support from the United States government, has stalled amid tensions between the two nations and at a time of Kremlin hostility toward homosexuality.
The Moscow New Drama Theater, a well-regarded company in Russia, had been planning to present the 1997 play, “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” this fall, with a company of Russian actors directed by the play’s writer, Moisés Kaufman, who is the artistic director of the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project. But Mr. Kaufman said he had recently been informed by New Drama Theater that the Russian government had barred the Moscow company from accepting foreign funds for artistic productions, prompting indefinite postponement of the collaboration.
Mr. Kaufman said he believed the real issue was the subject of the play, which is a dramatization of court transcripts from the 1895 prosecutions of Wilde, an Irish writer accused of sexual relationships with men. The play has been staged in New York and Los Angeles; writing in The New York Times, the critic Ben Brantley called it “absolutely gripping” and “the must-see sleeper of the Off Off Broadway season.”
“The opportunity to re-enact the Oscar Wilde trials in Moscow at this time would have been incredibly relevant, and also would have led to the kind of dialogue that is so sorely needed there at this time,” Mr. Kaufman said. He said he always knew there was a risk that at some point the Russian government would seek to squelch the project, but that he did not expect it to be so early; the Russian company was to begin rehearsals in August, and performances were planned for October.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemonAlphaSapphire
Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a social experiment in which commands representing buttons on an original 3DS (up, down, left, right, A, B, X, Y, start, select, control stick, and touch screen coordinates) are entered into a chat on Twitch, and then translated into a game of Pokémon Alpha Sapphire via an IRC bot. In short, over 10,000 people are fighting over a controller. Throughout its life, Twitch Plays Pokémon has spawned hilarious characters, memorable moments, and even a religion.
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Twitch Plays Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, the third run of "Season 2", takes the mob back to the land of water and trumpets, but with a twist. Using new technology, the stream will for the first time play a randomized version of a Gen 6 game. Unlike Twitch Plays Pokemon's previous randomized runs, the new randomizing software means an entirely new set of challenges, with evolutions now being randomized as well. Would a Torchic evolve into a Delphox? Could a Metang become a Registeel? Only time, RNG, and the chat's inability to leave the grass will tell.
The run officially got underway on July 12th, 2015, and ended on July 26th.
See also here for the archived progress of the game, or here for live updates. There is also a recap page, found here.
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Twitch Plays Pokémon Alpha Sapphire contains examples of:“…Regulations need to be evolved for cloud computing in India for Regulation of Investigatory Powers, Regulation on Stored Communication, Mandatory guidelines for National Security for cloud operation and Lawful interception and monitoring by Law Enforcement Agencies, State Privacy Laws and Fair Credit Reporting Act etc.”
A fairly harmless sounding consultation paper from the Indian Telecom regulator TRAI on cloud computing (pdf), but cloaked within in its verbosity are topics that could change the way the Internet functions in India: over 119 pages, within mentions of privacy and data protection, there is the potential for forced data localization and the prevention of cross border data transfer; within mentions of tax benefits is the potential for additional taxation of cloud services. Over and above that, the encryption issue makes a comeback after the DEITY’s remarkably daft encryption policy last year. On security, the TRAI paper says: “The Government will have to ensure a strict and vigilant interception system in cloud computing environment”
There’s a point where the TRAI also points towards the possibility of licensing “intermediate service providers”, without exactly specifying what kind of entities they are referring to. Since this term appears only once in the paper, and the preceding section refers to lawful interception of cloud services, we’re assuming that this refers to licensing of cloud companies.
For a regulator which appeared to be avoiding broad consultations and taking up issues one by one, this is a bit of a disappointment. It’s hard to find an online service today that doesn’t deploy cloud based services, and this consultation thus has the potential to effect every Internet business, and thus availability of services to users in India. The questions raised by the TRAI don’t entirely |
Times newsletters.
In only one instance did an American rider whom Landis accused of doping shout from the rooftop that he had never taken performance-enhancing drugs — not now, not when Landis had claimed he did — and that was Armstrong.
A day after Landis’s e-mail messages to top cycling officials detailing his and others’ doping practices became public, Armstrong told reporters that it was all a lie.
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On his Team RadioShack Web site, a statement was posted by the team’s lawyer, saying that the people Landis had accused of doping “have responded by pointing out that the contradictory and disjointed accusations from a confessed liar are baseless and untrue.”
But not everyone accused was vocal. As an investigation led by the United States Anti-Doping Agency and federal agents ensues, the riders have been relatively quiet.
Team officials who Landis has said encouraged or tolerated doping have also spoken out. Johan Bruyneel, the team manager of the RadioShack squad; Jim Ochowicz, the BMC Racing president and a former top USA Cycling official; and Andy Rihs, a co-owner of BMC Racing and former owner of the doping-plagued, Swiss-based Phonak team, all said Landis’s claims were untrue.
For Bob Stapleton, the owner of HTC-Columbia, the truth is unclear. And, in some ways, he said, he did not even want to know the truth.
The past does not matter if the sport keeps pushing forward with its antidoping program, he said.
“In 2006, when Floyd tested positive at the Tour, it was an absolute wake-up call for the sport, so, in a strange way, that’s one good thing he did for cycling,” Stapleton said. “Maybe in some cases, it has been one step forward and two steps back, but we’re at a better place than we’ve ever been. I think these days, most athletes are trying to do the right thing.”The big game today will be the first ever Super Bowl illuminated by LEDs instead of traditional metal halide lamps. University of Phoenix Stadium — home of the Arizona Cardinals and Super Bowl XLIX — was outfitted with the LED fixtures last year. Since LEDs are brighter than the old lamps, only 312 units were needed to replace the 780 metal halide lights that were originally installed in the stadium. The new lights also use 75 percent less energy, and they should last at least 20 years — far longer than the old lights that required maintenance every few seasons.
Brighter and whiter
But the lights are changing more than just corporate bottom lines. If you haven't watched a Cardinals game this season, you might notice a difference in the lighting quality. It might take a keen eye to notice, but despite using fewer than half as many lighting units, the light output onto the field is brighter and whiter than before. You'll also see that the strobe effect during slow-motion replays is gone, since LEDs don't flicker in the same way as metal halide lamps.
University of Phoenix Stadium isn't the first stadium to be lit by LEDs — NRG Stadium (home of the Houston Texans) also installed the new lights for this season. But the LEDs will now be under the scrutiny of the brightest stage of them all: the Super Bowl. Ephesus, the company that manufactured the lights, is probably hoping no one notices a difference, but at least if the power goes out like it did in 2013 it won't take a half an hour for the lights to come back on — LEDs power up instantly.Currently only West Virginia levies an excise tax on soft drinks and requires that soft drink packaging visibly indicate that the tax has been paid by the distributor. West Virginia law requires that an outline of the state be inscribed in a 1/4 inch circle on the can end. The State of West Virginia now allows soft drink distributors who are bonded in the state to ink-jet the tax information on the bottoms of cans. The product is in compliance if "WV1" is ink-jetted on the bottom regardless of the inscribed outline of the state.
Although can manufacturers are not responsible for the payment of excise taxes levied on products packaged in cans, can makers must provide the necessary labeling that soft drink distributors need to remain in compliance with the soft drink excise tax laws. Because many labeling requirements stipulate that specific labeling, such as deposit information, be clearly marked on the can end, there is a limited amount of space available on the can end for other labeling purposes. This is particularly true as the industry moves to the use of smaller and smaller can ends in an effort to reduce the amount of material used in packaging.
An excise tax in Louisiana was repealed in March 1997. Obviously, the LTP label is no longer required on can ends of soft drinks sold in the State of Louisiana.
Updates with respect to beverage can labeling are periodically published by CMI as changes to the various laws occur.Ubuntu MATE 15.04 for Raspberry Pi 2
Rohith Madhavan has made an Ubuntu MATE 15.04 image for the Raspberry Pi 2 which you can download or build yourself.
The image is functional and based on the regular Ubuntu armhf base, and not the new Snappy Core, which means that the installation procedure for applications is the same as that for the regular desktop version, ie using apt-get.
We have done what we can to optimise the build for the Raspberry Pi 2 and one can comfortably use applications such as LibreOffice, which in fact is a joy to use But the microSDHC I/O throughput is a bottleneck so we recommend that you use a Class 6 or Class 10 microSDHC card. If you build the image yourself we recommend you use the f2fs file system.
You’ll need a microSD card which is 4GB or greater to fit the image. The file system can be re-sized to occupy the unallocated space of the microSD card, similar to Raspbian.
NOTE! There are no predefined user accounts. The first time you boot the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 image it will run through a setup wizard where you can create your own user account and configure your regional settings.
Download
Pre-built images is also available:
Download the image and then:
Extract the.img.bz2 archive to get the image file.
`bunzip2 ubuntu-mate-15.04-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi-2.img.bz2`
Write the image file to the microSD card as root.
`sudo ddrescue -d -D --force ubuntu-mate-15.04-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi-2.img /dev/sdX`
The drive may be mounted on any /dev/sdX so use the command lsblk to
check.
Build
NOTE! Currently these scripts will only run on an armhf device.
Edit build-image.sh and change BASEDIR. Then run the build.
sudo./build-image.sh
This will take a long time, so I suggest you start this running before you go to bed.
Re-size file system
There are no utilities included for automatic file system re-sizing. However, it’s not hard to do manually. Once booted:
`sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0`
Delete the second partition ( d, 2 ), then re-create it using the defaults ( n, p, 2, enter, enter ), then write and exit ( w ). Reboot the system, then:
`sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2`
Hardware accelerated video
To play videos using hardware accelerated decoding you will need MPEG-2 and VC-1 licenses from the Raspberry Pi Store. You can then use omxplayer, which uses the Raspberry Pi VideoCore libraries, to provide hardware accelerated video playback.
Redirecting audio output
You can select which audio device omxplayer should output audio to.
For HDMI
omxplayer -o hdmi video.mp4
For 3.5mm audio jack
omxplayer -o local video.mp4
The sound will output to HDMI by default if both HDMI and the 3.5mm audio jack
are connected. You can, however, force the system to output to a particular
device using amixer.
For HDMI
sudo amixer cset numid=3 2
For 3.5mm audio jack
sudo amixer cset numid=3 1
Feedback and Improvements
Please post all feedback on the dedicated community topic. If you have any improvements then please submit a pull request to our BitBucket.
Credits
Rohith Madhavan - Made the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 image.
Martin Wimpress - Added first boot setup wizard and architecture optimisations.
Ryan Finnie - Raspberry Pi 2 Kernel, Firmware and video driver packages.
Sjoerd Simons - Made the initial Raspberry Pi 2 kernel patches for Debian Jessie.
Sergio Conde - Maintains omxplayer for the Raspberry Pi.
Changes
2015-04-22
Enabled Ryan Finnie’s PPA. https://launchpad.net/~fo0bar/+archive/ubuntu/rpi2 Many thanks to Ryan for adding Vivid as a build target.
Changed from cfq to deadline I/O scheduler.
to I/O scheduler. Added xserver-xorg-video-fbturbo (an accelerated x.org driver) 0~git.20150305.e094e3c-1.15.04. Limited to hardware accelerated window moving and scrolling.
(an accelerated x.org driver) 0~git.20150305.e094e3c-1.15.04. Added raspi-copies-and-fills (high performance memcpy and memset) 0.4-1.
(high performance memcpy and memset) 0.4-1. Added oem-config so first boot provides a setup wizard.
so first boot provides a setup wizard. Added rpi2-ubuntu-errata for facilitating post-release updates/migrations.
for facilitating post-release updates/migrations. Added sym-links to VideoCore utilties in /opt/vc/ for 3rd party script compatibility.
for 3rd party script compatibility. Added f2fs support to the build script. Pre-built images available for download use ext4 because f2fs file systems can not be resized
at present.
support to the build script. Updated to Linux 3.18.0-20.21.
Updated to flash-kernel 3.0~rc.4ubuntu54+rpi2.4.
3.0~rc.4ubuntu54+rpi2.4. Updated to omxplayer 0.3.6~git20150402~74aac37.
0.3.6~git20150402~74aac37. Updated to raspberrypi-firmware-nokernel 1.20150402.3ea439c-1.
1.20150402.3ea439c-1. Updated to raspberrypi-vc (VideoCore GPU libraries) 1.20150323.7650bcb-1.
(VideoCore GPU libraries) 1.20150323.7650bcb-1. Fixed /etc/network/interfaces so that the Ethernet device is now configurable via Network Manager.
so that the Ethernet device is now configurable via Network Manager. Removed openssh-server until host key regeneration can be integrated.
2015-03-14
Enabled systemd as the init system.
as the init system. Added raspberrypi-vc (VideoCore GPU libraries) 1.20150301.0de0b20-3.
(VideoCore GPU libraries) 1.20150301.0de0b20-3. Added omxplayer 0.3.6~git20150217~5337be8.
0.3.6~git20150217~5337be8. Added linux-firmware.
. Added openssh-server.
2015-03-07
Initial Release.
TODO
Add OpenSSH with host key regeneration on first boot.
Add raspi-config or equivilent.
or equivilent. Add automatic reszing of the root file system.
Referencesmophie introduces its first-ever waterproof juice pack battery case
Creators of the Original juice pack® Provide Diverse Protection and 100% Extra Battery Life with the juice pack® H2PROTM Made for iPhone® 6
Orange County, Calif., (May 5, 2015) – mophie—the #1 selling mobile battery case in North America(1), and innovator of intelligent solutions for mobile devices—announced today the juice pack® H2PROTM made for iPhone® 6, the company’s first waterproof battery case, providing more than 100% extra battery life.
In addition to waterproof protection, the juice pack® H2PROTM exceeds industry standards with top protection ratings. The sleek, yet extremely durable design enables this battery case to bounce back from accidental drops, dust, dirt and other everyday conditions, keeping your phone safe in all situations.
“Once again we’ve successfully broadened our product line by focusing on mobile users’ everyday power and protection concerns to develop a quality, reliable mophie solution,” said Daniel Huang, mophie CEO and Co-Founder. “The juice pack® H2PROTM serves as a protective safety net for those who encounter life’s unexpected mishaps.”
The juice pack® H2PROTM is equipped with a powerful 2,750mAh rechargeable lithium-ion polymer battery which allows users to enjoy up to 14 additional hours of talk time, 10 additional hours of web browsing, 11 additional hours of video playback, and 50 additional hours of music playback(2).
Featuring mophie’s Priority+TM charge and sync, the juice pack® H2PROTM allows the iPhone® 6 to charge before the juice pack® itself, and enables pass-through charge and sync while connected to a PC or Mac. Designed with pass-through volume and power buttons, as well as mophie’s proprietary mute switch, the juice pack® maintains full functionality of the mobile device.
The mophie juice pack® H2PROTM made for iPhone® 6 is currently available for pre-order at mophie.com for $129.95.
For the latest details and updates about all mophie products, follow mophie on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and register at mophie.com/innovation.
mophie, the #1 selling battery case manufacturer in North America, is a California-based, award-winning designer and manufacturer that empowers the mobile world to do more. Widely acclaimed for innovative mobile solutions, mophie is the proud developer of the original juice pack®. mophie products are recognized for style and engineered for performance, providing a seamless integration of hardware, software and design. mophie has operations in California, Michigan, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and China. mophie products are available in more than 130 countries, and can be found at Best Buy, Verizon, and T-Mobile stores, as well as Sprint and other leading retailers. Visit mophie.com and follow us on Facebook, twitter, and Instagram (@mophie).
Media Contact:
Kevin Malinowski
media@mophie.com
M: 732-684-8779Jurgen Klopp has delivered a robust defence of his underfire Liverpool centre-backs as he insisted that other top clubs would want to sign them.
The Anfield boss also dismissed suggestions that the Reds had erred by failing to strengthen that area of the squad during the summer transfer window.
Liverpool missed out on top target Virgil van Dijk after Southampton refused to sell, but Klopp insists an array of alternatives were considered before he opted to keep faith with what he already had in Dejan Lovren, Joel Matip, Ragnar Klavan and Joe Gomez.
That decision has been the subject of increased scrutiny this week after a 5-0 thrashing at the hands of Manchester City was followed by the Reds throwing away a lead in their 2-2 Champions League draw with Sevilla.
“With all the history before I came in and since I’ve been here with how people talk about these players, you really should try one time to go out there and ask other clubs what they think about these defenders and whether they would like to pick them. You would be really surprised,” Klopp said.
Virgil Van Dijk shows off aerial prowess in training
Pressed on why Liverpool didn’t pursue a Plan B after failing to land Van Dijk, Klopp said: “I said if there would have been a solution out there we would have done it. There was no solution.
“I cannot speak in this country about any players I tried to get. Give me other centre-halves?”
When it was put to him that either Napoli’s Kalidou Koulibaly or Ajax’s Davinson Sanchez, who ended up joining Tottenham, would have been among the other suitable options to bolster his backline, Klopp said: “No. We watched all of them 500 million times.
“Just to cool the people down, what if the new player doesn’t hit the first ball (like Lovren against Sevilla) and he makes exactly the same mistake? A mistake they all made in their life – but it is like ‘He is a £65million signing, he will improve’.
“Why do you think the other one cannot improve? I don’t understand that. We want to make the right decisions. A big part of football and life is really putting faith in the people you work with – trust them – because they all can improve.
“They all can. They are all good out there but they are not that good that you say yes they could help immediately. I had to make a decision and the decision was our boys are not worse than them.
“What I see from all the questions, you start too early coming back to these things. For me it’s really difficult always to come completely on your planet, visit you and say ‘Yeah you’re right, there were five good options out there and we missed them because, I don’t know, we wanted to spend the money anywhere else’.”
'I believe in trust'
One accusation levelled at Klopp by some fans and pundits is that he’s too trusting in the current crop.
“People say that? That’s the risk when you get a manager, so we are like we are,” he said.
“I believe in trust. I trust people until they give me an opportunity or a possibility not to trust them anymore. That’s how I understand life.
(Image: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
“My job is really to get the best out of these boys, not to sign them and tell them ‘Deliver, come on.’ That’s a clear deal. You perform really well boys, credit. We perform bad, my credit. It’s my job to make sure we can perform as good as possible.”
Lovren was a lightning rod for criticism after his blunder put the opener on a plate for Wissam Ben Yedder against Sevilla. But Klopp says the Croatian centre-back has been unfairly singled out.
“At the time I thought it had gone through his legs but then I watched it back. Things like this happen and it’s all about reacting to it,” he said.
“I’d give them all the advice: don’t read anything. But with the world of social media that’s quite difficult for the boys. They all know what people think and say in this moment.
“Two people say you’re good and you think ‘okay’, five people say you are bad and it feels like a stitch or whatever. Dejan is not 18 any more. He’s a man, he’s a father of two kids. He can deal with it. I’ve seen much bigger mistakes in my life.
“Around their second goal, I should have asked five players - and in fact I did - why they reacted like they did in that situation? That’s the most interesting question. We’ve worked on the quick throw-ins seven million times in training and it still happened. That’s more my problem than the individual mistakes.
“When a ball comes across and you miss it, it’s about one millisecond. You can’t train for this. The first goal was also a collective failure. At the end it’s a cross but in football you need to avoid crosses coming in.
“We should have that the ball back before that. Emre Can was in a situation where he usually gets the ball but he misjudged it. Do we talk about him? No. Not that I want people to talk about Emre, but I don’t understand the focus just on Dejan.
“My criticism always need to help. Others just need to make criticism. My job is a bit different.”
Klopp was irked that talk of defensive frailties rather than Liverpool’s scintillating attacking play has dominated the build up to Saturday’s Premier League clash with Burnley.
But fans’ frustration stems from the fact that it’s been an area of weakness for the Reds for so long. It pre-dates his two-year reign.
“I know that but that doesn’t make it any more right,” Klopp added.
“Hypothetical, but let’s say when I came here we started new and now we have this team. When I came in we were ninth and now ‘ooofff’. We are really on a good way.
“Is it allowed to see it like this? Yes. Sometimes we make mistakes because we are offensively that strong. If we lose the ball in the wrong moment, it is the most difficult thing to do to defend these situations.
“It is not that we don’t see it, it is not that we don’t want to fix it, it is not that we ignore it. Yes, sometimes there are goals I am angry about.
“But after the game again we talk about this and not enough about all the positive things. Two goals conceded, that was not good. But the rest was real Champions League football against a real strong side.
“My job is really to make the best out of this season and it’s easy for me in a lot of moments to believe in this team.”Melbourne cafe suggests 18pc 'gender pay gap' surcharge for male customers
Posted
A humble Melbourne cafe that asks its male customers to pay an 18 per cent "gender surcharge" has found itself in the eye of a social media storm.
Handsome Her in Melbourne's inner suburb of Brunswick markets itself as a cafe "by women, for women".
As part of its three "House Rules", the cafe stipulates women have priority seating, men will be charged an 18 per cent premium "to reflect the gender pay gap [2016] which is donated to a women's service".
The third rule states "respect goes both ways".
Pictures of the sign were shared on social media where the cafe's business concept was debated — is this clever corporate social responsibility, or male discrimination?
To be clear, the surcharge is optional and only applies one in every four weeks.
What's more, the money raised by the surcharge is donated to Elizabeth Morgan House, Victoria's peak body for Aboriginal women's services.
The 18 per cent surcharge figure comes from a 2016 report from Australia's Workplace Gender Equality Agency that placed the average full-time base salary pay gap at 17.7 per cent, resulting in a difference in salary of up to $27,000.
The report also found that the more women there were in executive leadership roles, the lower the gender pay gap was in the organisation.
"Organisations with the lowest share of female executive leaders have an average gender pay gap double the size of those with an equal share of women in senior roles: 20 per cent compared with 10 per cent," the report said.
"Organisation-wide reductions in the gender pay gap were recorded for those companies that improved gender balance at the executive leadership level between 2015 and 2016."
The report included other findings such as:
Male graduates access higher pay, with men more likely to nap the top graduate trainee salaries.
Women were much more likely to work part-time than men, and even out-earn men by about $4,000 a year. However, part-time managerial jobs tend to favour men, who earn more than 27 per cent than their female peers.
The gender pay gap grows with seniority, resulting in an annual difference of more than $93,000.
But the case for raising money for charity and getting people talking about the "long forgotten gender pay gap" did not win everyone over.
"Whilst appreciate highlighting the issue of pay, creating an us and them is divisive. Flip this, and Twitter is in flames," one Twitter user wrote.
"I think if you want to fight for equality then surely treating everyone the same is the way to go," wrote Leroy Brown.
Others supported the move, saying it was a fair move in considering that women are paid about 18 per cent less than men in certain roles.
"Love it! Spaces for ladies is always great and highlighting the pay gap like this is harder for people to ignore," Fiona Cannon wrote.
"As a man — no problem with it at all. No reason women shouldn't have their own spaces and be able to dictate what the rules are in them," Josh Elliott said.
Meanwhile, staff of the cafe took to its Facebook page to address what they called a "hectic couple of days".
"In three days we have opened the cafe, withstood a social media storm … and gotten Australia talking about the long forgotten gender pay gap," the post said, thanking customers who had shown their support.
"I had a woman bring her daughters in today and when she came up to the till and saw our gorgeous vulva stones and our period sticker packs she beamed, thanked us for what we were doing and said 'what a beautiful place to take my daughters' … I swelled with pride," the Facebook post said.
"We've had men travel across town to visit us and pay "the man tax" and throw some extra in the donation jar.
"Guys, you're pretty neat."
Topics: small-business, women, social-media, melbourne-3000, vicTrailer for Limitless.
Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro star in Limitless, an action-thriller about a writer who takes an experimental drug that allows him to use 100 percent of his mind. As one man evolves into the perfect version of himself, forces more corrupt than he can imagine mark him for assassination.
Out-of-work writer Eddie Morra's (Cooper) rejection by girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish) confirms his belief that he has zero future. That all vanishes the day an old friend introduces Eddie to MDT, a designer pharmaceutical that makes him laser focused and more confident than any man alive.
Now on an MDT-fueled odyssey, everything Eddie's read, heard or seen is instantly organized and available to him. As the former nobody rises to the top of the financial world, he draws the attention of business mogul Carl Van Loon (De Niro), who sees this enhanced version of Eddie as the tool to make billions.
But brutal side effects jeopardize his meteoric ascent. With a dwindling stash and hit men who will eliminate him to get the MDT, Eddie must stay wired long enough to elude capture and fulfill his destiny. If he can't, he will become just another victim who thought he'd found invincibility in a bottle.U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions makes a statement regarding national security in New York, U.S., November 2, 2017. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked Justice Department prosecutors to decide if a special counsel should be appointed to investigate certain Republican concerns, including alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation and the sale of a uranium company to Russia, according to media reports on Monday.
The Washington Post and New York Times cited a letter from the Justice Department to the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Robert Goodlatte, responding to his request for the appointment of a special counsel to look into various matters.
The letter quoted Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd as saying that Sessions had "directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues raised in your letters," according to the Post, which first reported the story (wapo.st/2zEwN7a)
Those prosecutors would then make recommendations “as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel,” the letter said.
Last month, Republican leaders of two House committees launched an investigation into an Obama-era deal in which a Russian company bought a Canadian firm that owned some 20 percent of U.S. uranium supplies.
Some Republicans have charged that the State Department under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved the deal after her husband’s charitable foundation received a $145 million donation.
Democrats have accused Republicans of launching a spurious investigation of Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, to divert attention from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged links between President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said five congressional committees, including the oversight panel, had investigated the deal and “identified no evidence to substantiate allegations that Secretary Clinton orchestrated, manipulated, or otherwise coerced” the interagency committee to approve the deal."Mountain State" redirects here. For the region in the Western United States, see Mountain States
State of the United States of America
West Virginia ( ()) is a state located in the Appalachian region in the Southern United States and is also considered to be a part of the Middle Atlantic States. It is bordered by Pennsylvania to the north, Maryland to the east and northeast, Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, and Ohio to the northwest. West Virginia is the 41st largest state by area, and is ranked 38th in population. The capital and largest city is Charleston.
West Virginia became a state following the Wheeling Conventions of 1861, after the American Civil War had begun. Delegates from some Unionist counties of northwestern Virginia decided to break away from Virginia, although they included many secessionist counties in the new state.[7] West Virginia was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863, and was a key border state during the war. West Virginia was the only state to form by separating from a Confederate state, the first to separate from any state since Maine separated from Massachusetts, and was one of two states admitted to the Union during the American Civil War (the other being Nevada). While a portion of its residents held slaves, most of the residents were yeomen farmers, and the delegates provided for gradual abolition of slavery in the new state Constitution.
The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers[8] classify West Virginia as part of the Southern United States. However the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies West Virginia as a part of the Mid-Atlantic.[9] The northern panhandle extends adjacent to Pennsylvania and Ohio, with the West Virginia cities of Wheeling and Weirton just across the border from the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, while Bluefield is less than 70 miles (110 km) from North Carolina. Huntington in the southwest is close to the states of Ohio and Kentucky, while Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry in the Eastern Panhandle region are considered part of the Washington metropolitan area, in between the states of Maryland and Virginia. The unique position of West Virginia means that it is often included in several geographical regions, including the Mid-Atlantic, the Upland South, and the Southeastern United States. It is the only state that is entirely within the area served by the Appalachian Regional Commission; the area is commonly defined as "Appalachia".[10]
The state is noted for its mountains and rolling hills, its historically significant logging and coal mining industries, and its political and labor history. It is also known for a wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities, including skiing, whitewater rafting, fishing, hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, rock climbing, and hunting.
History
Many ancient man-made earthen mounds from various prehistoric mound builder cultures survive, especially in the areas of present-day Moundsville, South Charleston, and Romney. The artifacts uncovered in these give evidence of village societies. They had a tribal trade system culture that crafted cold-worked copper pieces.
In the 1670s during the Beaver Wars, the powerful Iroquois, five allied nations based in present-day New York and Pennsylvania, drove out other American Indian tribes from the region in order to reserve the upper Ohio Valley as a hunting ground. Siouan language tribes, such as the Moneton, had previously been recorded in the area.
A century later, the area now identified as West Virginia was contested territory among Anglo-Americans as well, with the colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia claiming territorial rights under their colonial charters to this area before the American Revolutionary War. Some speculative land companies, such as the Vandalia Company,[11] and later the Ohio Company and Indiana Company, tried to legitimize their claims to land in parts of West Virginia and present day Kentucky, but failed. This rivalry resulted in some settlers petitioning the Continental Congress to create a new territory called Westsylvania. With the federal settlement of the Pennsylvania and Virginia border dispute, creating Kentucky County, Virginia, Kentuckians "were satisfied [...], and the inhabitants of a large part of West Virginia were grateful."[12]
The Crown considered the area of West Virginia to be part of the British Virginia Colony from 1607 to 1776. The United States considered this area to be the western part of the state of Virginia (which was commonly referred as Trans-Allegheny Virginia) from 1776 to 1863, before the formation of West Virginia. Its residents were discontented for years with their position in Virginia, as the government was dominated by the planter elite of the Tidewater and Piedmont areas. The legislature had electoral malapportionment, based on the counting of slaves toward regional populations, and the western white residents were underrepresented in the state legislature. More subsistence and yeoman farmers lived in the west and they were generally less supportive of slavery, although many counties were divided on their support. The residents of this area became more sharply divided after the planter elite of eastern Virginia voted to secede from the Union during the Civil War.
Residents of the western and northern counties set up a separate government under Francis Pierpont in 1861, which they called the Restored Government. Most voted to separate from Virginia, and the new state was admitted to the Union in 1863. In 1864 a state constitutional convention drafted a constitution, which was ratified by the legislature without putting it to popular vote. West Virginia abolished slavery by a gradual process and temporarily disenfranchised men who had held Confederate office or fought for the Confederacy.
West Virginia's history has been profoundly affected by its mountainous terrain, numerous and vast river valleys, and rich natural resources. These were all factors driving its economy and the lifestyles of its residents, who tended to live in many small, relatively isolated communities in the mountain valleys.
Prehistory
A 2010 analysis of a local stalagmite revealed that Native Americans were burning forests to clear land as early as 100 BC.[13] Some regional late-prehistoric Eastern Woodland tribes were more involved in hunting and fishing, practicing the Eastern Agricultural Complex gardening method which used fire to clear out underbrush from certain areas. Another group progressed to the more time-consuming, advanced companion crop fields method of gardening. Also continuing from ancient indigenous people of the state, they cultivated tobacco through to early historic times. It was used in numerous social and religious rituals.
"Maize (corn) did not make a substantial contribution to the diet until after 1150 BP", to quote Mills (OSU 2003).[full citation needed] Eventually, tribal villages began depending on corn to feed their turkey flocks, as Kanawha Fort Ancients practiced bird husbandry. The local Indians made corn bread and a flat rye bread called "bannock" as they emerged from the protohistoric era. A horizon extending from a little before the early 18th century is sometimes called the acculturating Fireside Cabin culture. Trading posts were established by European traders along the Potomac and James rivers.
Tribes which inhabited West Virginia as of the year 1600 were the Siouan Monongahela Culture to the north, the Fort Ancient culture along the Ohio River from the Monongahela to Kentucky and extending an unknown distance inland [14] & the Eastern Siouan Tutelo & Moneton tribes in the southeast. There was also the Iroquoian Susquehannock in the region approximately east of the Monongahela River and north of the Monongahela National Forest, a possible tribe called the Senandoa, or Shenandoah, in the Shenandoah Valley & the easternmost tip of the state may have been home to the Manahoac people. The Monongahela may have been the same as a people known as the Calicua, or Cali.[15] The following may have also all been the same tribe—Moneton, Moheton, Senandoa, Tomahitan.
During the Beaver Wars, other tribes moved into the region. There was the Iroquoian Tiontatecaga (also Little Mingo, Guyandotte),[16] who seem to have split off from the Petun after they were defeated by the Iroquois. They eventually settled somewhere between the Kanawha & Little Kanawha Rivers. During the 1750s, when the Mingo Seneca seceded from the Iroquois and returned to the Ohio River Valley, they contend that this tribe merged with them. The Shawnee arrived as well, but were primarily stationed within former Monongahela territory approximately until 1750, however they did extend their influence throughout the Ohio River region. They were the last Native tribe of West Virginia and were driven out by the United States during the Shawnee Wars (1811–1813). The Erie, who were chased out of Ohio around 1655, are now believed to be the same as the Westo, who invaded as far as South Carolina before being destroyed in the 1680s. If so, their path would have brought them through West Virginia & the historical movement of the Tutelo,[17] as well as Carbon dating for the Fort Ancients seem to correspond with the given period of 1655-1670 as the time of their removal.[14] The Susquehannocks were original participants of the Beaver Wars, but were cut off from the Ohio River by the Iroquois around 1630 and found themselves in dire straits. From disease, constant warfare and an inability to provide for themselves financially, they began to collapse and moved further and further east, to the Susquehanna River of Eastern Pennsylvania.[18] The Manahoac were probably forced out in the 1680s, when the Iroquois began to invade Virginia.[19] The Siouan tribes there moved into North Carolina & later returned as one tribe, known as the Eastern Blackfoot, or Christannas.[20]
The Westo did not secure the territory they conquered. Before they were even gone, displaced natives from the south flooded into freshly conquered regions and took them over.[21] These became known as the Shattaras, or West Virginia Cherokees. They took in and merged with the |
'm sure there would be other benefits, but one thing is for sure: if Trump wants to leave a lasting legacy, leadership on this issue alone would secure him a place in the history books!The man who was charged after allegedly posting a video to Facebook of himself driving 190 km/h down a Manitoba highway had another run in with the law on Tuesday.
The man had to be forcibly removed from a radio station in Swan River after showing up irate and demanding to see a man who had interviewed him the day before.
CJSB FM news director Riley Laychuk interviewed the man Monday afternoon after hearing about the charges and the Facebook video.
"I used some of his comments in a story in the afternoon, and I guess something must have upset him. I'm not entirely sure what happened. He ended up leaving us three voice mails that night basically all of them full with swear words that he had some things to settle with me and that he was going to come to the radio station in the morning to hopefully talk to me, putting it nicely," said Laychuk.
The man did show up Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., he said.
"The staff wasn't expecting him, and they came back and got me and said, 'There's this guy here to see you, and I said, 'Oh no. Oh no. You're not letting him back," said Laychuk. "He was trying to get through the door already. I could hear them yelling at him to stay back. They were keeping him at bay."
Laychuk called RCMP and told them he needed help.
Officers arrived to station and arrested the man. They later released him and told Laychuk they told him to stay away from the station and its staff.
"It was scary. Nothing compares. I was frightened. I was legitimately terrified," said Laychuk. "I was assuming that worst case, there would be some sort of physical confrontation. That's what my worst fear was. That's why I was trying to tell them, 'Don't let him through the door.' I was scared. I was shaking."
CBC contacted RCMP to find out if charges will be laid in this case, but they have not yet responded.A 35-minute documentary that sheds light on the difficulties facing Arab scientists and students in forced exile is due to be screened this week (7 December) at the US National Academies of Science in Washington, DC.
“The documentary reveals the difficult journey of refugee scientists,” Nicole Leghissa ‘Science in Exile’ was produced by The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and premiered at the World Science Forum held in Jordan in November. It explores how wars in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq have ravaged the lives of four researchers who fled their homelands in search of safety, and an opportunity to resume their research or studies in host countries. In the film they share their concerns and stories on the journey to seeking asylum — and how they ended up as refugees rather than scientists.
Like any refugee who flees from war, the scientists seek a new home and a source of livelihood for themselves and their families. But, a refugee scientist aspires for more — “a laboratory or research centre to continue his scientific contributions” — according to Italian film director Nicole Leghissa.
"The documentary reveals the difficult journey of refugee scientists, showing that the idea of starting over is not an option,” Leghissa tells SciDev.Net. “[It also] highlights the fact that they are targeted in times of war and conflict."
The film has been produced with the support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). Its production took about seven months in both Lebanon and Turkey, according to Leghissa.
"The sad fact is that their countries are incapable of providing help for them, and some scientists might even not find a job opportunity in the diaspora, forced eventually to lose self-confidence at a time when humanity still needs them to offer what they have to research centres in their new communities,” Leghissa adds.
"The crisis in Syria has affected the past, the present and might even affect the future after Syria [has been] depleted of many of its scientists," said Saja Al Zoubi, one of the scientists featured in the film.
Some estimates suggest that more than half of Syrian doctors are now refugees.
Saja, who had to flee Syria for Lebanon after the deterioration of the security situation in Damascus, works as a social scientist. Her recent research focused on the economics of refugee families in Lebanon, especially households headed by women.
The concerns over security in Syria continue to haunt and disturb Saja, fearing the day when she might be banned from work in her host country. "At that time, [if that happens,] I will lose everything," she said. Researchers participating at the Forum workshop where the film premiered confirmed that the challenges begin after asylum. Among the challenges they face in host countries are the search for work, obtaining a residence permit in the country of asylum, the equivalence of scientific certificates, the existence of institutions that accept refugee scientists, and accessing grants and initiatives that will enable them to continue their scientific journey.
Highlighting initiatives to support refugee researchers, Celine Taminian, special adviser for the Middle East/North Africa region at the Institute of International Education's Scholar Rescue Fund, said that since its launch in 2004, the Fund has given nearly 726 grants to researchers who pursue master's, doctorate, and post-doctoral degrees.
Taminian explained that the plight of refugee scientists emerged after thousands of scientists fled Iraq in fear of retaliation by the government. The Fund began working with them at that time, and was able to support 280 Iraqi scientists —covering the costs of their research and studies in different fields of science.
The same effort is being made right now to support scientists from Syria, Yemen, and other countries affected by conflict.
But despite the opportunities and research grants provided by international organisations and civil society, the crisis is growing faster than the solutions. The solution lies only in ending conflicts, which are the main reason for the brain drain, especially in the Middle East, according to comments made after the film screening at the Forum.Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Differences remain between Israel and the US, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington, the White House has said.
President Obama urged the Israeli PM to take steps to build confidence in the peace process, during "honest" talks on Tuesday, spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
Mr Gibbs added that the US was seeking "clarification" of the latest plans to build homes in occupied East Jerusalem.
Mr Netanyahu's trip came amid the worst crisis in US-Israeli ties for decades.
The Israeli leader delayed his departure from Washington on Wednesday to meet the US Middle East peace envoy, George Mitchell, at his hotel.
ANALYSIS Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor, Washington
All day, Israeli and US diplomats have been shuttling back and forth across Washington. The Americans want assurances from Mr Netanyahu that they can take to the Palestinians to get them to agree to talks. It has been a difficult process. Before Mr Netanyahu met President Obama at the White House on Tuesday night, the message from the Israeli side was that they had made up with the Americans, and that they now understood their position on Jerusalem. But as they were meeting news broke about another housing development for Jewish settlers in occupied East Jerusalem. Afterwards, the White House signalled the crisis was not over, announcing that no photograph or video of the meeting would be released, which is a calculated snub. Even if the Americans do manage to get indirect talks going, the chances that they will make progress are slight. Both sides are politically weak - and their positions are a long way apart. To make matters worse, the entire region is more than usually unstable this year.
Mr Mitchell returned to the US on Tuesday following a meeting in the West Bank with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The White House was reportedly seeking to persuade Mr Netanyahu to commit to several trust-building measures to revive hopes for indirect "proximity talks" between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Palestinians pulled out of moves towards talks, just after they had been announced two weeks ago, when Israel unveiled plans to build 1,600 homes in the East Jerusalem settlement of Ramat Shlomo.
The project was approved during a visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden - a move which Washington branded an insult.
Then, minutes before Mr Netanyahu's fence-mending visit to the White House on Tuesday, it emerged the Jerusalem municipal government had approved another development.
Twenty apartments are to be built for Jewish settlers on the site of an old hotel in the predominantly Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Mr Gibbs told reporters on Wednesday there were areas of agreement and disagreement between the sides, following the two meetings in Washington, one of which was unscheduled.
He described the three-and-a-half hours of talks as an "honest and straightforward discussion that continues".
"The president has asked the prime minister for certain things to build confidence up to proximity talks that we think can make progress," Mr Gibbs said.
He reiterated the US position that there was an "unbreakable bond" between the US and the Israeli people.
The Israelis said there had been a "good atmosphere" during Tuesday's talks.
But the BBC's Kim Ghattas in Washington notes Mr Netanyahu did not get the reception usually reserved for America's allies.
There was no press conference, no lavish welcome, and the White House did not even release a picture of the meeting.
It all signals that the US is playing tough, making clear it is upset with the Israeli government, says our correspondent.
"I think it comes as a great shock to you and me, but not everything the president does is for the cameras and for the press," Mr Gibbs told reporters.
The White House also demanded on Wednesday further "clarification" about the development in Sheikh Jarrah from Mr Netanyahu, who was said to have been caught off guard by the announcement the previous day.
Palestinians want East Jerusalem for their future capital, but Israel insists the city cannot be divided.
Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
They are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.John Kasich, Mathematically Eliminated from Winning Nomination, Now Competing in Utah Only to Deny Ted Cruz the 50% Winner-Take-All Threshold and Deliver Delegates to Trump
Kasich is no longer a real candidate, per the math, but now seems to running for the position of Trump's Vice President, running against Cruz to keep Trump in the lead.
Via Allah, Kasich doesn't have a chance in Utah. Neither does Trump, actually, as Mormons are solidly against him.
Yet Kasich is buying ads in Utah -- for no reason other than to keep Cruz below the 50% threshold at which Cruz would invoke the winner-take-all rule and get all 42 of Utah's delegates.
Kasich is a strange and ugly worm of a man, full of vanity, for reasons baffling to all onlookers.
Meanwhile, while most of "Mr. Trump's" spinning chorus is on the same page in claiming Trump only spoke of "riots" as a metaphor, one surrogate forgets which lies she's supposed to tell and says "riots wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing" if a group of people thinks they're being "ignored."
A similar logic was offered to justify the Ferguson riots -- but was angrily countered by some of the same people now threatening riots.
Lenin said that principle was for the weak. It was weak to object to something on principle. The strong man, the wise man, asked "Who? Whom?" before making his decisions about the propriety of an action or tactic -- "Who?" is doing it, and to "Whom?" is it being done?
Only then, when you've figured out whether your Tribe is doing the act in question, could you decide if it was Proper Soviet Thought to support it or condemn it.
And now "Who? Whom?" analysis seems to be en vogue on the right.
What a truly wonderful time to be alive.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prisoners and authorities clash in northern Mexico
The UN has called for investigation into a prison riot in Mexico that left more than a dozen people dead.
The death toll rose to 17 on Wednesday night following clashes inside Cadereyta jail in Nuevo Leon state earlier in the week.
The UN cited other recent prison revolts as a reason for a "complete and exhaustive" report.
State authorities said they are open to cooperating with human rights organisations.
They previously said lethal force was needed to regain full control of the facility, near Monterrey.
About 250 inmates battled security forces during the disturbance, local media report.
A UN statement urged authorities "to clarify the tragedy that has occurred and to grant justice to the victims and their families", according to El Universal newspaper.
"Do you want somebody responsible? I am responsible," state security spokesperson Aldo Fasci told reporters.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Relatives waiting outside Cadereyta prison for news after the riot
He said attempts to mediate with inmates who took three guards hostage had failed.
However, he insisted no direct orders were given to start shooting. Officers were following protocol, he said.
He also said a police officer had a lung seriously injured when a prisoner attacked him with a "rod".
The UN statement referenced a 2016 a riot at Topo Chico prison, which left 49 people dead, and another violent outbreak at Apodaca prison in 2012, where 44 people died. Both prisons are in Nuevo Leon state.
Mexican prisons are often criticised for overcrowding and an inability to tackle violence between rival gangs.Cybele (; Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubileya/Kubeleya Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother";[1] Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Κυβέλη Kybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis) is an Anatolian mother goddess; she may have a possible precursor in the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük, where statues of plump women, sometimes sitting, have been found in excavations. She is Phrygia's only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies around the 6th century BC.
In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her possibly Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the harvest–mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a eunuch mendicant priesthood.[2] Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.
In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship.
Cult origins and development [ edit ]
Anatolia [ edit ]
No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Cybele's Phrygian cult. She may have evolved from a statuary type found at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, dated to the 6th millennium BC and identified by some as a mother goddess.[3] In Phrygian art of the 8th century BC, the cult attributes of the Phrygian mother-goddess include attendant lions, a bird of prey, and a small vase for her libations or other offerings.[4]
The inscription Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya[1] at a Phrygian rock-cut shrine, dated to the first half of the 6th century BC, is usually read as "Mother of the mountain", a reading supported by ancient classical sources,[1][5] and consistent with Cybele as any of several similar tutelary goddesses, each known as "mother" and associated with specific Anatolian mountains or other localities:[6] a goddess thus "born from stone".[7] She is ancient Phrygia's only known goddess,[8] and was probably the highest deity of the Phrygian state.
In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Pausanias attests to a Magnesian (Lydian) cult to "the mother of the gods", whose image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus. This was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess, and was attributed to the legendary Broteas.[9] At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess—identified by the Greeks as Cybele—took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,[10] and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.[11] This was the aniconic stone that was removed to Rome in 204 BC.
Images and iconography in funerary contexts, and the ubiquity of her Phrygian name Matar ("Mother"), suggest that she was a mediator between the "boundaries of the known and unknown": the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead.[12] Her association with hawks, lions, and the stone of the mountainous landscape of the Anatolian wilderness, seem to characterize her as mother of the land in its untrammeled natural state, with power to rule, moderate or soften its latent ferocity, and to control its potential threats to a settled, civilized life. Anatolian elites sought to harness her protective power to forms of ruler-cult; in Lydia, her cult had possible connections to the semi-legendary king Midas, as her sponsor, consort, or co-divinity.[13] As protector of cities, or city states, she was sometimes shown wearing a mural crown, representing the city walls.[14] At the same time, her power "transcended any purely political usage and spoke directly to the goddess' followers from all walks of life".[15]
Some Phrygian shaft monuments are thought to have been used for libations and blood offerings to Cybele, perhaps anticipating by several centuries the pit used in her taurobolium and criobolium sacrifices during the Roman imperial era.[16] Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed, and eventually subsumed, by the influences and interpretations of her foreign devotees, at first Greek and later Roman.
Greece [ edit ]
From around the 6th century BC, cults to the Anatolian mother-goddess were introduced from Phrygia into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of Magna Graecia. The Greeks called her Mātēr or Mētēr ("Mother"), or from the early 5th century Kubelē; in Pindar, she is "Mistress Cybele the Mother".[17] Walter Burkert places her among the "foreign gods" of Greek religion, a complex figure combining the Minoan-Mycenaean tradition with the Phrygian cult imported directly from Asia Minor.[18] In Greece, as in Phrygia, she was a "Mistress of animals" (Potnia Therōn),[19] with her mastery of the natural world expressed by the lions that flank her, sit in her lap or draw her chariot. She was readily assimilated to the Minoan-Greek earth-mother Rhea, "Mother of the gods", whose raucous, ecstatic rites she may have acquired. As an exemplar of devoted motherhood, she was partly assimilated to the grain-goddess Demeter, whose torchlight procession recalled her search for her lost daughter, Persephone.[20]
As with other deities viewed as foreign introductions, the spread of Cybele's cult was attended by conflict and crisis. Herodotus says that when Anacharsis returned to Scythia after traveling and acquiring knowledge among the Greeks in the 6th century BC, his brother, the Scythian king, put him to death for joining the cult.[21] In Athenian tradition, the city's metroon was founded around 500 BC to placate Cybele, who had visited a plague on Athens when one of her wandering priests was killed for his attempt to introduce her cult. The account may have been a later invention to explain why a public building was dedicated to an imported deity, as the earliest source is the Hymn To The Mother Of The Gods (362 AD) by the Roman emperor Julian.[22] Her cults most often were funded privately, rather than by the polis.[23] Her "vivid and forceful character" and association with the wild set her apart from the Olympian gods.[24]
Cybele's early Greek images are small votive representations of her monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands. She stands alone within a naiskos, which represents her temple or its doorway, and is crowned with a polos, a high, cylindrical hat. A long, flowing chiton covers her shoulders and back. She is sometimes shown with lion attendants. Around the 5th century BC, Agoracritos created a fully Hellenised and influential image of Cybele that was set up in the Athenian agora. It showed her enthroned, with a lion attendant, and a tympanon, the hand drum that was a Greek introduction to her cult and a salient feature in its later developments.[25]
For the Greeks, the tympanon was a marker of foreign cults, suitable for rites to Cybele, her close equivalent Rhea, and Dionysus; of these, only Cybele holds the tympanon herself. In Greek myth, a connection between Cybele and Dionysus may not date any earlier than the 1st century BC: in the Bibliotheca formerly attributed to Apollodorus, Cybele is said to have cured Dionysus of his madness.[26] Their cults, however shared several characteristics: the foreigner-deity arrived in a chariot, drawn by exotic big cats (Dionysus by tigers, Cybele by lions), accompanied by wild music and an ecstatic entourage of exotic foreigners and people from the lower classes. By the end of the 1st century BC, their rites In Athens, and elsewhere, were sometimes combined; Strabo notes that Rhea-Cybele's popular rites in Athens might be held in conjunction with Dionysus' procession.[27] Like Dionysus, Cybele was regarded as having a distinctly un-Hellenic temperament,[28] simultaneously embraced and "held at arm's length" by the Greeks.[29]
Bactria ( Cybele drawn in her chariot by lions towards a votive sacrifice (right). Above are the Sun God and heavenly objects. Plaque from Ai Khanoum Afghanistan ), 2nd century BC. Gilded silver, φ 25 cm
In contrast to her public role as a protector of cities, Cybele was also the focus of mystery cult, private rites with a chthonic aspect connected to hero cult and exclusive to those who had undergone initiation, though it is unclear who Cybele's initiates were.[30] Reliefs show her alongside young female and male attendants with torches, and vessels for purification. Literary sources describe joyous abandonment to the loud, percussive music of tympanon, castanets, clashing cymbals and flutes, and to the frenzied "Phrygian dancing", perhaps a form of circle-dancing by women, to the roar of "wise and healing music of the gods".[31]
Conflation with Rhea led to Cybele's association with various male demigods who served Rhea as attendants, or as guardians of her son, the infant Zeus, as he lay in the cave of his birth. In cult terms, they seem to have functioned as intercessors or intermediaries between goddess and mortal devotees, through dreams, waking trance or ecstatic dance and song. They include the armed Kouretes, who danced around Zeus and clashed their shields to amuse him; their supposedly Phrygian equivalents, the youthful Corybantes, who provided similarly wild and martial music, dance and song; and the dactyls and Telchines, magicians associated with metalworking.[32]
Cybele and Attis [ edit ]
Roman Imperial Attis wearing a Phrygian cap and performing a cult dance
Cybele's major mythographic narratives attach to her relationship with Attis, who is described by ancient Greek and Roman sources and cults as her youthful consort, and as a Phrygian deity. In Phrygia, "Attis" was both a commonplace and priestly name, found alike in casual graffiti, the dedications of personal monuments and several of Cybele's Phrygian shrines and monuments. His divinity may therefore have begun as a Greek invention based on what was known of Cybele's Phrygian cult.[33] His earliest certain image as deity appears on a 4th-century BC Greek stele from Piraeus, near Athens. It shows him as the Hellenised stereotype of a rustic, eastern barbarian; he sits at ease, sporting the Phrygian cap and shepherd's crook of his later Greek and Roman cults. Before him stands a Phrygian goddess (identified by the inscription as Agdistis) who carries a tympanon in her left hand. With her right, she hands him a jug, as if to welcome him into her cult with a share of her own libation.[34] Later images of Attis show him as a shepherd, in similar relaxed attitudes, holding or playing the syrinx (panpipes).[35] In Demosthenes' On the Crown (330 BC), attes is "a ritual cry shouted by followers of mystic rites".[36]
Attis seems to have accompanied the diffusion of Cybele's cult through Magna Graecia; there is evidence of their joint cult at the Greek colonies of Marseilles (Gaul) and Lokroi (southern Italy) from the 6th and 7th centuries BC. After Alexander the Great's conquests, "wandering devotees of the goddess became an increasingly common presence in Greek literature and social life; depictions of Attis have been found at numerous Greek sites".[37] When shown with Cybele, he is always the younger, lesser deity, or perhaps her priestly attendant; the difference is one of relative degree, rather than essence, as priests were sacred in their own right and were closely identified with their gods. In the mid 2nd century, letters from the king of Pergamum to Cybele's shrine at Pessinos consistently address its chief priest as "Attis".[38]
Roman Cybele [ edit ]
Republican era [ edit ]
Mater Deum, the Mother of the Gods, from southern Gaul[39] Votive altar inscribed to, the Mother of the Gods, from southern Gaul
Romans knew Cybele as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"), or as Magna Mater deorum Idaea ("great Idaean mother of the gods"), equivalent to the Greek title Meter Theon Idaia ("Mother of the Gods, from Mount Ida"). Rome officially adopted her cult during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), after dire prodigies, including a meteor shower, a failed harvest and famine, seemed to warn of Rome's imminent defeat. The Roman Senate and its religious advisers consulted the Sibylline oracle and decided that Carthage might be defeated if Rome imported the Magna Mater ("Great Mother") of Phrygian Pessinos.[40] As this cult object belonged to a Roman ally, the Kingdom of Pergamum, the Roman Senate sent ambassadors to seek the king's consent; en route, a consultation with the Greek oracle at Delphi confirmed that the goddess should be brought to Rome.[41] The goddess arrived in Rome in the form of Pessinos' black meteoric stone. Roman legend connects this voyage, or its end, to the matron Claudia Quinta, who was accused of inchastity but proved her innocence with a miraculous feat on behalf of the goddess. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, supposedly the "best man" in Rome, was chosen to meet the goddess at Ostia; and Rome's most virtuous matrons (including Claudia Quinta) conducted her to the temple of Victoria, to await the completion of her temple on the Palatine Hill. Pessinos' stone was later used as the face of the goddess' statue.[42] In due course, the famine ended and Hannibal was defeated.
Most modern scholarship agrees that Cybele's consort (Attis) and her eunuch Phrygian priests (Galli) would have arrived with the goddess, along with at least some of the wild, ecstatic features of her Greek and Phrygian cults. The histories of her arrival deal with the piety, purity and status of the Romans involved, the success of their religious stratagem, and power of the goddess herself; she has no consort or priesthood, and seems fully Romanised from the first.[43] Some modern scholars assume that Attis must have followed much later; or that the Galli, described in later sources as shockingly effeminate and flamboyantly "unRoman", must have been an unexpected consequence of bringing the goddess in blind obedience to the Sibyl; a case of "biting off more than one can chew".[44] Others note that Rome was well versed in the adoption (or sometimes, the "calling forth", or seizure) of foreign deities,[45] and the diplomats who negotiated Cybele's move to Rome would have been well-educated, and well-informed.[46] Romans believed that Cybele, considered a Phrygian outsider even within her Greek cults, was the mother-goddess of ancient Troy (Ilium). Some of Rome's leading patrician families claimed Trojan ancestry; so the "return" of the Mother of all Gods to her once-exiled people would have been particularly welcome, even if her spouse and priesthood were not; its accomplishment would have reflected well on the principals involved and, in turn, on their descendants.[47] The upper classes who sponsored the Magna Mater's festivals delegated their organisation to the plebeian aediles, and honoured her and each other with lavish, private festival banquets from which her Galli would have been conspicuously absent.[48] The goddess herself was contained within her Palatine precinct, along with her priesthood, at the geographical heart of Rome's most ancient religious traditions.[49] She was promoted as patrician property; a Roman matron – albeit a strange one, "with a stone for a face" – who acted for the clear benefit of the Roman state.[50][51]
Lazio 1st century BC marble statue of Cybele from Formia
Imperial era [ edit ]
Augustan ideology identified Magna Mater with Imperial order and Rome's religious authority throughout the empire. Augustus claimed a Trojan ancestry through his adoption by Julius Caesar and the divine favour of Venus; in the iconography of Imperial cult, the empress Livia was Magna Mater's earthly equivalent, Rome's protector and symbolic "Great Mother"; the goddess is portrayed with Livia's face on cameos[52] and statuary.[53] By this time, Rome had absorbed the goddess's Greek and Phrygian homelands, and the Roman version of Cybele as Imperial Rome's protector was introduced there.[54]
Imperial Magna Mater protected the empire's cities and agriculture — Ovid "stresses the barrenness of the earth before the Mother's arrival.[55] Virgil's Aeneid (written between 29 and 19 BC) embellishes her "Trojan" features; she is Berecyntian Cybele, mother of Jupiter himself, and protector of the Trojan prince Aeneas in his flight from the destruction of Troy. She gives the Trojans her sacred tree for shipbuilding, and begs Jupiter to make the ships indestructible. These ships become the means of escape for Aeneas and his men, guided towards Italy and a destiny as ancestors of the Roman people by Venus Genetrix. Once arrived in Italy, these ships have served their purpose and are transformed into sea nymphs.[56]
Stories of Magna Mater's arrival were used to promote the fame of its principals, and thus their descendants. Claudia Quinta's role as Rome's castissima femina (purest or most virtuous woman) became "increasingly glorified and fantastic"; she was shown in the costume of a Vestal Virgin, and Augustan ideology represented her as the ideal of virtuous Roman womanhood. The emperor Claudius claimed her among his ancestors.[57] Claudius promoted Attis to the Roman pantheon and placed his cult under the supervision of the quindecimviri (one of Rome's priestly colleges).[58]
Festivals and cults [ edit ]
Megalesia in April [ edit ]
[59] Illustration of the month of April based on the Calendar of Filocalus (354 AD), perhaps either a Gallus or a theatrical performer for the Megalesia
The Megalesia festival to Magna Mater commenced on April 4, the anniversary of her arrival in Rome. The festival structure is unclear, but it included ludi scaenici (plays and other entertainments based on religious themes), probably performed on the deeply stepped approach to her temple; some of the plays were commissioned from well-known playwrights. On April 10, her image was taken in public procession to the Circus Maximus, and chariot races were held there in her honour; a statue of Magna Mater was permanently sited on the racetrack's dividing barrier, showing the goddess seated on a lion's back.[60]
Roman bystanders seem to have perceived Megalesia as either characteristically "Greek";[61] or Phrygian. At the cusp of Rome's transition to Empire, the Greek Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes this procession as wild Phrygian "mummery" and "fabulous clap-trap", in contrast to the Megalesian sacrifices and games, carried out in what he admires as a dignified "traditional Roman" manner; Dionysius also applauds the wisdom of Roman religious law, which forbids the participation of any Roman citizen in the procession, and in the goddess's mysteries;[62] Slaves are forbidden to witness any of this.[63] In the late republican era, Lucretius vividly describes the procession's armed "war dancers" in their three-plumed helmets, clashing their shields together, bronze on bronze,[64] "delighted by blood"; yellow-robed, long-haired, perfumed Galli waving their knives, wild music of thrumming tympanons and shrill flutes. Along the route, rose petals are scattered, and clouds of incense arise.[65] The goddess's image, wearing the Mural Crown and seated within a sculpted, lion-drawn chariot, is carried high on a bier.[66] The Roman display of Cybele's Megalesia procession as an exotic, privileged public pageant offers signal contrast to what is known of the private, socially inclusive Phrygian-Greek mysteries on which it was based.[67]
'Holy week' in March [ edit ]
The Principate brought the development of an extended festival or "holy week"[68] for Cybele and Attis in March (Latin Martius), from the Ides to nearly the end of the month. Citizens and freedmen were allowed limited forms of participation in rites pertaining to Attis, through their membership of two colleges, each dedicated to a specific task; the Cannophores ("reed bearers") and the "Dendrophores ("tree bearers").[69]
March 15 (Ides): Canna intrat ("The Reed enters"), marking the birth of Attis and his exposure in the reeds along the Phrygian river Sangarius, [70] where he was discovered—depending on the version—by either shepherds or Cybele herself. [71] The reed was gathered and carried by the cannophores. [72]
("The Reed enters"), marking the birth of Attis and his exposure in the reeds along the Phrygian river Sangarius, where he was discovered—depending on the version—by either shepherds or Cybele herself. The reed was gathered and carried by the. March 22: Arbor intrat ("The Tree enters"), commemorating the death of Attis under a pine tree. The dendrophores ("tree bearers") cut down a tree,[73] suspended from it an image of Attis,[74] and carried it to the temple with lamentations. The day was formalized as part of the official Roman calendar under Claudius.[75] A three-day period of mourning followed.[76]
March 23: on the Tubilustrium, an archaic holiday to Mars, the tree was laid to rest at the temple of the Magna Mater, with the traditional beating of the shields by Mars' priests the Salii and the lustration of the trumpets perhaps assimilated to the noisy music of the Corybantes. [77]
March 24: Sanguem or Dies Sanguinis ("Day of Blood"), a frenzy of mourning when the devotees whipped themselves to sprinkle the altars and effigy of Attis with their own blood; some performed the self-castrations of the Galli. The "sacred night" followed, with Attis placed in his ritual tomb. [78]
or ("Day of Blood"), a frenzy of mourning when the devotees whipped themselves to sprinkle the altars and effigy of Attis with their own blood; some performed the self-castrations of the |
totally different plotlines. Could he do it again? Could this new series live up to the lofty expectations created by the way the author set the bar so high with the Shadow Ops series? Well, I'm please to report that once more, the answer is a resounding! At least as far as this first volume is concerned, in any case.Here's the blurb:As was the case in his last offering, Myke Cole seems more mature as a writer and in better control of his craft. And as always, having served in the military allows the author to imbue his books with a credibility regarding the realism of the use of magic in military operations and its ramifications up and down the chain of command. I feel that it gives any Myke Cole work its unique "flavor" and remains what sets them apart from everything else on the market. With magic returning to the world, it was interesting to see how the US military tried to take advantage of these new powers in the early days of what would come to be known as the Great Awakening. I'm particularly looking forward to finding out how the top secret unit known as the Gemini Cell will grow to become the SOC.All three Shadow Ops volumes were character-driven affairs and the same can be said of. This may be military fantasy, yet Myke Cole has a knack for creating genuine three-dimensional protagonists with absorbing back stories. I feel that Cole never did receive the credit he deserves for having a deft human touch which allows him to come up with unexpected emotional scenes packing a powerful punch. Jim Schweitzer is an easy character to root for and I enjoyed how the author brought him back to life and how he portrayed his struggles to maintain his identity. I felt that there was a good balance between his POV and that of his wife Sarah, who's been told that her husband has passed away. The hopeless love affair with Steve made me groan in frustration, but I should have known that Cole wouldn't go for the path of least resistance. Scenes with Eldredge, Jawid, and Ninip gave us a fascinating glimpse of the repercussions engendered by the return of magic and I'm really looking forward to more of that in the upcoming installments.As is usually his wont, Cole keeps the pace nice and crisp, andis a another page-turner. You may recall that, although I loved, I felt that the 300-page set-up and only 30-something pages to close the show felt a bit incongruous. I am aware that mass market paperback editions habitually preclude the sort of word count that authors publishing hardbacks can work with. But these last two novels demonstrated that Cole likely needs more pages to do justice to the tale he is telling. Here's to hoping that his editors will give him a bit more freedom in the future, as once again I felt thatwould have been stronger, especially where the finale is concerned, if Cole had had more pages to work with, thus giving him the opportunity to bring this book to an end without being forced to rush everything.With, Myke Cole proves that the Shadow Ops trilogy was no fluke. It's everything the first series was and then some! Don't feel bad if you haven't given Cole a shot yet. Rejoice, for you can now dive into no less than four engaging and entertaining novels, with more on the way!Myke Cole'sis military fantasy at its best!The final verdict: 8/10For more info about this title: CanadaHe has given up his “C.S.I.” reruns, consuming campaign coverage on Fox News — intently but fretfully — when he is perched in front of the television in his Houston home.
He reads three print newspapers daily, dials into briefings given by advisers to his son Jeb’s presidential campaign and stays up late to watch prime-time debates — after sitting through the so-called undercard, too.
Former President George Bush, 91 and frail, is straining to understand an election season that has, for his son and the Republican Party, lurched sharply and stunningly off script. And he is often bewildered by what he sees.
“I’m getting old,” he tells friends, appraising today’s politics, “at just the right time.”
These are confounding days for the Bush family and the network of advisers, donors and supporters who have helped sustain a political dynasty that began with the Senate victory by Prescott Bush, the older Mr. Bush’s father, in Connecticut 63 years ago. They have watched the rise of Donald J. Trump with alarm, and seen how Jeb Bush, the onetime Florida governor, has languished despite early advantages of political pedigree and campaign money.Only 35 percent of respondents to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll agreed that President Donald Trump is keeping major campaign promises. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Poll: 65 percent say Trump has accomplished little
President Donald Trump's approval ratings have continued to dive.
Just 37 percent of Americans approve of his job performance in the latest ABC News/Washington Poll poll. His net approval rating of negative 22 percentage points is the lowest for any president at nine months in office in polling dating to 1946; except for Gerald Ford, no other president had a net negative at this point in his presidency.
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Moreover, 65 percent of Americans say Trump has accomplished either “not much” or “little to nothing” as president, up from 56 percent after his first 100 days. For a president who constantly says he is accomplishing things at an unprecedented pace, only 35 percent of respondents agreed that he is keeping his major campaign promises.
But even with historically low approval ratings, 2016 voters say a hypothetical rematch between Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would still be too close to call, according to the poll.
Both the president and Clinton would receive 40 percent of the vote among those who showed up to the polls last November. Among the overall sample, which skews Democratic, Clinton would win the rematch, 41 percent to 34 percent.
The poll is not all bad news for Trump. The president constantly criticizes congressional Democrats for obstructing his agenda, and according to the poll, Americans agree with him. Sixty-one percent of those polled said leaders of the Democratic Party are mainly criticizing vs. 28 percent who said the party is presenting alternatives. Interestingly, in November 2009, questions about the Republican Party generated nearly identical sentiments in the poll when President Barack Obama was in office.
Responding to the week's bombshell Russia probe news, 51 percent of respondents said the president is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump's campaign, compared with 37 percent who said Trump is not cooperating and 12 percent who had no opinion. Just under 70 percent of respondents approved of the charges against Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, who stands accused of money laundering and failure to register as a foreign lobbyist, the latter of which is required by law.
The poll was conducted from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 and reached a random sample of 1,005 U.S. adults via landline and cellphone. The overall margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.RCMP in Langley have shut down plans for a massive house party advertised on Facebook that was attracting the attention of thousands of young people.
The so-called Project X party was based on a movie released this spring about three unpopular high school seniors who aim to make a name for themselves by advertising a huge birthday party on the web, which eventually spirals out of control.
Since then, there have been copycat Project X parties around the world, making the news in Australia, Germany, several U.S. cities and even Calgary, leading to the destruction of several homes and one fatal shooting.
According to police in Langley one such party was scheduled for Saturday night in Walnut Grove, and more than a thousand Facebook members had already signed up, saying they would attend.
The address was to be revealed two days before the party was scheduled to begin, according to the posting.
'Please come and bring friends!'
"Everyone is invited....I am just in the middle of getting my stuff to my new house in WG and i don't know many people so im having a party that hopefully a decent amount of people show up. No parents will be there so dont worry.... Please come and bring friends!" said the Facebook posting.
But before that happened police contacted the owner of the Facebook account to have the invite taken down. They now believe the individual's account had been hacked and the invite may have actually just been a hoax, according to Corp. Holly Marks.
"The individual who posted it has actually removed it from the website, and we've been monitoring it and looking to see if any sort of rejuvenation of the location or anything like that has been posted on Facebook, Craigslist, or any type of social media, and we haven't been able to find that," said Marks.
But the police still have concerns about teenagers showing up in Langley looking for somewhere to party, so they still plan to set up roadblocks and traffic checks on Saturday night to make sure those looking to cut loose don't try to take over a vacant home.
"These types of parties generally don't take place in a person's home, as much as a vacant home, or a home put up for sale currently unoccupied," said Marks.The Better Business Bureau of Eastern Carolina says beware of scam artists trying to use the BP oil spill as a means to get your money.
“Unfortunately, following any national disaster, scammers will find a way to prey on the misfortune of others,” said Beverly Baskin, President & CEO of BBB serving Eastern North Carolina. “Whether they are looking to provide work or financial assistance to relief efforts, potential donors should do their research to make sure they know who will benefit from their time and donations.”
The bureau warns of job scams associated with helping clean up the oil spill. Job hunters told to pay an upfront fee to get a job or pay for training are dealing with scam artists.
Also, unsolicited emails that claim you are qualified for compensation from BP are showing up in email inboxes. The FTC is warning against phony adjusters who ask for fees to expedite services.
Finally, beware of charity scams claiming to help the people in the Gulf of Mexico region. The BBB has compiled a list of charities assisting with the spill and its cleanup.
For more details, please click here.VIP Completions has announced that its latest custom jet interior will feature a world’s first: a flowing-water display backlit with LED lighting, known as a bubble wall. The owner is able to manipulate the colors of these LED lights via a smartphone app. The bubble wall is the centerpiece of the new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner’s interior, which emphasizes light, reflections, and a palette of black, silver, and gray—creating a clean, relaxed, contemporary look.
The forward section of the Dreamliner’s cabin features a spacious lounge with an open seating plan to accommodate formal or informal meetings, meals, and entertainment. The rear third of the cabin is equipped with a private bedroom, a study, and a large bathroom with a shower. Other design details include an array of Swarovski crystals that twinkle like stars when the lights are low and cushion covers in colors that complement the lighting options—making it easy to change the look and mood of the lounge and private spaces.
The 787-9 Dreamliner’s cabin is 186 feet long and just over 18 feet across, and the jet can carry up to 280 passengers in airline configuration. It can fly up to 9,500 miles nonstop and it can cruise as fast as about 561 mph at an altitude of 40,000 feet. First deliveries of the $257 million jet began this summer. While VIP Completions has not released an official price for its interior work, it has confirmed that such a project would cost around $100 million on top of the cost of the jet. (vipcompletions.com)More than a thousand VIA Rail travellers were stranded on four trains Saturday night when Idle No More protesters blocked off the main rail route between Toronto and Montreal.
About a dozen protesters took over the tracks in Marysville, near Kingston, around 4:30 p.m., forcing VIA Rail to dispatch 20 buses to transport passengers to their respective destinations, which included Toronto’s Union Station, Ottawa and Montreal.
The Marysville blockade was one of a series of nationwide demonstrations in which protesters blocked bridges, roads and train tracks on Saturday. Their collective hope: To kill the federal government’s Bill C-45, which they say is a breach of First Nations treaty rights.
Ontario Provincial Police said that while protesters don’t have the right to stop trains, they are legally allowed to demonstrate.
“We recognize that they have the right to peaceful protest, and our responsibility is keeping the peace,” said Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kristine Rae. “We had to weigh the situation. We have an open dialogue going on.”
Photos:Idle No More protests
Liam Mitchell, 33, had his Toronto-bound train delayed for 45 minutes due to the blockade. “It’s a minor inconvenience for a much bigger issue,” Mitchell said.
After more than seven hours at the tracks, protesters in Marysville ended their demonstration by midnight Saturday, Rae confirmed. VIA Rail service is expected to run Sunday as scheduled without bus detours.
Last Sunday, protesters halted 12 trains near Belleville, affecting about 2,500 travellers.
In Oshawa, more than a hundred Idle No More protesters seized a Highway 401 overpass around noon. The location was chosen to attract attention from drivers on the highway below, said protest organizer Jesse Cullen, 27.
“It was pretty successful; we had enough people to shut down the bridge for 45 minutes because the crowds spilled out to the road,” said Cullen, who has Métis heritage.
An elder in attendance conducted a smudging ceremony and blessed police officers who helped shut down Albert St.
After the peaceful demonstration, protesters headed to a local café to plan their next move — a march to Oshawa MP Colin Carrie’s office on Jan. 12, the day after Chief Theresa Spence will meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Spence has been on a hunger strike since Dec. 11 in protest of the bill.
“(The protests) didn’t start with a hunger strike by Chief Spence,” Cullen said. “There’s a need to carry on the discussion after the Jan. 11 meeting.”
Traffic on Hwy. 403 in Hamilton idled for a half-hour as 250 protesters marched down the King St. W. on-ramp, beating drums and carrying signs that challenged Bill C-45.
In Sarnia, traffic on the Blue Water Bridge linking Ontario to Michigan halted completely for just over an hour in the afternoon as about 250 protesters marched onto Highway 402 and blocked it in support of hunger strikes by chiefs and elders across Canada.
The protesters, carrying signs protesting Conservative environmental policies and supporting the Idle No More movement, walked peacefully onto the highway, which links the bridge to Highway 401, from nearby Point Edward, following a convoy of cars and a truck carrying native drummers and singers.
Under the watchful eye of OPP officers, the blockaders began their march Saturday morning from a snowy, windswept spot by the St. Clair River directly under the bridge. Organizers first held an aboriginal water ceremony near a monument dedicated to the memory of native ancestors and then drove and marched to the bridge entrance.
• Christmas in Attawapiskat
OPP officers warned the organizers that their actions were illegal but offered their protection if the protesters followed an agreed-to route. The marchers waited impatiently at the bridge entrance for about 10 minutes while the OPP closed the highway. A police vehicle that had been parked across the entrance was pulled back by officers, clearing the way for the march to proceed.
As overhead signs at the bridge toll booths flashed, the bridge was closed. Protesters chanted “why are we waiting” and “idle no more” while listening to speakers from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Sarnia.
The bridge protest is only part of a campaign to “shut down the Chemical Valley,” the complex of oil refineries and chemical plants south of the city, said Ron Plain, who helped organize the recent 13-day blockade of a CN Rail line serving area industries.
Members of the protest movement also plan to blockade the bridge again in the spring, he said.
Plain said he faces a possible $180,000 legal bill from CN if he doesn’t plead guilty to contempt of court charges brought by the rail firm for failing to end the blockade sooner.
“I’m not pleading guilty to this. I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada,” he told the Star. “I’m ready to take it on the chin for the youth of this community, who have to live with the results of Stephen Harper’s actions,” he told the crowd.
Bill C-45 includes amendents to the Indian Act that will affect the leasing of reserve lands, as well as changes that will remove federal protection for some lakes and streams.
“It’s important that the people of Sarnia understand why we are here,” said Aamjiwnaang band councillor John Adams. “This Bill C-45 affects the land, air, and water that our sovereign people look after. The government has no right to change these things without talking to us. We’re here for everybody’s rights, not just for native people.”
The demonstration ended peacefully and no major traffic tie-ups were reported either on the 402 or on city streets.
Earlier Saturday, police in Cornwall closed the Seaway International Bridge as a public safety precaution.
It’s unclear when the usually busy toll bridge, which connects the eastern Ontario city and Akwesasne, Ont., to Massena, N.Y., will be reopened.
Sgt. Marc Bissonnette of the Cornwall detachment said about 100 to 150 demonstrators were marching on the bridge.
Similar demonstrations were held at several other locations, including the Peace Arch crossing in Surrey, B.C., the Peace Bridge between Fort Erie and Buffalo, and the Queenston/Lewiston Bridge in Niagara Falls.
Police in Ontario have warned travellers to plan ahead because some roads and highways in these areas may face longer than usual traffic delays due to the demonstrations.
With files from Star wire servicesWatters to Moore: 'Read The Room, Roy - Your Time's Over'
Ivanka Trump: 'Special Place in Hell for People Who Prey on Children'
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore to drop out of the race, suggesting a write-in candidate like Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Moore has been accused of sexual misconduct, including pursuing relationships with teenage women while he was in his 30s. One accuser said she was 14 years old when Moore initiated sexual contact with her.
Moore has denied the allegations and remained defiant, saying he will not quit the race.
Dear Mitch McConnell, Bring. It. On. — Judge Roy Moore (@MooreSenate) November 16, 2017
On "Fox & Friends," Judge Andrew Napolitano noted that Sessions - who held the Alabama seat for 20 years before vacating it to join President Donald Trump's cabinet - has said he has "no interest" in returning to the Senate.
"I don't see any way out of this," Napolitano said. "If Judge Moore is elected, the Senate must seat him, because the Supreme Court has said you can't add a qualification to a member of Congress that you be a good person or that you have never misbehaved."
He said the only qualifications for members of Congress are that they are at least 30 years old, from the state they're representing and lawfully elected.
"If he's seated, they can't expel him, because they can only expel people from Congress for what they've done while in Congress," Napolitano explained. "If he is elected, in my view, they'll be stuck with him."
As for voters possibly electing a write-in candidate, Napolitano said they must write the correct legal first and last name.
"Then those votes will count, as long as that person is somebody that lives in Alabama," Napolitano said. "So if they were to do it with Jeff Sessions, his name's not 'Jeff,' it's 'Jefferson.' You're going to need 55,000 people to write in 'Jefferson Sessions' and spell it correctly."
Watch more above.
New Poll Shows Roy Moore Trailing Democrat Doug Jones by 12 Points
Ben Shapiro Slams Roy Moore Over 'Highly Credible' Sex Allegations
Tucker Says Roy Moore Shouldn't 'Drag God Into This'"I'm excited! I love all those guys. They gave me one of my first jobs," Greenfield says of the Veronica Mars movie becoming a reality. "It was a big break for me and people really liked me on that show. I had such a good time with all of them. I think I'm going down to do a day or two on the movie in June or something, so that should be just great."
When asked if Thomas has shared any spoilers or plotlines with him, Greenfield coyly responds, "We've been emailing, we've been emailing." One thing we do know about Deputy Leo is that he will be working as a detective in the San Diego Police Department, which Thomas exclusively revealed to us. "I gotta re-tap into that whole thing!" Greenfield says with a laugh.
But fans of Veronica and Deputy Leo shouldn't get their hopes up for a romantic reunion. "I think there are some other characters you'd like to see her get with, but I'm so thrilled they thought of me and are bringing me back for even the few days I'm working on it," Greenfield says.
—Reporting by Daniel WallyThe tragic reality is the Bush II/Obama administrations have made the world a far more dangerous place.
A great many rationales have been floated for the most destructive foreign policy in American history, i.e. the fatally incoherent policies of the Bush II/Obama presidencies.
These rationales come in several flavors:
1. The official administration (public relations) rationales
2. The not-so-secret rationales of Empire and realpolitik
3. Conspiracy-type rationales proposed by outsiders
The official rationale has two basic variations:
1. The (now repudiated) Neoconservative agenda of remaking the world in our image (i.e. neoliberal democracy) with military force and nation-building.
2. The longstanding policy of hemming in hostile ideologies and empires with alliances, mutually beneficial trade arrangements and the threat of overwhelming military response to any over-reach by hostile nation-states and/or alliances.
The unspoken goal of maintaining U.S. military, diplomatic, economic and cultural dominance is the not-so-secret rationale of Global Empire. From the point of view ofrealpolitik, the official rationales serve as the PR facades of Empire.
Realpolitik is the unspoken underbelly of both official rationales: the essence ofrealpolitik is the ends justify the means: if we have to kiss up to psychopathic dictators, kleptocrats, brutal juntas, extremist groups, unsavory guns-for-hire and even regimes that are visibly hostile to American values and dominance to reach operational goals (for example kill the bad guys), so be it: we will do anything necessary to further our short-term operational goals.
The problem with this kind of short-term thinking in an incoherent strategy is that it only serves expediency: without a coherent strategy based on core values and deeply informed, clearly defined national interests based on those values, expediency inevitably leads to blowback.
In incoherent policies such as those pursued by Bush II/Obama, expedient operations lead to failures that trigger more secrecy and expediency, and there is no end to the failure born of expediency and avoidance of accountability.
Examples of conspiracy-type rationales include One-World agendas fostered by elite groups such as Bilderburg. I find these much less persuasive than good old Empire (i.e. global dominance), because we have to remember that the leadership has to have a narrative that "sells" the tens of thousands of people who are the operational core of the Empire an idealistic and idealized rationale for their sacrifice of morals, values and often their lives.
Serving an Elite agenda isn't persuasive, and neither is neocon nation-building. What sells is "fighting the enemy before they bring the battle to our Homeland" and the broad service of American Interests, i.e. #2 above: the fostering of democracy and Neoliberal Capitalism with soft power (alliances, trade, loans, etc.) and striking devastating blows to potential enemies before they can organize a strike against us.
The fundamental incoherence arises from the conflicting narratives and goals of these rationales. Precisely how can we serve American Interests by trashing the values we espouse and supporting the very psychopaths, juntas and extremists who foment the sort of instability that threaten American Interests?
If the Master Narrative of U.S. foreign policy is the ends justify the means, then clearly we have chosen our means very poorly.
This raises the larger question of whether a foreign policy that requires actively undermining our values and purported goals of democracy, open markets, stability and prosperity for all can possibly achieve its goal of maintaining Imperial dominance. if the victims of our realpolitik policies and those we have tasked with implementing them both lose faith in the American Project, then it is operationally impossible to win hearts and minds with more drone strikes, more laser-guided bombs and more alliances with the dregs of humanity.
Simplistic ideologies such as Neoconservatism fail in the complex environment of the real world. We might profitably recall that the 1960s equivalent of Neoconservatism was the "domino theory" that held that all small nation-states in a region were prone to "falling like dominoes" to Communist insurgencies, regardless of their history, culture, society, economy and form of government.
In other words, the stubborn ignorance of U.S. foreign policy based on ideological simplicities is near-infinite.
The second source of incoherence is the legalistic mindset that everything can be finessed with more words and policy refinements. This legalistic approach--so clearly the dominant mindset of the Obama administration--is one manifestation of American Exceptionalism: that not only can we remake the world in our astonishingly parochial image, but that we can control the world like we control the power structure at home: by finessing problems with legalistic subtleties ("it depends on the definition of is") and threatening overwhelming violence (just lace demonstrators with pepper spray and threaten whistleblowers with life in prison) to make the problem go away.
That this legalistic mindset guarantees failure in the real world is lost on those devoted to legalizing all of their extra-legal policies--if not in principle then in name.
Legalizing secrecy, ignorance and killing does not make magically transform these abuses of power into a successful policy. This may well summarize the Bush II/Obama administrations in history.
The vast ignorance at the heart of the Bush II/Obama foreign policy is breath-taking. We can argue about the ignorance of these two destructive presidents, but I see little to contest the ignorance of the policies and the institutions that make the operational decisions.
There are smart, well-informed and globally experienced people in the U.S. government, but they are ignored, dismissed or marginalized precisely because their knowledge threatens the incoherent mess that passes for foreign policy in these catastrophically inept presidencies.
The defining characteristic of the Bush II/Obama administrations is the reliance on secrecy--not to protect "national security" but to avoid accountability. If the operation is secret, its failure can be safely buried. This is the reason why everything is classified in the Bush II/Obama administrations: transparency and public knowledge are anathema because they enable scrutiny and analysis and eventually, accountability.
Secrecy is all about avoiding accountability. "National security" is the facade.
Secrecy is the refuge of every dictatorship, totalitarian regime and fascist junta on the planet. We need only look at the savage response of the Obama administration to whistleblowers who have risked their careers and livelihoods, not to mention their freedom, to expose the most egregious violations of the Constitution and American values to see just how dependent the Obama administration is on secrecy to avoid accountability.
Bush II was no better: using proxies (private contractors, local militia, etc.) has a long history in the U.S. Imperial Project as a way of avoiding accountability and scrutiny, but the Bush II/Obama foreign policy is totally dependent on proxies of one kind or another (consider the explosive rise in the use of killer drones, Obama's favored proxy).
The real world is not as forgiving as a bought-and-paid-for media; blowback takes many forms. The incoherence of the Bush II/Obama administrations is not only reaping horrendous harvests in the playgrounds of their Imperial ambitions, it is eroding the American public's trust in their government and the institutions that claim to protect them in a dangerous world.
The tragic reality is the Bush II/Obama administrations have made the world a far more dangerous place. That is blowback writ large.
None of this is new; it's all well-documented in the public record. The list of books written about the destructive consequences of the Bush II/Obama foreign policies is long; here is a short list of worthy titles to explore:
The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy
Are you like me? Ever since my first summer job decades ago, I've been chasing financial security. Not win-the-lottery, Bill Gates riches (although it would be nice!), but simply a feeling of financial control. I want my financial worries to if not disappear at least be manageable and comprehensible.
And like most of you, the way I've moved toward my goal has always hinged not just on having a job but a career.
You don't have to be a financial blogger to know that "having a job" and "having a career" do not mean the same thing today as they did when I first started swinging a hammer for a paycheck.
Even the basic concept "getting a job" has changed so radically that jobs--getting and keeping them, and the perceived lack of them--is the number one financial topic among friends, family and for that matter, complete strangers.
So I sat down and wrote this book: Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
It details everything I've verified about employment and the economy, and lays out an action plan to get you employed.
I am proud of this book. It is the culmination of both my practical work experiences and my financial analysis, and it is a useful, practical, and clarifying read.
"I want to thank you for creating your book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It is rare to find a person with a mind like yours, who can take a holistic systems view of things without being captured by specific perspectives or agendas. Your contribution to humanity is much appreciated."
Laura Y.Free-agent kicker Jay Feely attended Monday's settlement conference in Tom Brady's Deflategate case in his capacity as a member of the NFL Players Association's executive committee.
What's interesting is what he said when he and Brady met with the judge.
In the NFLPA's initial court filing July 31 in Brady's appeal of his four-game suspension, the union indicated that no player had ever been investigated or disciplined for violating the NFL's Competitive Integrity Policy. The brief said only teams and team personnel had been disciplined under the policy, and it cited an example from 2009.
That year, the NFL suspended a member of the New York Jets equipment staff after he "attempted to use unapproved equipment to prep the K balls prior to" a Jets game against the New England Patriots.
The union's brief goes on to say that while the NFL interpreted the equipment employee's action as an attempt to gain a competitive advantage, the Jets' kicker, "the player who could have benefited from the alleged 'attempt to gain a competitive advantage' was not investigated, let alone disciplined."
The Jets' kicker that season? Feely.
The incident was not mentioned in open court Monday, but later that day, Feely told "The Doug Gottlieb Show" on CBS Sport Radio that he did talk to U.S. District Court Judge Richard M. Berman about the situation.
"We talked about the similarities in that case and the differences in the way the NFL responded," Feely said. "I didn't get in trouble. I had no culpability in that case."
Jay Feely says he and U.S. District Court Judge Richard M. Berman "talked about the similarities" between Deflategate and the Jets' K ball incident "and the differences in the way the NFL responded." Andy Lyons/Getty Images
In the 2009 case, according to Feely, a Jets equipment manager put an extra pad on the brush he was using to prepare the kicking balls before the game. The pad was meant to protect his fingers. Feely said equipment managers were given 20 minutes before the game to prepare the kicking balls, and both teams did so in the same room and were supervised by an NFL official.
"The reaction of the NFL was much different than they reacted to Tom, even though the circumstances were very similar," Feely said, adding that he thought the league's reaction to Brady's situation could have something to do with the Patriots' history, including accusations of videotaping opponents in the 2007 "Spygate" incident.
"If something even had happened, it would have been a speeding ticket, and [the league] reacted like it was a homicide," Feely said.
Feely, who said he doesn't believe Brady did anything wrong or had anything to do with the deflated footballs, attended Monday's hearing at the request of Berman, who asked Feely and Giants co-owner John Mara to come to court and try to help work out a settlement between Brady and the NFL.
That settlement didn't happen, and Berman is set to rule on the case this week.
The Patriots open the season Sept. 10 against the Steelers.(Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
It's rare for journalists to join forces. Usually they are too competitive, independent and stubborn for that. But President Donald Trump's unrelenting war against what he calls the "fake" news media is generating a new solidarity in the Fourth Estate. Instead of causing reporters and editors to knuckle under, Trump's attempts at intimidation are generating the biggest anti-Trump media backlash since he took office.
Trump prompted media outrage again Sunday when he re-tweeted a doctored video in which he body-slammed a man who had a CNN logo superimposed on his face. Trump was shown throwing the "CNN" figure to the floor outside a wrestling ring, jumping on his victim and repeatedly punching him. The 28-second video apparently was based on an actual incident from several years ago in which Trump orchestrated a moment of fury similar to the staged violence of professional wrestling. In the original moment, Trump apparently "attacked" Vince McMahon, head of a major wrestling organization, and pummeled him. (McMahon's wife Linda is now administrator of Trump's Small Business Administration.)
Trump's critics immediately expressed outrage and contempt, and some said the video incited violence against journalists. Trump defenders said the video was an attempt at being light-hearted and the media are showing they can't take criticism and only want to dole it out.
But the level of solidarity against Trump is reaching a new level. A spokeswoman for the Committee to Protect Journalists, a media advocacy group, said, "Targeting individual journalists or media outlets, on- or off-line, creates a chilling effect and fosters an environment where further harassment, or even physical attack, is deemed acceptable." Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, which has been regularly attacked by Trump, issued a statement that, "I think it is unseemly that the president would attack journalists for doing their jobs, and encourage such anger at the media." A spokesman for CNN, the cable network that is a frequent target of Trump tirades, said, "It is a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters."
Presidents are never happy with their news coverage. I've seen this first-hand covering six presidents going back to 1986 – Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and currently Donald Trump. But other presidents had a much better understanding and acceptance than Trump of the role in American society of journalism and the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press.
These presidents knew that the relationship between the media and the president is adversarial, and the media are obliged to hold the president accountable. Meanwhile, the president and his aides are trying to make him look as good as possible.
Of course this generates tension. But the most effective presidents don't take the scrutiny as a personal affront as Trump does. Nor do they define every engagement with the media as a dire matter of winning and losing as Trump sees it. For his part, Trump says journalists are "the enemy" of the American people. This insults many in the Fourth Estate who see their role as educators trying to perform a public service.
The deep hostility was illustrated in Trump's recent dustup with the co-hosts of "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. They have criticized Trump and made fun of him, but he went ballistic and demeaned them in a very personal way when he called Scarborough a "psycho" and mocked Brzezinski as "low IQ crazy" and a woman who was "bleeding badly from a face-lift" when the duo met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida around last New Year's Eve. This generated more media solidarity as one journalist after another lambasted Trump for being gross, puerile and, in his references to Brzezinski, misogynistic. A CNN spokesman blasted Trump and defended the MSNBC co-hosts. An MSNBC spokeswoman said in a news release, "It's a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty |
’t review its $85 billion deal to sell itself to AT&T.
Last week, the entertainment giant agreed to sell its only TV station, Atlanta’s WPCH, to Meredith for $70 million — which means it would not be among the assets Time Warner will sell to the telco giant.
“That is the regulatory hook for FCC review,” Pai told the Wall Street Journal at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “My understanding is that the deal won’t be presented to the commission.”
The report sent Time Warner shares up 1.4% to a 52-week high.
If the FCC is out of the picture, then the deal would only have to pass muster with the Justice Department, which could oppose it only if it finds an antitrust problem.
If the Trump administration opposes the deal — the president said he did during last year’s election campaign — then it would have been easier to attack at the FCC. The independent, quasi-judicial agency can fight mergers that it believes would hurt the public interest, which can be defined broadly.
Time Warner has other licenses besides the one held by WPCH. But they involve technical, mostly backhaul, functions and either might not have to be sold to AT&T or can be replaced by distribution technologies that don’t use the public airwaves.On Hardball, Chuck Todd called it a “fantasy,” but... he reported that some Republicans think that maybe they can talk Donald Trump into quitting, and that an ideal replacement ticket would be Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.
Chris Matthews was very skeptical, saying that there’d never be a week when Pence could beat Hillary, because he lacks the “pizazz.” Todd replied that some Republicans believe that a generic Republicans could beat Clinton. Todd quoted one Republican as saying “take any two people in the White Pages. Make them the ticket. Put R’s next to their name, and put them on a desert island and not say anything, and they think that candidate gets 47%.” Then again, how tuned in can someone be who still thinks in terms of the “White Pages?”
So what do Legal Insurrection readers think? Could they ever imagine Trump stepping down? And if he did, could Pence-Haley beat Hillary-Kaine?Twitter today announced it has acquired machine learning startup Whetlab. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Whetlab’s researchers developed developed technology at Harvard, Toronto, and Sherbrooke universities to make machine learning “better and faster for companies, automatically.” In short, it made easier and faster for companies to train a machine learning system. Neither of the companies offered much detail on how Whetlab will help Twitter, though the startup’s website does note its technology “can have a great impact by accelerating Twitter’s internal machine learning efforts.”
That said, a source close to Twitter says the company will use Whetlab’s technology as an internal service to accelerate Twitter’s current machine learning efforts. Twitter was apparently also interested in Whetlab’s five-person team as they have “extensive” machine learning expertise, with an emphasis in deep learning and artificial intelligence.
Twitter’s interest in machine learning technology is not very surprising. The social networking company could use it to learn more about its users through how, when, and what they tweet. From there, Twitter could improve how it fights abuse and spam, re-prioritize new features for users and businesses, tweak how it serves ads, and in general decide how best to use engineering resources.
Whetlab’s technology webpage is worth a read for background. Here’s an excerpt:
Companies around the globe are investing billions in machine learning technologies. But there’s a big problem: you may have a lot of ideas about how your company can use machine learning, but there’s a big gap between the fancy results you read about in the news and the systems that you can get your engineers to build in-house. You’ve been promised artificial intelligence, but it seems like you need to hire a room full of PhDs to get it! Whetlab bridges this gap. It’s “AI for AI” — sophisticated machine learning techniques that get your in-house machine learning system off the ground, automatically. Rather than having to hire doctorate-wielding machine learning experts to architect and tune your system, our patent-pending technology helps your engineers — your team that already understands your data and your needs — get the latest and greatest deep learning techniques going in days rather than months or years. Moreover, Whetlab doesn’t just replicate expert capabilities, it exceeds them: our technology has repeatedly outperformed the top machine learning researchers in configuring systems for the hardest cutting-edge problems, setting the state of the art for benchmarks in challenging domains such as visual object recognition, speech processing, and computational biology.
As a result of the deal, Whetlab is no longer accepting signups for its closed beta. The public-facing service will be shut down on July 15, 2015.
Whetlab users can, however, download their previous experiments’ data. It is available via the website as raw JSON, as well as via Whetlab’s command-line utility in either JSON or tab-separated format (TSV).
Whetlab users looking for an alternative system as a result of the shutdown will be happy to know the startup is offering some guidance. For machine learning optimization, Whetlab recommends trying Spearmint, SMAC, or Hyperopt.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VisualPun
Uncle Grandpa, Steven Universe ("Say Uncle") "Don't worry, bro, none of this is canon. But this is!" (pulls out an actual cannon)
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When a phrase which is usually used as a metaphor is instead shown as being performed literally. This can be because The Ditz didn't understand the statement, or can just be a simple gag. Often considered one of those "old-fashioned" forms of comedy, so its use nowadays rarely does little more than "produce some smiles." (Unless children are watching; they love this style of humor, and will howl loud and long.) Occasionally this action can be performed literally but without much fanfare, implying what's going on. Can often be combined with a Literal Genie.
Common versions include requests to "give me a hand" being met with disembodied hands and quotes of Marc Antony "lend me your ears"—well, use your imagination.
These can be quite a nightmare for translators: purely textual puns can be rewritten into something else, but when the pun has a visual component (which usually cannot be changed), it becomes much harder or impossible to come up with something that makes sense.
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B-Roll Rebus is when news and documentaries do this with Stock Footage. Compare Stealth Pun, which is sort of like a Visual Pun without the visuals. Of course, sometimes a Visual Pun can be a stealth pun. But, you know, they're stealthy about it. Supertrope to Rules of the Road in cases where road signs are literal, not figurative, depictions of what's up ahead. Metaphoric Metamorphosis falls under this trope too. See also Literal Metaphor which is often a Sister Trope.
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Examples:
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Asian Animation
In one episode of Happy Heroes, Big and Little M. use a Trojan horse in Doctor H.'s internet router. The Trojan horse is literally a giant rocking horse.
Anime & Manga
Card Games
Munchkin is rife with these. For example, the card "Steal a Level", where the card's effect is that you steal a level, as in the gaming term, from an opposing player. The illustration is someone stealing a level, as in the tool.
Magic: The Gathering: The symbol for Phyrexia sets greatly resembles the Greek letter Phi. As in, Phi-rexian. Look at the illustration for Bronze Calendar. It's a bronze colander. The Revised Edition game manual included Richard Garfield's account of the creation of the game. He mentions that the pre-release version used placeholder art for the cards, including a few of these. For example, "Heal" was a photograph of someone's foot, while "Power Sink" showed Calvin sitting in a toilet, "because what is a toilet except a power sink?" Foresee depicts a four-eyed woman.
Comic Books
Comic Strips
Here in Dilbert, Phil, The Prince Of Insufficient Light darns a man to Heck with his spoon. No, not his giant spoon. Much worse.
in Dilbert, Phil, The Prince Of Insufficient Light darns a man to Heck with his spoon. No, not his giant spoon. Much worse. A The Far Side strip shows a couple driving around with a map of Nowhere, approaching a sign that reads "Now Entering The Middle."
An early Calvin and Hobbes strip features Calvin showing Hobbes an "antelope"... by taking him over to an anthill, pointing to one, and saying "See, she's climbing down the ladder to her boyfriend's car!" Hobbes is not amused.
Garfield: This strip featured Frank, a friend of Jon's, meeting Garfield for the first time and rubbing him. Garfield reacted violently and stated "Some people rub me the wrong way".
strip featured Frank, a friend of Jon's, meeting Garfield for the first time and rubbing him. Garfield reacted violently and stated "Some people rub me the wrong way". Dykes to Watch Out For #346, before the 2000 election: Ginger : Vote for Nader and youll get what you deserve. Bush.
Which is exactly where the croquet ball ends up.
An Inside Woody Allen strip features a store which runs on this trope. Suitcases are shaped like hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds; hand mirrors have a thumb and four fingers, etc. When Woody says he'd like to complain to the manager because it's "too literal" the clerk points to a door labeled "Head Office" which is shaped like a person's head.
Fan Works
AMV Hell 3 has a "MULTI KILL!"... only it's not three players being fragged in quick succession as per Unreal Tournament but rather Multi from To Heart killing.
In The Return of Chaos, Discord expresses that he's "Cracking himself up," followed by cracks actually appearing on his body with chips falling off.
In Altered Histories Harry casts a disarming spell on a Polish thug with a rather literal result.
Harry casts a disarming spell on a Polish thug with a rather literal result. A Different Professor : Sirius: That was beautiful, Madam Bones. I don't think I have ever seen anyone cut a politician off at the knees with that amount of skill and so little bloodshed. In fact the last time I saw anyone cut off at the knees I actually saw my cousin Bellatrix cut someone's legs off at the knees.
: In A Collection of Harmonious OneShots Hermione gets annoyed at Ron dating Lavender to try to make her jealous and Harry comments that a ton of shit is going to drop on Ron if he keeps up this sort of thing. Hermione then decides to get revenge by conjuring a brown cloud which drops a literal ton of shit on Ron immediately after the Gryffindor/Hufflepuff Quidditch game.
Films — Animation
Films — Live-Action
Literature
Live-Action TV
Music
Pinballs
Pro Wrestling
Any time a garbage can was weaponized in Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling after Giant Baba coined the phrase Garbage Wrestling to describe it.
Women's Extreme Wrestling champion T.H.A.I. wore fishnets under jeans, with a fish shape cut into the jeans so you could see them.
Johnny Curtis had the gimmick of creating visual puns when he first showed up on WWE Smackdown.
Software
Beta versions of Windows 7 had a wallpaper with a fish (a betta to be exact) blowing 7 bubbles. This is a pun on Windows 7 beta. This wallpaper also sneaked its way into some of the final versions as well. This same fish was used for the Consumer Preview edition of Windows 8. The bubbles here form the number 8, as a pun on Windows 8 beta.
. This wallpaper also sneaked its way into some of the final versions as well. Also in windows, the button to close an open window is a red button with an "X" in the middle. So to close the window, you have to "X"-it.
Theater
Spamalot has one during this musical number at around 4:31. What's the... oh, "Hay". Duh.
at around 4:31. In The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged), two of these are thrown in near the end: Pontius Pilot and the Axe of the Apostles.
The Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening has an actor-specific example during "The Bitch of Living": The line referencing a girl named Marianna Wheelan has Anna - played by wheelchair-using actress Ali Stroker - wheel by with a bit of a sassy flourish.
Theme Parks
The Haunted Mansion has the opera singers as a visual pun on The Phantom of the Opera, and the Grand Ballroom scene contains a ghost of Caesar, as in "Great Caesar's ghost!"
Muppet*Vision 3D has Waldo, the new 3D Muppet, allowing his nose to jump off his face, grow legs, and start dashing in circles. "Don't cha just hate it when your nose runs?"
A hidden detail on the pathway surrounding Popeye & Bluto's Bilge-Rat Barges at Universal's Islands of Adventure shows a different kind of "school of fish" - a small schoolhouse sitting on top of water.
Mickey's Philharmagic used to have a smell pun. During the "A Whole New World" sequence they would pump in the scent of Jasmine's perfume, which, naturally, smelled like jasmine. Unfortunately, too many people were allergic to the scent, and so the scene is now odorless.
Video Games
Web Animation
Web Comics
Web Original
Western Animation
TV Tropes Wiki
Real LifeIn the mid-eighteenth century, the term bureaucracy entered the world by way of French literature. The neologism was originally forged as a nonsense term to describe what its creator, political economist Vincent de Gournay, considered the ridiculous possibility of “rule by office,” or, more literally, “rule by a desk.” Gournay’s model followed the form of more serious governmental terms indicating “rule by the best” (aristocracy) and “rule by the people” (democracy). Yet bureaucracy quickly developed a nonsatirical life of its own once the French Revolution got under way. The Terror was, of course, infamously bureaucratic, with dossiers the way to denunciation, condemnation, and execution.
On July 2, 1789, as legend has it, a voice rang out from the interior of the Bastille into the street below: “They are killing prisoners in here!” Two weeks later, citizens stormed the Bastille, inaugurating the long and complex series of events that would constitute the French Revolution. The alleged yeller, one Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, had been removed to the insane asylum at Charenton ten days before the siege, thus having miraculously galvanized his potential liberators or murderers and evaded them. It is a singular piece of luck that Sade was not present for the storming, for it is likely that, descending upon the marquis’ luxuriously appointed cell, the sansculottes would have had some difficulty differentiating Sade from his oppressors, much less from their own.
As this series of apocryphal events intimates, the Marquis de Sade occupies an unusual place in French letters. He is at once the paradigmatic aesthete to end all aesthetes, a supreme materialist and spendthrift, an aristocrat determined to organize his life around complexly choreographed orgies (and the eccentrically appointed locations necessary for these performances), and an iconoclast, if not a revolutionary. Though the paper trail that emerges from his early life includes at least three accusations of flaying, stabbing, poisoning, and other unusual forms of physical and emotional abuse—leveled by prostitutes and other women poorly protected by the law—Sade has been held up as a beacon of sexual liberation during an era benighted by Christian repression and hypocrisy. Susan Sontag and Julia Kristeva have praised the freedom of his writing and thought. As the myth of his cry to action from within the Bastille indicates, Sade’s readers are willing, in spite of his title, to receive him as an anarchist hell-bent on upending the feudal order of his day.
But for all Sade’s aristocratic indulgence of peculiar whims and profligate spending on whips and whores, he is also one of the first major authors of what we might term modern bureaucratic literature. His writings are extraordinarily, pruriently concerned with acts that can be accomplished only by people working in groups who follow, in an orderly fashion, arbitrary rules and regulations. These secular constraints not only defy common sense but fly in the face of what we usually think of as basic respect for the sensations and lives of others. Thus another neologism: sadism. The writings of the Marquis de Sade describe dispassionate intimacy in the plural. In this sense, they foreshadow the social world of the contemporary office.
Pork, Said the Bear, by Theodor Severin Kittelsen, late nineteenth or early twentieth century. © Private Collection / Photo © O.Vaering / Bridgeman Images.
Like the word bureaucracy, sadism is a neologism that has taken on a life of its own. Today, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, sadism is an “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others.” Yet Sade’s notion of dispassionate intimacy is quite particular. His sadism is less concerned with pleasure in the pain of others than with a lack of feeling regarding the pain of others. Though many of Sade’s writings describe characters who engage in cruel and murderous acts of sexual congress, few if any seem to enjoy the pain of others, no matter how necessary the mutilation of flesh to the act in question. Sade’s embodied economic processes, his sometimes rather less than mutually consenting coworkers, labor to produce orgasm—which is really just a route to apathy. After orgasm, Sade’s libertines are briefly freed from the confusing sensation of need. The libertine looks dispassionately down upon the flayed corpse in which he has just succeeded in ejaculating and experiences clarity. The corpse cannot, reasonably, be the object of affections or emotion; it holds no spell of either generosity or dependency over the Sadean character who has just made use of it. A corpse, even if nominally endowed with life, can inspire nothing other than apathy in the libertine. And apathy is the aesthetic mode that, for Sade, correlates with the best forms of agency, since it demonstrates the libertine’s freedom from Christian sympathy and its attendant hypocrisies. An absolutely liberated, absolutely impersonal pleasure testifies to the libertine’s refusal of insincere social bonds. “Virtue suffers the punishment of crime,” wrote Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet in 1771, “even as crime enjoys with impunity the pleasures that should be the rewards of virtue.” Sadean sex is, to inject a contemporary term, the fuck of the spreadsheet, in which all markers of identity and sentimentality are like the footlong dildo the eponymous libertine heroine of The History of Juliette uses to impale a nine-year-old girl: detachable, iterable, and sortable by size. Anyone can be a libertine, provided she or he is willing to be systematic.
The most famous of Sade’s narratives, 120 Days of Sodom, is also the most explicit about the Sadean protagonist or sadist. Here again liberation through apathy, rather than through cruelty or enjoyment, is key. The four friends who convene at Château de Silling for a four-month debauch are not so much interested in harming others as they are in orchestrating an experience that will be beyond anything they have previously enacted. This experience will, therefore, culminate in their absolute liberation from moral order. Drafted during Sade’s incarceration at the Bastille in microscript on a forty-foot roll of paper pieced together from smuggled scraps, 120 Days was a physical labor of desperation, passion, and personal and political rage, the composition of which was apparently accompanied by elaborate masturbation rituals. Sade never completed the manuscript, so we do not know what will happen to the libertines on day 120—but it seems to be a matter of little difference if they were to walk away from their fortress of horrors with plans to reconvene the following year or if the secluded castle were spontaneously engulfed in flames, taking all occupants to their deaths. (Manuscript notes suggest that sixteen people will survive the events at Silling and return to Paris, but who knows what, in a final draft, might have occurred.) Our own ambivalence regarding the book’s actual ending, which Sade sketches out in his notes as a series of coordinated imprisonments and executions, is not accidental. It results from Sade’s skillful cultivation of simultaneous prurient interest and utter apathy in the reader of 120 Days of Sodom. We are fascinated by the four libertine friends’ stats, by their personal deterioration or fortitude, by their ability to orgasm repeatedly or not at all, by the revolting details of body hair and the shapes of their buttocks. But beyond their appetites, appearances, and aristocratic titles, we know little of the friends save what they do in the fortress. And because what they do in the fortress is determined by a set of laws drawn up at the outset of their macabre vacation, plus narratives supplied by ancient procuresses invited expressly to narrate acts of debauchery, our psychological understanding of the four friends remains limited. We know that they are very rich, highly sexed, extraordinarily well organized, and thoroughly apathetic. Of the victims we know significantly less: they are young, beautiful, soft-skinned.
O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! —William Shakespeare, 1596
Within this desert of spiritual detail, one piece of familial backstory is supplied. At the opening of 120 Days, we learn that each of the friends has raped his own daughter and that each has married the unfortunate daughter of another one of the four friends. This arrangement guarantees that Christian marriage has been reimagined as an enterprise of debauchery. Yet this brief peek at a previous arrangement among the four provides a key to the meaning of other relentlessly formal coital permutations set up later on: 120 Days of Sodom is not a novel about the apathy of institutions and how they dehumanize and anonymize their members. It is not about marriage, unless we understand the four friends’ relationship as a kind of marriage. It is, rather, a novel about the apathy of coworking, a description of how individuals collaboratively create codes for behavior and imagine actionable scenarios in an enclosed space—i.e., office, another relative neologism derived from the Latin word for “obligation”—all the while guaranteeing that their actions will be impersonal. This is the sense in which 120 Days of Sodom can be considered an “office novel.” It is also, bizarrely, a comedy; it is the story of a highly successful office and how it works.
If, as in Tolstoy’s formulation, all successful offices are the same, what are the universal qualities of Sodom, LLC? What does this happy office have that other offices also share?
Hierarchy. The four friends form an executive committee, which is overseen by the four procuresses, four duennas, and four storytellers, who operate like a toothless board of directors. Beneath the four friends and their advisers are eight individuals titled “fuckers” whose professional function is not mysterious. Forming the ranks of junior staff are the four friends’ four unlucky daughter-wives and a group of sixteen children who are essentially sacrificial victims, aka interns—or, in a more perverse reading, the very 8½-x-11 multiuse acid-free paper on which the workplace discourse is pitilessly inscribed. There is no mobility within this hierarchy. A kitchen staff of three is exempt from the orgies so that it may concentrate on preparing food. There is also a scullery staff of three, all apparently murdered at the novel’s close according to Sade’s final notes.
Accounting. Sade’s own hand appears throughout the manuscript to count characters, particularly if any have been killed off, and to tally activities. At the close of the manuscript, he instructs himself to keep an account of the particular passions of his four central protagonists, “as, for example, the hell libertine,” though what he means by this is not entirely clear; it appears that he was separated from the manuscript before he was able to make good on this plan. This dispassionate accounting seems to require that the author catalogue the preferences of the four libertines so that each friend is scientifically differentiated. Elsewhere in his notes, Sade complains of his own tendency toward confusion and repetition, an imperfection he planned to correct with a more stringent accounting.
Purpose-built office space. The Château de Silling has numerous chambers with diverse designated functions. For example, everyone is required to defecate in the castle’s chapel. There are bedrooms for sleeping, a dungeon for torturing and murdering, a stage for communicating tales of debauchery. There are no exits; these have been walled off at the novel’s start, accessibility being a liability rather than an asset as far as the libertines’ place of business is concerned.
Production schedule. Each day at the Château de Silling unspools in a regular way. All present arise at ten AM, and debauchery and dining occur at fixed intervals until two AM. There are designated months for certain activities, as well as designated apparel. All present are made aware of their hourly tasks, but only the libertines know of the torture and slaughter with which the four-month fiscal year will end.
Catering. Delicious meals are provided in a timely fashion by dedicated cooks.
Erotic scene by the edge of a river, India, c. 1900. © Private Collection / Bridgeman Images.
Bonuses. There is an unusual amount of eating of shit. In some psychoanalytic readings of the practice of coprophilia, excrement represents money. Certainly scat functions as a rarity in everyday sexual economies. At Château de Silling it is plentiful.
Dispassionate intimacy. All sex acts are preordained and coordinated by statutory schedule. The victims of the libertines cannot choose whether or not to have sex, but even the libertines are not free to choose when, whom, or how they fuck. The only emotional reaction manifested by the libertines is that of impatience, inspired by delays in sexual activity worked into the schedule set at the beginning of the novel. These delays have a speculative function. They increase the libertines’ passion through denial, which increases the yield on passion’s principal, as it were. Such delays are not directed at any particular libertine. They are impersonal, general, and purely pragmatic.
Office work sets into tension, in close quarters, the ambitions of the individual and the destiny of the group. Office workers rub elbows with one another and gather at the water (or kombucha) cooler, rolling chairs collide and become entangled, sweaty softball tournaments are organized. It is possible that the success of the individual can become the success of the group, but it is more likely that in order for an office to succeed, individuality must be undermined, in that it must always directly serve the plural. Here is a rationale for the current vogue for open-plan work spaces, in which one has little privacy unless urinating, defecating, or making coffee. The open-plan-office worker must progress from a state of hyperconsciousness of the effect of her fleshly presence on her coworkers to total numbness in order to get any work done. In such work spaces, the sensitive are likely to spend their days endeavoring to stop unconsciously fidgeting or touching their faces or hair. Open-plan offices also stymie the unusually creative and independent, reducing them into collaborators. Management likes this. Accountability and credit can circulate in offices and even temporarily land, but there should be no authors in offices, only positions. Meanwhile, offices are not just places. Offices are not merely locations, nor are they particularly egalitarian. There are “office politics.” The office has a will of its own, yet, paradoxically, it is not exactly collective.
Setting aside for a moment the annoying behavior to which we must become inured if we are to survive the office (inane chats, baffling email communications, multipage budgets), we must also learn to cherish less our personal specificity. This soft injunction to conform often has a funny way of meaning that we must also become inured to our colleagues’ specific personalities. We do not fully choose or even desire our coworkers, no matter how intentional or progressive the workplace. At the office, we need one another to fulfill certain tasks by means of certain skills. We have less need, inevitably, of our coworkers’ personal histories, the deep reasons why they are the way they are or need whatever is needed. Nor do we have much use for our coworkers’ bodies, in all their ample particularity. We must, with our coworkers, develop forms of dependency and attachment that are risible and fungible, but not too risible and not too fungible. The legend emblazoned above most office doors should be “Try Not to Harm One Another When Convenient but, Above All, Don’t Love One Another.” Far worse than insulting one’s office mate or stepping on a colleague’s toe would be to recognize her or him as one’s soul mate. In such a scenario, all work would cease. We, like Sade’s libertines, require a modicum of impersonality, if not an actual series of statutes or rotating cast of narrating hags, in order to interact effectively with our coworkers. We tersely sign our emails “Best,” but what does this really mean? How can we wish for the best on behalf of someone we—purposefully—barely know? And yet there is no more appropriate or versatile send-off. The polite, efficient apathy implied by “Best” is one of the greatest office supplies known to the contemporary world; it should be bottled and sold in bulk at Staples—which, perhaps, in some sense it already is.
Did Sade know he was writing about office life? Did he intuit that the neoclassic return of republican forms of government to the West would also bring new administrative cultures, new ways of dispersing agency within groups, new levels of mediation and organization of bodies by form and file not even imagined by the church? For Sade, the project of “being with” is a notion not as fraught as it is aggressively simplified. His erotic project, like Kant’s ethical project, is a reasonable means of removing hypocrisy and contingency from social interactions—or, perhaps, of removing hypocrisy by way of removing contingency. (Jacques Lacan, for one, was so taken by the marquis’ infallible logic that he placed Sade’s texts in dialogue with Kant’s writings on reason and ethics to contextualize modernity’s path to Freud.) Sade seems to dream of a sexual relationship in which choice, chance, personal dependency, and the existence of a consenting other have been removed. As things stand, there is too much contingency and complexity in sex for Sade’s taste. Indeed, according to Sade, sex can never be too orderly or too public. It is this valence of his thought that seems overwhelmingly applicable to the contemporary office, if not to contemporary social life overall. We suffer still from an excess of contingency when it comes to others. Too much is possible, particularly in light of the “death” of the Catholic god against whom Sade railed. In major metropolitan areas—hives of office life—everything is permitted, and too many bodies are way too near to hand.
The German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann wrote a lecture on love in the summer of 1969 in which he argues that love is an important form of mediation, a solution to the problem of excessive contingency in republican social life. According to Luhmann, love allows us to simplify our social lives in a way that is, counterintuitively, not reductionist, since love depends on our individuality in order to function. Luhmann argues for the exceptionality of love, maintaining that “other media of communication can take the place of love to only a very limited extent, just as love can not take the place of truth or power or money without limitations.” Compare Luhmann’s solution to Sade’s: the latter removes love altogether while the former describes love as a logical necessity. Perhaps this is why Sade’s descriptions of human interactions seem so much more applicable to office work than to personal life. While the personal continues to dominate contemporary culture, it is difficult for those of us who cherish our individuality, as well as our privacy, to take Sade entirely seriously. We should also be just a bit afraid of him.
The body says what words cannot. —Martha Graham, 1985
It is crucial to mention that 120 Days of Sodom is, in spite of the copious violence and elaborate intercourse, one of the most boring novels of all time, particularly if read from beginning to end. One might, at some point in its pages, prefer to take up with an ATM receipt or an end-user license agreement. The novel expresses apathetic joys that are less reminiscent of the aesthetics of the snuff film—a genre that, pace ISIS, is almost always determined to have been faked—than the horrors of petty administrative perfections, callous email exchanges, and endless insurance forms. The faint pleasure of office culture is merely the anodyne pleasure of any coworker, scrolling through email before she heads out to the next meeting. It might seem like perversity to describe it as such, but take a closer look: herein lies your pleasure. For today, everyone is a libertine.Recorded over five years, at studios in Paris, London, and New York, and, including promotion, costing several million dollars, the album features musicians who played on albums by Sting, Chic, and Michael Jackson. Of note are the drummers Omar Hakim and John (JR) Robinson, the bassist Nathan East, and Nile Rodgers, the tidiest rhythm guitarist ever. But the guest musicians are not all from one era: Pharrell Williams, of the Neptunes, sings on and co-wrote two singles; Panda Bear, of Animal Collective, appears as a vocalist; and the seventies oddball Paul Williams sings a long song about the power of touch. This jumble extends to other facets of the album, which ends with a six-minute ode to a spaceship taking off. In several advertisements, the title “Random Access Memories” is rendered in the same font and coloring as the “Thriller” logo. So this record doesn’t just think big—it comes into the world as a thing to crush other things.
Daft Punk’s fourth studio album, “Random Access Memories,” is an attempt to make the kind of disco record that they sampled so heavily for “Discovery.” As such, it serves as a tribute to those who came before them and as a direct rebuke to much of what they’ve spawned. Only intermittently electronic in nature, and depending largely on live musicians, it is extremely ambitious, and as variable in quality as any popular album you will hear this year. Noodly jazz fusion instrumentals? Absolutely. Soggy poetry and kid choirs? Yes, please. Clichés that a B-list teen-pop writer would discard? Bring it on. The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of “Random Access Memories” repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard. Daft Punk engages the sound and the surface of music so lovingly that all seventy-five loony minutes of “Random Access Memories” feel fantastic, even when you are hearing music you might never seek out. This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?
In 1993, when the French duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo released their first record, as members of the rock band Darlin’, an English journalist described the music as “a daft punky thrash.” Shortened, this became the name of their next project, a not very punk dance act. Daft Punk’s début single, “The New Wave,” from 1994, was a fast, thumping techno track built from drum machines and synthesizers. Twenty years later, Daft Punk hasn’t so much changed dance music as dominated it. The group laid the groundwork for the growing contemporary dance genre by making music that was slightly rougher and almost comically synthetic—the latter symbolized by their habit of wearing robot helmets in their public appearances. “Discovery,” from 2001, is perhaps the most influential dance record in recent memory. The album’s centerpiece is the propulsive “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which samples Edwin Birdsong’s “Cola Bottle Baby.” After singing each word of the title, one at a time, the group moves into an evenly spaced chant that is sort of like Maoist yoga: “Work it harder, make it better. Do it faster, makes us stronger, more than ever, hour after, our work is never over.” It is workout music that is already working out. In 2007, Kanye West’s single “Stronger” used a sample from the song, and helped nudge hip-hop toward the sounds of the club.
The album has been launched as well as any in memory. On April 12th, at Coachella, and the next night, on “Saturday Night Live,” Pharrell Williams, Rodgers, and the Daft Punk “robots” appeared in a one-minute clip, in which they played the first single, “Get Lucky,” as a band. The song lopes along in a soft disco thump, seductive but not ecstatic. Rodgers plays immaculate, clean upstrokes on electric guitar, voicing chords that feel airy but never seek attention. It is as close to magic as pop comes. The bass line moves forward and throws in the kind of circular fillip that would take ages to sample but that a practiced session player can do without thinking. Williams is not a fantastic singer but he’s wonderfully unpretentious, a perfect parallel to Rodgers.
His verses sound like talking, and the words are some of the album’s least inane: “Like the legend of the phoenix, all ends with beginnings. What keeps the planets spinning, the force from the beginning.” It would probably change the record only slightly if the lyrics were randomly rearranged and placed in other songs. Love, elevation, fun, the search for identity—it’s all of a piece, snugly fitted and bespoke. Williams moves into a silky, high harmony section for the bridge, perhaps the |
a female (6.5 feet tall) and other, a male (over 8 feet tall). Many of these artifacts can be viewed at the small Humboldt natural history museum in Winniemucca, Nevada. Some were also reportedly sent to the Nevada Historical Society in Reno, while others became part of private collections.
Si-Te-Cah: Myth or Reality
Remains at the Humboldt Museum
As the excavation progressed, the archaeologists concluded that the Paiute myth was reality. What led them to this was the discovery of many broken arrows that had been shot into the cave, and a dark layer of burned material under sections of overlaying guano. They also found what appears to be a calendar: a donut-shaped stone with 365 notches carved along its outside rim and 52 corresponding notches along the inside.
The Debate Continues: Are the Si-Te-Cah Fact or Fiction
This wasn’t the final chapter in the story of Nevada’s red-haired giants. As reported in the Nevada Review-Miner newspaper, June 19, 1931, in February and June of 1931 two very large skeletons were found in the Humboldt dry lakebed, near Lovelock. One skeleton was 8.5 feet tall and was later described as being wrapped in a gum-covered fabric, not unlike Egyptian mummies. The other was almost 10-feet tall.
So if the giants existed, what happened to their remains? All that still exists are a skull and jawbone and a variety of artifacts at the Humboldt Museum, private collections or the Reno Museum of Natural History, according to the original archaeologists. What of the rest of the giants? Were they transported elsewhere as part of a cover-up, or have they simply been lost with time?
Let’s let Loud, one of the original archaeologists, have the last say on the matter: “Certain features of the cave may have given rise to the Paiute story in case that story is pure fiction. (1) There are strata of grass and tule in the cave which are carbonized. Fires started by sparks from torches of bold explorers may have smouldered for days in such deposits. (2) Much of the hair found on the mummies in the cave is reddish. Similar hair is known from mummies from the Pueblo region, Peru, and elsewhere, the color being due to age or chemical action. (3) The smell of the cave with its immense deposit of bat guano suggests burnt bodies, and made Ishi, a Yahi Indian, reluctant to enter a room at the museum where cave specimens were stored.
There is some doubt that Say-do-carah in Sarah Winnemucca’s story means “conqueror” or “enemy.” The Northern Paiute applied to the ancient people the name sai-duka’a, ” tule-eaters,” a name which might be applied to any people with this habit. This may account for the application of the name or its shortened form sai’i to the Pit River Indians and the form Saidyuka to Indians of eastern Oregon.”
Sources:
Ironlight,Loud, LL & Harrington, M.R. Lovelock Cave, Otherworld MysteryAmid ongoing uncertainty over the fate ofHarish Rawat government which will face floor test in Uttarakhand Assembly on March 28, the BJP on Wednesday claimed at least five moreMLAs from the Congress-led alliance are ready to jump over to its side.
“There are at least five more MLAs in the Congress-led alliance including some occupying ministerial positions only biding their time to switch over to our side,” chief spokesman of the Pradesh BJP Munna Singh Chauhan told PTI.
“They are in touch with us and will happily jump over to our side in case the arithmetic of the state Assembly veers towards a tie during voting in the House on March 28,” he said.
Though he refused to disclose the names, Chauhan said they were both from the Congress and its ruling partner the six-member Progressive Democratic Front – a conglomerate of independents and political parties.
Read: Ramdev’s hand in political crisis in Uttarakhand, says Congress
“The resentment against Harish Rawat’s autocratic style of functioning in the party is deeper than it may appear at first sight. It is not confined to the nine rebel MLAs who have openly revolted against him. There are others equally unhappy and are secretly waiting for a change-over. They will align with us as and when the opportunity presents itself,” he said.
Chauhan claimed as per the rules, state Assembly speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal cannot disqualify the nine rebel MLAs under the anti-defection law.
“The law is very clear in this regard. The speaker can disqualify a member under the anti-defection law only on two grounds. One, defying party whip in the House and two, defecting to another party. None of these apply to the nine rebel MLAs who have neither violated the whip nor defected to any other group or party,” he said.
Elaborating on this, Chauhan said how can the “rebel MLAs be accused of defying the party whip when the Speaker himself disallowed a division of votes on the appropriation bill in the House?”
Even if the speaker’s announcement that the appropriation bill was “passed by voice vote by implication means there was no violation of the party whip,” he contended.
“However, if the speaker ventures into any kind of adventurism and rushes to disqualify the rebel MLAs his action will not stand the scrutiny in a court of law,” he warned.
Read: What fuels Uttarakhand ex-CM Bahuguna’s ambitions
First Published: Mar 23, 2016 17:21 ISTToday we officially shipped the final release of Silverlight 3.
Silverlight 3 Features
Silverlight 3 is a major update and delivers a ton of new features and capabilities. Some of the new Silverlight 3 runtime capabilities include:
HD Media
Silverlight 3 now supports hardware graphics acceleration – enabling both video and graphics compositing to be offloaded onto a GPU. This can dramatically lower CPU usage on a computer, and enables HD video to be played on older low end machines. You can now deliver and play 1080p HD video experiences over the web.
Silverlight 3 includes new media codec support for H.264 video, AAC audio and MPEG-4 content. This enables you to easily play and stream media encoded using these standards. Silverlight 3 also includes raw bitstream audio/video APIs that enable you to create additional codecs (in any.NET language) that support playing any other media format. Silverlight 3 also adds a variety of additional media features that enable better logging (for media analytics and ad monetization scenarios), provide the ability to disable screen-savers when playing long-form video content, and enable content protection.
IIS Media Services is a free server product that complements Silverlight and provides the ability to efficiently stream media over HTTP. It enables both on-demand and live HD video to be delivered using “smooth streaming” - which is an adaptive streaming algorithm that can deliver video at bitrates optimized for a client’s network conditions and CPU capabilities. Check out this demo to see a good example of smooth streaming in action with Silverlight.
The HD support within Silverlight, combined with the Smooth Streaming support of IIS Media Services, enables a dramatically better video experiences on the web. This past week alone, we’ve had multiple customers broadcast live HD events using Silverlight and smooth streaming (up to 3MBits) including: Wimbledon, the Tour de France, AVP Volleyball, and the Michael Jackson Memorial Service.
Immersive Graphics
The new GPU acceleration capabilities of Silverlight 3 enable even richer and more immersive graphic experiences.
Silverlight 3 also adds new perspective 3D support that can be used with graphic elements, videos and controls. Silverlight 3 also includes new bitmap and pixel APIs, as well as the ability to create and apply custom pixel shader effects (e.g. blur, dropshadow, swirl, etc) to any image, video element, or control. Easing support can also now be used to enable more textured motion within animations.
Out of Browser Support
Silverlight 3 enables applications to run outside the browser and taken offline. Users can safely install web applications on their computers, and create persistent shortcuts to them on the desktop, start menu and taskbar (this is supported on both Windows and the Mac).
New network detection support within Silverlight enables developers to monitor the network status of a machine and switch between offline and online modes within their applications. Silverlight 3 also includes an automatic update mechanism for applications – so that clients who have installed applications are automatically updated when new application versions are deployed on the originating webserver.
Application Development
Silverlight 3 includes a ton of new application development features.
The Silverlight 3 runtime/SDK combined with the Silverlight Toolkit now includes ~100 UI controls that enable common scenarios (layout, data, charting, child windows, etc) while also providing full styling and template customization support.
Silverlight 3 enables richer data binding features. Element to element binding support between controls is now enabled. Validation error template support has been added to controls (enabling better error message display). Hierarchical data binding is supported by the DataGrid. And a new DataForm control enables better master/detail scenarios. Silverlight 3 also now enables SaveFileDialog support.
Silverlight 3 includes a new navigation framework that enables deep-linking and forward/back button integration within the browser. This also enables search engine optimization (SEO) support so that content within a Silverlight application can be indexed by search engines – including Google, Bing and Yahoo. Silverlight 3 also supports the ability to cache assemblies on the client, and re-use them across multiple applications (decreasing the download size and improving the startup time of applications).
Silverlight 3 includes much better text rendering and font support. Text rendered using Silverlight 3 applications is much crisper and cleaner than previous releases, and applications now have access to local fonts. The Silverlight 3 styling system also now supports merged resource dictionaries, BasedOn style inheritance support, and the ability for styles to be reset any number of times. Silverlight 3 also adds richer accessibility support, and is the first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing partially-sighted people to make changes such as high contrast color schemes for ease of readability using familiar operating system controls.
Silverlight 3 includes richer networking support. WCF error faults are now supported across the network. Server-side push duplex support is now easier to setup. Binary XML serialization of payloads is now supported. The new.NET RIA Services framework (which now has a go-live license) can be used to easily build multi-tier data applications that span the client and server..NET RIA Services enables you to write validation code once and have it applied on both the client and middle-tier layers of your applications.
Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Silverlight 3
Today we are also shipping a free download that enables Silverlight 3 development support for VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download provides project support, intellisense, compilation, and debugging for Silverlight 3 applications. The next release of Visual Studio - VS 2010 - will add to this and provide a fully interactive WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight (including data binding support within the designer).
Click here to download the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight (this will also install the SL3 developer runtime + sdk). Click here to download the Silverlight Toolkit (which adds additional controls).
Expression Studio 3
Today we are also shipping a release candidate (RC) of Expression Blend 3 (including Sketchflow) that enables rich editing of Silverlight 3 applications and projects.
You can download the Expression Blend 3 + Sketchflow RC here.
Expression Blend 3 is a major update and enables dramatically richer tooling support. Some of its improvements include:
Sketchflow : SketchFlow makes it significantly easier to create prototypes, experiment with dynamic user experiences, and incorporate feedback from customers. If you haven’t seen or tried it yet - you must. It really is a game changing new way to create great user centric applications.
: SketchFlow makes it significantly easier to create prototypes, experiment with dynamic user experiences, and incorporate feedback from customers. If you haven’t seen or tried it yet - you must. It really is a game changing new way to create great user centric applications. Intellisense : Blend 3 includes C#, VB and XAML intellisense support. You can now write code and event handlers within Blend without having to switch to VS.
: Blend 3 includes C#, VB and XAML intellisense support. You can now write code and event handlers within Blend without having to switch to VS. Behaviors : Blend 3 includes behavior support which can encapsulate complex design interactions into reusable components that can be directly applied to a control within the design surface. This enables designers to quickly add functionality and behavior to applications without having to write code.
: Blend 3 includes behavior support which can encapsulate complex design interactions into reusable components that can be directly applied to a control within the design surface. This enables designers to quickly add functionality and behavior to applications without having to write code. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator Import : Blend 3 now has built-in support for importing Photoshop and Illustrator files. As part of the import process you can view and pick individual Photoshop layers to import, customize and regroup layers, and have Photoshop/Illustrator elements retain their original formats within XAML: including layer positions, editable text and font settings, and vector element conversion to XAML.
: Blend 3 now has built-in support for importing Photoshop and Illustrator files. As part of the import process you can view and pick individual Photoshop layers to import, customize and regroup layers, and have Photoshop/Illustrator elements retain their original formats within XAML: including layer positions, editable text and font settings, and vector element conversion to XAML. Sample Data: Blend 3 adds design-time sample data support which makes it easy to mock up data-connected applications and see what they look like without requiring access to live data. You can generate sample data or import sample data from an XML file and it is available to controls on the artboard at design-time. You can customize your sample data details, and you can easily switch between using sample data and using live data at run-time.
Blend 3 adds design-time sample data support which makes it easy to mock up data-connected applications and see what they look like without requiring access to live data. You can generate sample data or import sample data from an XML file and it is available to controls on the artboard at design-time. You can customize your sample data details, and you can easily switch between using sample data and using live data at run-time. TFS : Blend 3 now includes Team Foundation Server (TFS) support – allowing you to use source control and enlist within projects. Blend shares the same project and solution format as Visual Studio – allowing both VS and Blend to work simultaneously on the same projects and enabling seamless editing between them.
: Blend 3 now includes Team Foundation Server (TFS) support – allowing you to use source control and enlist within projects. Blend shares the same project and solution format as Visual Studio – allowing both VS and Blend to work simultaneously on the same projects and enabling seamless editing between them. Other Improvements: Additional enhancements including improved animation and easing function support, 3D transform support, visual effects support, and an improved visual state manager designer.
Christian Schormann has a great blog post that describes Expression Blend 3 in more detail.
The final release of Expression Studio 3 (which includes the Blend + Sketchflow, Web, Encoder and Design products) will ship within the next 30 days. Expression Studio 3 will be included as part of the MSDN Premium and higher subscriptions (meaning MSDN Premium customers don’t have to pay anything extra to get all of the Expression Studio products). Expression Studio 3 will also be available for standalone purchase for $599 (with discounts available for upgrades from previous versions of Expression and/or competitive products).
Summary
Today’s release is a major update of our Silverlight stack of products – and comes only 9 months after the release of Silverlight 2.
You can learn more about Silverlight 3 and the tools that go along with it from the below sites:
www.silverlight.net (tutorials, downloads and forums where you can get help)
expression.microsoft.com (Expression community home)
www.microsoft.com/silverlight (Silverlight home – some V3 feature demos here)
Hope this helps,
ScottJon prepares for conflict. Sansa tries to talk to Theon. Brienne waits for a sign. Stannis (Stephen Dillane) remains stubborn. Jaime attempts to reconnect with family.
In the previous two seasons, the seventh episode has often been momentous in its own right, often creating a cliffhanger-type moment leading into the often-explosive dash to the finish. In some ways, “The Gift” feels similar, featuring a major turning of the tables. In other ways, however, there’s a sense that some stories are treading water, and the writers are getting stretched thin trying to figure out what to do with them. This is a detriment to an otherwise well-constructed episode, because despite visiting all major narrative areas (the only area excluded is Braavos) and doing so in a cohesive way that mostly does not feel rushed, some of what happens in those areas raise questions about just what the writers are thinking.
The most controversial story from the previous episode—that of Sansa, now the plaything of the sadistic Ramsay—remains one of the stronger stories of the show, as the writers don’t shy away from the reality of what would become of such a marriage. However, Sansa Stark is not Jeyne Poole (Ramsay’s victim in the novel), and even though brutalized and abused she strives to find her way out of her dilemma. Not simply trusting in her call to Reek to remember that he is Theon Greyjoy, she takes matters into her own hands by stealing a potential weapon, and then (more interestingly) starts to pry at Ramsay’s confidence in his place as heir to his father, a weak spot that turns on his former illegitimacy and the reality that he could easily be made illegitimate again if his father had it in his mind.
Some will say that this is showing that rape somehow empowers Sansa, but that isn’t what’s happening, in our opinion. Sansa is stronger in will than some will credit. She may not have Arya’s spunky tomboyishness, she may not have a Needle, but she has certainly tasted grief and suffering and abuse and come out the other side still intact in mind and spirit, buffeted but not crushed or destroyed. She still has hope. Her tenacious optimism may make her seem simply naïve but it’s her greatest strength, and the writing of how she proceeds in Winterfell feels true to the character (and the characters, not just hers but that of Ramsay as depicted by the show, and of Reek).
Elsewhere, the threat of rape provide fodder for a “hero moment” for Samwell, but here we think the writers are less successful. Compensating for what seems to have been a failure to create a more organic lead-up to Gilly’s choice to sleep with Sam, the writers play on the idea of the Night’s Watch being filled with rapists. While that is true enough, in its way, its a distinctly heavy-handed approach to things when we know that the same Watch in the novels, similarly noted for its former rapists and criminals, prove rather more benign than, say, Stannis’s own men with the female wildling prisoners.
Had the writers wanted, spending some more time with Aemon, Gilly, and Sam as Aemon’s health deteriorated could have led to more of a sense of grief and loss after his passing, fueling a consummation of their mutual desire. Instead, violence from new characters we’ve never seen before and may well never seen again was the solution.
King’s Landing is largely more rewarding in this episode, despite juggling a number of different scenes touching on all the significant players. Jonathan Pryce is absolutely the highlight of the episode, in fact, as his High Septon spars with Olenna Tyrell and then reveals his intentions to Cersei is a wonderfully well-played scene. The reveal that Lancel has unburdened his sins—all of them—and so revealed Cersei’s own sins leaves the episode on the image of her locked cell door, letting us know that the lioness has been caged.
But speaking of Lancel, many would make the easy assumption that Littlefinger’s scene with Olenna culminated with his telling her about Lancel. We suspect this is not the case at all, however, but rather that this juxtaposition of scenes is simply a bit of misdirection. Who is the “handsome young man”, then, if not Lancel? Our best guess is that it could by Olyver himself, offered up to Olenna to either recant his evidence or perhaps to be the victim of an unfortunate accident before he can testify.
But there’s another idea that we’ve been pondering: could it be Gendry? We’ve not seen the poor blacksmith’s apprentice since season 3, when Davos sent him to row in the general direction of King’s Landing. Did he make it there, only to fall into Littlefinger’s hands? The show has used him as a kind of “proof” of the illegitimacy of Cersei’s children, so arming Olenna with Gendry would surely seem like a potentially big lever… against Cersei. The sticking point is that it’s unclear how it helps the Tyrells deal with the Faith. A trade, Gendry and the “proof” of Tommen’s illegitimacy in return for Margaery and Loras? Something doesn’t seem quite right there.
But I digress. The episode does have a couple of faulty areas. The briefer but more annoying of these is Meereen, where Daenerys and Daario prove to have a fairly light-hearted relationship even in extremity. The angst we were hoping for, the turmoil of warring emotions, has been shoved aside and given us a Daenerys who simply sees her marriage as political and fully expects to be able to keep having a fling with a sellsword of common origins.
Daenerys feels very little like her novelistic counterpart here, to the point that it’s dawned on us that she really isn’t that similar to the source character any longer whereas it felt like she was more or less in the right place for much of the show. It’s odd that such a relatively minor scene drove that home. At least the writers have retained Daario’s advice to her, and Daenerys’s struggle with the idea of becoming a butcher to place her will over the Meereenese.
Jorah and Tyrion, on the other hand, lack some logic in their narrative, suggesting an unusual level of sloppiness. Tyrion is sold for a few coins to be a fighter… but what about the “fortune” from a “cock merchant” that Malko, the slaver, expected? No explanation appears to be needed, as far as the writers are concerned. And then in the fighting pit, why does Daenerys believe that these men that Yezzan is bossing around are free men rather than slaves? And for that matter, why is everyone unchained… except Tyrion, who is kept shackled as if he were a ravening monster?
It’s frightening to think that perhaps the further the writers get into making their own story, the sloppier they get. Is it because of exhaustion and having too much on their plate? Is it because, as they start to move more and more away from the books, they’re simply not up to the task of keeping track of so many small details? Is it just an anomaly and future episodes will be less filled with plot holes? It will be interesting to see what’s to come in the final three episodes of the season.
Besides this, we have to admit being rather underwhelmed at the Tyrion and Daenerys meeting. Yes, fans have been waiting for this to happen for a long time. But the scenario presented feels trite and uninteresting in and of itself, and what the novels seem to be preparing to present—their meeting seems likely to take place after major strife and turmoil on levels far beyond what the show is willing or able to present—will doubtless be much more interesting. In a post-episode interview, Benioff and Weiss present their case for the meeting, namely that they simply couldn’t see themselves delaying it because the characters are too good and interesting to keep apart. But I’d argue that such a momentous meeting could have used a suitably momentous occasion to feel like the haste was deserved.
Last but not least, Dorne. The Jaime and Myrcella scene is a bit of fluff, alas, with little weight behind it. The cell scene with Bronn and the Sand Snakes, on the other hand… has little weight behind it. It’s a well-executed scene, and fleshes out (ahem) Tyene far more so than it has done in the previous episodes. However, on later reflection it becomes clear that the false jeopardy the writers introduce for Bronn feels forced: why exactly is Bronn allowed to live by the Sand Snakes? He’s no one but a man who snuck into their land, killed their men, and attempted to steal away the betrothed of a Dornish prince.
Seeing Bronn go would of course have been sad, but there’d be something poetic in his meaningless death after singing the last lines of “The Dornishman’s Wife”, and it would give that part of the story genuine weight that it has so far lacked to a woeful degree. Instead, the writers make Tyene mercurial enough to give him an antidote for no better reason than he claims (under the duress of having been poisoned!) that she’s the most beautiful woman he’s seen.
It’s a shame that a scene with such a poor foundation is also the best chance for a Sand Snake to be fleshed out, and I suppose one can question that nudity was a requirement of the scene. It works, certainly, and Ms. Sellers sells (sorry) the character’s feigned sweetness and intense sexuality very well indeed… but something more substantial would have been even better for her. And for the other Sand Snakes, who do well with their brief opportunities to roll their eyes but are otherwise given only a line or two more. Is this the last we’ll see of the Sand Snakes? If so, it will be one of the most pointless exercises of the show to have conducted.
The episode covers elements from the following chapters: Samwell II (AFfC), Samwell IV (AFfC), The King’s Prize (ADwD), Tyrion X (ADwD), Daenerys IV (ADwD), and Cersei X (AFfC)
Samwell II (AFfC) : In the novels, Maester Aemon’s rapidly deteriorating health begins when he departs the Wall for the Citadel, by way of Braavos. He does begin to have strange dreams and lapses of memory, and does reminisce about his younger brother King Aegon V.
: In the novels, Maester Aemon’s rapidly deteriorating health begins when he departs the Wall for the Citadel, by way of Braavos. He does begin to have strange dreams and lapses of memory, and does reminisce about his younger brother King Aegon V. Samwell IV (AFfC) : Maester Aemon’s death and funeral take place on the Cinnamon Wind, a Summer Isles swan-ship, in the novels; however, as they are at sea, Aemon’s body is preserved in a cask of rum rather than cremated, until such time as the ship arrives at Oldtown and the Citadel. Cremation is the customary means of funeral for Targaryens, however. “Egg. I dreamed that I was old,” is a famous line from the novels, though not (as on the show) his last words, and the show omits Aemon’s focus on Daenerys and the prophecies that Melisandre believes in, and those that Rhaegar once seemed to believe. Samwell’s sleeping with Gilly takes place in the aftermath of Aemon’s death, in the books.
: Maester Aemon’s death and funeral take place on the Cinnamon Wind, a Summer Isles swan-ship, in the novels; however, as they are at sea, Aemon’s body is preserved in a cask of rum rather than cremated, until such time as the ship arrives at Oldtown and the Citadel. Cremation is the customary means of funeral for Targaryens, however. “Egg. I dreamed that I was old,” is a famous line from the novels, though not (as on the show) his last words, and the show omits Aemon’s focus on Daenerys and the prophecies that Melisandre believes in, and those that Rhaegar once seemed to believe. Samwell’s sleeping with Gilly takes place in the aftermath of Aemon’s death, in the books. The King’s Prize (ADwD) : This Asha chapter provides inspiration for the situation Stannis’s forces find themselves in when snowstorms strike and begin to decimate them. Davos is not present with Stannis’s force, having been sent on missions on Stannis’s behalf. Stannis’s insistence in going forward no matter the cost, on throwing the dice on victory, are very much in keeping with the novels, on the other hand.
: This Asha chapter provides inspiration for the situation Stannis’s forces find themselves in when snowstorms strike and begin to decimate them. Davos is not present with Stannis’s force, having been sent on missions on Stannis’s behalf. Stannis’s insistence in going forward no matter the cost, on throwing the dice on victory, are very much in keeping with the novels, on the other hand. Tyrion X (ADwD) : Captured at sea after their ship founders, Jorah and Tyrion (as well as Penny, absent from the show) are taken to Slaver’s Bay and to the market that the Yunkish host has made outside the walls of Meereen. Tyrion shows off his wits and skills to earn a very good price from Yezzan zo Qaggaz, one of the Yunkish Masters, whose name has been reused for a rather different character (even if still a slaver). However, Jorah is not purchased initially until Tyrion convinces Yezzan’s agent that Jorah is necessary for the act Tyrion and Penny allegedly have, based on the song “The Bear and the Maiden Fair.”
: Captured at sea after their ship founders, Jorah and Tyrion (as well as Penny, absent from the show) are taken to Slaver’s Bay and to the market that the Yunkish host has made outside the walls of Meereen. Tyrion shows off his wits and skills to earn a very good price from Yezzan zo Qaggaz, one of the Yunkish Masters, whose name has been reused for a rather different character (even if still a slaver). However, Jorah is not purchased initially until Tyrion convinces Yezzan’s agent that Jorah is necessary for the act Tyrion and Penny allegedly have, based on the song “The Bear and the Maiden Fair.” Daenerys IV (ADwD) : Daenerys and Daario Naharis do continue their relationship up to Daenerys’s marriage to Hizdahr in the novels, but Daenerys insists that once she’s wed she must stay faithful to Hizdahr rather than suggesting, as on the show, that it’s merely a political marriage and no one will care if she continues it. Daario’s apparent feelings about the situation on the novels seem to be much angrier and less accepting than on the show.
: Daenerys and Daario Naharis do continue their relationship up to Daenerys’s marriage to Hizdahr in the novels, but Daenerys insists that once she’s wed she must stay faithful to Hizdahr rather than suggesting, as on the show, that it’s merely a political marriage and no one will care if she continues it. Daario’s apparent feelings about the situation on the novels seem to be much angrier and less accepting than on the show. Cersei X (AFfC): Cersei’s gloating over Margaery, who screams at her and calls her “bitch”, is drawn from the novels. Cersei’s belief that she is in control of the situation, up to and including meeting the High Septon privately and without any guards of her own. However, rather than having her sins revealed by Lancel, it is Ser Osney Kettleblack—whom she sent to the High Septon to claim an affair with Margaery, only to be arrested, tortured, and questioned until he revealed Cersei’s crimes—whose testimony betrays her. Finally, in the novel she realizes that the High Septon means to arrest her and attempts to flee, shoving him aside, knocking one septa down and scratching another in the face, and rushing out as far as the Great Sept proper when more septas seize her. Cersei’s arrest on the show is much more passive on her part, with relatively little struggle.
Other scenes of note:
Jon’s departure: Jon does not depart Castle Black for Hardhome in A Dance with Dragons.
Sansa and Reek: This scene feels quite accurate to the Reek of the novel, particularly his revealing to Ramsay that Sansa has plans to escape with the help of inside-sources. However, the scene is an invention of the show.
Sansa and Ramsay: Another scene not from the novels, as Sansa and Ramsay never marry. Sansa’s counterpart in the novels, Jeyne, also does not end up with any similar conversations with Ramsay, nor does she steal a weapon.
Stannis and Melisandre: As previously noted, Melisandre does not accompany Stannis on his campaign, nor does she ever appear to suggest the sacrifice of Shireen to him.
Attack on Gilly: Gilly is never assaulted by brothers of the Watch in the novels, nor is Samwell.
Olenna and the High Sparrow: Olenna is in Highgarden through most of A Feast for Crows, so such a scene does not take place in the novels.
Cersei and Tommen: The novels do not feature a similar scene, as Tommen is much younger in the books and subsequently less concerned and involved in such matters. Cersei’s offer to speak to the High Septon to try and resolve matters is inspired by a similar claim from Cersei in Cersei X.
Jaime and Myrcella: Jaime never goes to Dorne, so such a scene never takes place in the novels. One detail of note is Myrcella’s claim that she has been in Dorne for “years”. In the novels, the span of time between her leaving King’s Landing for Dorne and the attempt of Princess Arianne to crown her (the closest equivalent to the show’s own conspiracy plot) is slightly more than six months, according to most estimates. On the show, there’s little sense that years have actually passed, so her statement can be considered an exaggeration.
Bronn and the Sand Snakes: Similarly, Bronn is not in Dorne so such a scene does not take place. The poison Tyene names is an invention of the show. The lyrics to “The Dornishman’s Wife” are, however, accurate. So, too, is Tyene’s interest in and skill with poisons, the weapon that her father Oberyn taught her, although in many other respects Tyene is very different from the character in the novels.
Littlefinger and Olenna: This scene does not take place in the novels, as Littlefinger remains in the Vale while Olenna remains in Highgarden after having left King’s Landing following Tommen’s marriage to Margaery.
The Fighting Pit: This scene of preliminary fighting in the pits, witnessed by Daeenrys, is an invention of the show. The circumstances by which Jorah and Tyrion are to appear before Daenerys are quite different in the novels, and Daenerys is not aware either of them are in the vicinity of Meereen by the end of A Dance with Dragons.Swiss non-profit the Publiq Foundation has launched a blockchain-based content platform that aims to fight “fake news” and bias reporting.
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, provided such individuals have a valid ID from their home state. All of the aforementioned states grant permits on a shall-issue basis for modes of concealed carry that require a permit.
On July 24, 2014, Washington D.C. became a constitutional carry jurisdiction for a brief moment when its ban on carrying a handgun was ruled unconstitutional and the ruling was not stayed.[58] The ruling said that any resident who had a legally registered handgun could carry it without a permit and non-residents without felony convictions could carry as well. The ruling was then stayed on July 29, 2014.[59][60][61][62]
"Shall issue" redirects here. For the laws that define these jurisdictions, see shall-issue law
A shall-issue jurisdiction is one that requires a license to carry a concealed handgun, but where the granting of such licenses is subject only to meeting determinate criteria laid out in the law; the granting authority has no discretion in the awarding of the licenses, and there is no requirement of the applicant to demonstrate "good cause". The laws in a Shall-Issue jurisdiction typically state that a granting authority shall issue a license if the criteria are met, as opposed to laws in which the authority may issue a license at their discretion.
Typical license requirements include residency, minimum age, submitting fingerprints, passing a computerized instant background check (or a more comprehensive manual background check), attending a certified handgun/firearm safety class, passing a practical qualification demonstrating handgun proficiency, and paying a required fee. These requirements vary widely by jurisdiction, with some having few or none of these and others having most or all.
The following are shall-issue states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina,[39] North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon,[40] Pennsylvania, Rhode Island (for permits issued by local authorities), South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee,[42] Texas,[43][44] Utah,[45] Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.[12] The territory of Guam is also Shall-Issue with the passage of Bill 296.[63]
Certain states and jurisdictions, while "may-issue" by law, direct their issuing authorities to issue licenses to all or nearly all qualified applicants, and as such they are considered "shall-issue" in practice. Connecticut, and certain cities and counties in California, Massachusetts, and New York are examples.[citation needed]
Connecticut law specifies that CCW licenses be granted on a may-issue basis, but the state's courts have established that issuing authorities must grant CCW licenses on a shall-issue basis for applicants who meet all statutory qualifications, as unlike other may-issue states Connecticut law does not contain a requirement for the applicant to show "necessary and proper reason" for obtaining a license.[citation needed]
States with pure shall-issue licensing laws require the issuing authority to issue permits to any applicant who has submitted a properly-completed application, passed a background check, completed any required training, and met any other criteria specified by law. The issuing authority has no discretion to deny permits based on factors beyond the qualification criteria specified by law.[citation needed]
Shall-issue with limited discretion is a subset of shall-issue licensing that borders between pure shall-issue and may-issue policy, where an issuing authority has a limited degree of discretion to deny applicants a concealed carry permit based either on the applicant's suitability or reason for requesting a permit, even after the applicant has completed any required training and passed a background check. In states with such licensing practices, the issuing authority would be required to demonstrate with substantiating evidence, that the applicant is either not suitable or lacks appropriate need for the permit. Most denials in such states are typically reversed upon appeal provided the applicant has passed a background check and fulfilled any training requirements for the permit. States with shall-issue laws that allow a limited degree of discretion include Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. Although may-issue by statute, Connecticut also falls into this subset, in practice.
Some shall-issue jurisdictions allow for automatic renewal of concealed carry permits, as long as the permit-holder files the renewal application before the permit expires (or in some states, a short grace period following expiration of the original permit). Other jurisdictions require a permit-holder to complete refresher training in firearms safety and undergo a criminal background check before applying for renewal. Some jurisdictions periodically run permit holders' IDs through the NICS background check system. Other jurisdictions require a judge to suspend a permit if the holder is arrested for certain offenses (return/revocation of the permit depending on later disposition of the case).
A may-issue jurisdiction is one that requires a permit to carry a concealed handgun, and where the granting of such permits is partially at the discretion of local authorities (frequently the sheriff's department or police), with a few states consolidating this discretionary power under state-level law enforcement. Moreover, issuing authorities in most may-issue jurisdictions are not required to provide a substantive reason for the denial of a concealed carry permit. Some may-issue jurisdictions may provide administrative and legal avenues for an applicant to appeal a permit denial, while others do not.
The law typically states that a granting authority "may issue" a permit if various criteria are met, or that the permit applicant must have "good cause" (or similar) to carry a concealed weapon. In most such situations, self-defense in and of itself often does not satisfy the "good cause" requirement, and issuing authorities in some may-issue jurisdictions have been known to arbitrarily deny applications for CCW permits without providing the applicant with any substantive reason for the denial. Some may-issue jurisdictions require a permit-holder to provide justification for continued need for a concealed carry permit upon renewal, and may deny the renewal of an expiring permit without sufficient showing of "good cause." Some of these jurisdictions may revoke a permit after it has been issued when the issuing authority in its discretion has determined that the "good cause" used in approving the permit application no longer exists. Other may-issue jurisdictions allow for automatic renewal of the permit, as long as the permit-holder completes any required firearms safety training and files the renewal application before the permit expires. Some may-issue jurisdictions give issuing authorities discretion in granting concealed carry permits based on an applicant's suitability (e.g., moral character) by requiring the applicant to submit evidence (resume/curriculum vitae, letters of reference, credit history, etc.) showing the applicant is of suitable character to be issued a permit.
When distinguishing between shall-issue and may-issue, that distinction may not necessarily be explicitly apparent in the exact letter of the law. Rather, a more accurate determinant as to whether a state is shall-issue versus may-issue is whether or not the applicant is required to show "good cause" when applying for a permit. Court precedent also plays an important role in determining whether a state is may-issue or shall-issue without regard to the verbiage in state law. For example, New York is a may-issue state, even though its concealed carry licensing laws includes the words "shall issue," because New York law requires applicants to show "good cause" when applying for a concealed carry permit. Since "good cause" is highly subjective, issuing authorities in New York have wide discretion in determining what constitutes "good cause," and the ability for an ordinary citizen to obtain a concealed carry permit varies widely throughout the state. In contrast, the pistol permit law in neighboring Connecticut contains the words "may issue," despite Connecticut effectively being a shall-issue state. This is because Connecticut's pistol permit law does not require the applicant to show "good cause" to the issuing authority when applying for a pistol permit. Because Connecticut's permitting law lacks a subjective "good cause" standard, that state's courts have repeatedly and consistently ruled that issuing authorities must issue pistol permits to applicants who meet the state's statutory qualifications for a pistol permit.
May-issue can be compared to shall-issue where in a may-issue jurisdiction, the burden of proof for justifying the need for a permit rests with the applicant, whereas in a shall-issue jurisdiction the burden of proof to justify denying a permit rests with the issuing authority.
The following are may-issue states by law: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.
A state that is de jure a may-issue jurisdiction may range anywhere from shall-issue to no-issue in practice,[64][65] i.e., permissive may-issue to restrictive may-issue, based on each licensing authority's willingness to issue permits to applicants:
Connecticut and Delaware are regarded as permissive may-issue states, where either governmental policy or court precedence direct issuing authorities to approve applications that meet all non-discretionary criteria.
Hawaii, Maryland, and New Jersey are considered restrictive may-issue jurisdictions, where issuing authorities are directed to deny most or all applications, either based on hard-to-meet "good cause" requirements or agency policies specifically prohibiting issue. Additionally Maryland and New Jersey require the applicant provide substantive evidence of a clear and immediate threat on their lives that exists outside of their home at the time the permit application is filed. Rhode Island further requires applicants for the statewide permit to submit to a mental health records check at the applicant's expense.
California, Massachusetts, and New York vary within state, as the criteria for what constitutes "good cause" is defined at the local level. Issuing authorities in inland California, rural portions of Massachusetts, and Upstate New York generally accept self-defense without evidence of a specific threat as "good cause" and will grant permits to the vast majority of applicants who pass a background check and complete the required firearms safety training. Meanwhile, concealed carry permits are difficult to virtually impossible to obtain by ordinary citizens in urban areas, such as New York City, Long Island, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco metropolitan areas. In these locations, the definition of "good cause" is generally limited to specific and immediate threats on an applicant's life that cannot be mitigated by any other means. There are also "moderately restrictive" local jurisdictions in these states where the local "good cause" definitions may be more restrictive than locales that practice shall-issue licensing, but less restrictive than those counties or municipalities that rarely or never issue permits.
Rhode Island state law is two-tier; local authorities are directed by state law and court precedent (Archer v McGarry) to practice shall-issue permitting policy, but the Attorney General's office has discretionary authority over permits issued by its office. The permits issued by both the local authorities and the AG are valid statewide, but the AG issued permit is required for open carry in general. Some local jurisdictions, at the recommendation of the AG, still refer all applicants to the AG's office and the "may-issue" state-level system in violation of Archer.[66]
In some may-issue jurisdictions, permits are only issued to individuals with celebrity status, have political connections, or have a high degree of wealth,[67][68][69] resulting in accusations of systematic corruption in how CCW permit applications are adjudicated in some such jurisdictions.[70] Additionally, issuing authorities charge arbitrarily defined fees that go well beyond the basic processing fee for a CCW permit, thereby making the CCW permit unaffordable to most applicants. For example, applying for a New York City concealed carry permit typically costs around $5,000 when the filing fee and other administrative fees are combined.
In recent cases challenging restrictive discretionary issue laws, federal district and appeals courts have generally applied intermediate scrutiny to these and other Second Amendment related cases, where the courts recognize that restrictive concealed carry laws "infringe on an individual's right to keep and bear arms," but also recognizes that such infringement is permitted to further "an important government interest in public safety." Any and all other Rights that are described as "individual" and "fundamental" by the SCOTUS require a "strict scrutiny" standard as shown in prior decisions involving fully applicable incorporation cases. In Maryland, Woollard v. Sheridan, the United States District Court for the District of Maryland decided in favor of a Maryland resident who was denied a permit renewal due to lack of "good cause" in accordance with Maryland law.[71] The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed, holding the "good cause" requirement met the standard of intermediate scrutiny applicable to restrictions on the right to carry arms outside the home, and reinstated the "good cause" requirement on March 21, 2013.[72] The plaintiffs in the case filed a petition for certiorari in the United States Supreme Court; the court denied certiorari without comment on October 15.[73] New York's similar "good cause" requirement was also under challenge in Kachalsky v. Cacase. However, certiorari before SCOTUS was denied on April 15, 2013. Drake v. Filko, involving several plaintiffs (including one kidnap victim) denied permits under New Jersey's permitting system; the suit challenged New Jersey's "justifiable need" requirement for obtaining a carry permit. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the lower court's judgment holding the requirement constitutional, holding (much like the 4th Circuit in Woollard and the 2nd Circuit in Kachalsky) that the New Jersey statute survived intermediate scrutiny.[74] The common theme from Courts of Appeals rulings upholding may-issue laws is that state or local policies in limiting who is granted permits to carry firearms in public "furthers an important government interest in public safety," by which state legislatures enact laws making licensed concealed carry available but establish criteria to limit the number of concealed carry permit-holders to as few as practicable to pass constitutional muster. The courts have opined that these laws survive intermediate scrutiny on that basis. However, all other "fundamental" and "individual" Rights are subjected to a "strict scrutiny" standard, see, Duncan, 391 U.S. at 149, and n. 15, supra., "A right that is fundamental from an American perspective applies equally to the Federal Government and the States."
Concealed carry on U.S. military installations [ edit ]
While members of the Armed Services may receive extensive small arms training, United States Military installations have some of the most restrictive rules for the possession, transport, and carrying of personally-owned firearms in the country.
Overall authority for carrying a personally-owned firearm on a military installation rests with the installation commander, although the authority to permit individuals to carry firearms on an installation is usually delegated to the Provost Marshal. Military installations do not recognize state-issued concealed carry permits, and state firearms laws generally do not apply to military bases, regardless of the state in which the installation is located. Federal law (18 USC, Section 930) generally forbids the possession, transport, and carrying of firearms on military installations without approval from the installation commander. Federal law gives installation commanders wide discretion in establishing firearms policies for their respective installations. In practice, local discretion is often constrained by policies and directives from the headquarters of each military branch and major commands.
Installation policies can vary from no-issue for most bases to shall-issue in rare circumstances. Installations that do allow the carrying of firearms typically restrict carrying to designated areas and for specific purposes (i.e., hunting or officially sanctioned shooting competitions in approved locations on the installation). Installation commanders may require the applicant complete extensive firearms safety training, undergo a mental health evaluation, and obtain a letter of recommendation from his or her unit commander (or employer) before such authorization is granted. Personnel that reside on a military installation are typically required to store their personally-owned firearms in the installation armory, although the installation commander or provost marshal may permit a servicemember to store his or her personal firearms in their on-base dwelling if he or she has a gun safe or similarly designed cabinet where the firearms can be secured.
Prior to 2011, military commanders could impose firearms restrictions to servicemembers residing off-base, such as mandatory registration of firearms with the base Provost Marshal, restricting or banning the carrying of firearms by servicemembers either on or off the installation regardless of whether the member had a state permit to carry, and requiring servicemembers to have a gun safe or similar container to secure firearms when not in use. A provision was included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011 that limited commanders' authority to impose restrictions on the possession and use of personally-owned firearms by servicemembers who reside off-base.
A no-issue jurisdiction is one that – with very limited exceptions – does not allow any private citizen to carry a concealed handgun in public. The term refers to the fact that no concealed carry permits will be issued (or recognized). Since July 2013, with the legalization of concealed carry in Illinois, there are presently no no-issue states per se; with only the territory of American Samoa being the only U.S. jurisdiction that completely prohibits concealed carry.
While technically may-issue under state law, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, and certain cities and counties within California, Massachusetts, and New York are no-issue jurisdictions in practice, with governmental policy directing officials with discretionary power to rarely or never issue licenses. Additionally, some of the United States' insular territories (U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, etc.) are no-issue jurisdictions in practice. Most no-issue jurisdictions have exceptions to their laws that permit open or concealed carry by active and retired law enforcement officials, armed security personnel while on duty and in uniform, and for members of the Armed Forces. Wisconsin and Illinois were the last remaining no-issue states, until licensed concealed carry was legalized in 2011 and 2013, respectively. Prior to legalization, Wisconsin outlawed concealed carry, but open carry was legal statewide. Illinois had banned concealed carry, and generally prohibited open carry in most locations as well.
Limitations on concealed carry [ edit ]
Prohibitions of the concealed carry of firearms and other weapons by local governments predate the establishment of the United States. In 1686, New Jersey law stated “no person or persons … shall presume privately to wear any pocket pistol … or other unusual or unlawful weapons within this Province.” After the federal government was established, states and localities continued to restrict people from carrying hidden weapons. Tennessee law prohibited this as early as 1821. By 1837, Georgia passed into effect “An Act to guard and protect the citizens of this State, against the unwarrantable and too prevalent use of deadly weapons.” Two years later, Alabama followed suit with “An Act to Suppress the Evil Practice of Carrying Weapons Secretly.” Delaware prohibited the practice in 1852.[75] Ohio did the same in 1859, a policy that remained in effect until 1974.[76] Cities also regulated weapons within their boundaries. In 1881, Tombstone, Arizona enacted Ordinance No. 9 "To Provide against Carrying of Deadly Weapons," a regulation that sparked the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral later that year.
Most may-issue jurisdictions, and some shall-issue jurisdictions allow issuing authorities to impose limitations on CCW permits, such as the type and caliber of handguns that may be carried (Massachusetts, New Mexico), restrictions on places where the permit is valid (New York, Rhode Island, Illinois), restricting concealed carry to purposes or activities specified on the approved permit application (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York), limitations on magazine size (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York), or limitations on the number of firearms that may be carried concealed by a permit-holder at any given time (some states). Permits issued by all but two states (New York and Hawaii) are valid statewide. New York State pistol licenses, which are generally issued by counties, are valid statewide with one exception. A permit not issued by New York City is invalid in that city, unless validated by its police commissioner.[77][78] Permits issued by Hawaii are valid only in the county of issuance.
Training requirements [ edit ]
Some states require concealed carry applicants to certify their proficiency with a firearm through some type of training or instruction. Certain training courses developed by the National Rifle Association that combine classroom and live-fire instruction typically meet most state training requirements. Some states recognize prior military or police service as meeting training requirements.[79]
Classroom instruction would typically include firearm mechanics and terminology, cleaning and maintenance of a firearm, concealed carry legislation and limitations, liability issues, carry methods and safety, home defense, methods for managing and defusing confrontational situations, and practice of gun handling techniques without firing the weapon. Most required CCW training courses devote a considerable amount of time to liability issues.
Depending on the state, a practical component during which the attendee shoots the weapon for the purpose of demonstrating safety and proficiency, may be required. During range instruction, applicants would typically learn and demonstrate safe handling and operation of a firearm and accurate shooting from common self-defense distances. Some states require a certain proficiency to receive a passing grade, whereas other states (e.g., Florida) technically require only a single-shot be fired to demonstrate handgun handling proficiency.
CCW training courses are typically completed in a single day and are good for a set period, the exact duration varying by state. Some states require re-training, sometimes in a shorter, simpler format, for each renewal.
A few states, e.g., South Carolina, recognize the safety and use-of-force training given to military personnel as acceptable in lieu of formal civilian training certification. Such states will ask for a military ID (South Carolina) for active persons or DD214 for honorably discharged persons. These few states will commonly request a copy of the applicant's BTR (Basic Training Record) proving an up-to-date pistol qualification. Active and retired law enforcement officers are generally exempt from qualification requirements, due to a federal statute permitting retired law enforcement officers to carry concealed weapons in the United States.[80]
Virginia recognizes eight specific training options to prove competency in handgun handling, ranging from DD214 for honorably discharged military veterans, to certification from law enforcement training, to firearms training conducted by a state or NRA certified firearms instructor including electronic, video, or on-line courses. While any one of the eight listed options will be considered adequate proof, individual circuit courts may recognize other training options.[79] A small number of states, such as Alabama and Georgia, have no training requirements to obtain a permit—only a requirement that the applicant successfully pass the required background check before issuance.
Reciprocity [ edit ]
Permit reciprocity[13][81] Full reciprocity Full reciprocity for resident permits Vehicle carry only Partial reciprocity No reciprocity
CCW Reciprocity
Many jurisdictions recognize (honor) a permit or license issued by other jurisdictions. Recognition may be granted to all jurisdictions or some subset which meets a set of permit-issuing criteria, such as training comparable to the honoring jurisdiction or certain background checks. Several states have entered into formal agreements to mutually recognize permits. This arrangement is commonly called reciprocity or mutual recognition. A few states do not recognize permits issued by any other jurisdiction, but offer non-resident permits for out-of-state individuals (who possess a valid concealed carry permit from their home state) who wish to carry while visiting such states. There are also states that neither recognize out-of-state concealed carry permits nor issue permits to non-residents, resulting in a complete ban on concealed carry by non-residents in such states.
Recognition and reciprocity of concealed carry privileges varies. Some states (e.g. Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio) unilaterally recognize all permits. Others such as Michigan, limit such universal recognition to residents of the permit-issuing state.[82] While 37 states have reciprocity agreements with at least one other state and several states honor all out-of-state concealed carry permits, some states have special requirements like training courses or safety exams, and therefore do not honor permits from states that do not have such requirements for issue. Some states make exceptions for persons under the minimum age (usually 21) if they are active or honorably-discharged members of the military or a police force (the second of these two is allowed under Federal law). States that do not have this exemption generally do not recognize any license from states that do. An example of this is the State of Washington's refusal to honor any Texas LTC as Texas has the military exception to age.[83] Idaho and Missouri also have standard and enhanced permits that have different requirements to obtain and also have unique reciprocity with different states.[84]
Ohio permits have the highest recognition in 40 states. One can obtain multiple state permits in an effort to increase the number of states where that user can carry a legally concealed weapon. It is common practice to use a CCW Reciprocity Map[85] to gain clarity on which states will honor the person's combination of resident and non-resident permits given the variety of standards and legal policies from state to state. There are also various mobile applications[86] that guide users in researching state concealed carry permit reciprocity.
Although carry may be legal under State law in accordance with reciprocity agreements, the Federal Gun Free School Zones Act subjects an out-of-state permit holder to federal felony prosecution if they carry a firearm within 1000 feet of any K–12 school's property line; however, the enforcement of this statute is rare given several states' nullification statutes prohibiting state law enforcement officers from enforcing federal firearms laws.
Restricted premises [ edit ]
While generally a concealed carry permit allows the permit holder to carry a concealed weapon in public, a state may restrict carry of a firearm including a permitted concealed weapon while in or on certain properties, facilities or types of businesses that are otherwise open to the public. These areas vary by state (except for the first item below; Federal offices are subject to superseding Federal law) and can include:
Federal government facilities, including post offices, IRS offices, federal court buildings, military/VA facilities and/or correctional facilities, Amtrak trains and facilities, and Corps of Engineers-controlled property (carry in these places is prohibited by Federal law and preempts any existing State law). Carry on land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management (federal parks and wildlife preserves) is allowed by Federal law as of the 2009 CARD Act, but is still subject to state law. However, carry into restrooms or any other buildings or structures located within federal parks is illegal in the United States, despite concealed carry being otherwise legal in federal parks with a permit recognized by the state in which the federal park is located. Similarly, concealed carry into caves located within federal parks is illegal.
, including post offices, IRS offices, federal court buildings, military/VA facilities and/or correctional facilities, Amtrak trains and facilities, and Corps of Engineers-controlled property (carry in these places is prohibited by Federal law and preempts any existing State law). Carry on land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management (federal parks and wildlife preserves) is allowed by Federal law as of the 2009 CARD Act, but is still subject to state law. However, carry into restrooms or any other buildings or structures located within federal parks is illegal in the United States, despite concealed carry being otherwise legal in federal parks with a permit recognized by the state in which the federal park is located. Similarly, concealed carry into caves located within federal parks is illegal. State and local government facilities, including courthouses, DMV/DoT offices, police stations, correctional facilities, and/or meeting places of government entities (exceptions may be made for certain persons working in these facilities such as judges, lawyers, and certain government officials both elected and appointed)
, including courthouses, DMV/DoT offices, police stations, correctional facilities, and/or meeting places of government entities (exceptions may be made for certain persons working in these facilities such as judges, lawyers, and certain government officials both elected and appointed) Venues for political events, including rallies, parades, debates, and/or polling places
, including rallies, parades, debates, and/or polling places Educational institutions including elementary/secondary schools and colleges. Some states have "drop-off exceptions" which only prohibit carry inside school buildings, or permit carry while inside a personal vehicle on school property. Campus carry laws vary by state.
including elementary/secondary schools and colleges. Some states have "drop-off exceptions" which only prohibit carry inside school buildings, or permit carry while inside a personal vehicle on school property. Campus carry laws vary by state. Public interscholastic [ citation needed ] and/or professional sporting events and/or venues (sometimes only during a time window surrounding such an event)
and/or venues (sometimes only during a time window surrounding such an event) Amusement parks, fairs, parades and/or carnivals [ citation needed ]
Businesses that sell alcohol (sometimes only "by-the-drink" sellers like restaurants, sometimes only establishments defined as a "bar" or "nightclub", or establishments where the percentage of total sales from alcoholic beverages exceeds a specified threshold)
(sometimes only "by-the-drink" sellers like restaurants, sometimes only establishments defined as a "bar" or "nightclub", or establishments where the percentage of total sales from alcoholic beverages exceeds a specified threshold) Hospitals (even if hospitals themselves are not restricted, "teaching hospitals" partnered with a medical school are sometimes considered "educational institutions"; exceptions are sometimes made for medical professionals working in these facilities)
(even if hospitals themselves are not restricted, "teaching hospitals" partnered with a medical school are sometimes considered "educational institutions"; exceptions are sometimes made for medical professionals working in these facilities) Churches, mosques and other "Houses of worship," usually at the discretion of the church clergy (Ohio allows with specific permission of house of worship) [87]
, mosques and other "Houses of worship," usually at the discretion of the church clergy (Ohio allows with specific permission of house of worship) Municipal mass transit vehicles or facilities
Sterile areas of airports (sections of the airport located beyond security screening checkpoints, unless explicitly authorized)
(sections of the airport located beyond security screening checkpoints, unless explicitly authorized) Non-government facilities with heightened security measures (Nuclear facilities, power plants, dams, oil and gas production facilities, banks, factories, unless explicitly authorized)
(Nuclear facilities, power plants, dams, oil and gas production facilities, banks, factories, unless explicitly authorized) Aboard aircraft or ships unless specifically authorized by the pilot in command or ship captain
unless specifically authorized by the pilot in command or ship captain Private property where the lawful owner or lessee has posted a sign or verbally stated that firearms are not permitted
where the lawful owner or lessee has posted a sign or verbally stated that firearms are not permitted Any public place, while under the influence of alcohol or drugs (including certain prescription or over-the-counter medications, depending on jurisdiction)
"Opt-out" statutes ("gun-free zones") [ edit ]
Some states allow private businesses to post a specific sign prohibiting concealed carry within their premises. The exact language and format of such a sign varies by state. By posting the signs, businesses create areas where it is illegal to carry a concealed handgun; similar to regulations concerning schools, hospitals, and public gatherings.
Violation of such a sign, in some of these states, is grounds for revocation of the offender's concealed carry permit and criminal prosecution. Other states, such as Virginia, enforce only trespassing laws when a person violates a "Gun Free Zone" sign. In some jurisdictions trespass by a person carrying a firearm may have more severe penalties than "simple" trespass, while in other jurisdictions, penalties are lower than for trespass.[88]
Such states include: Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska,[89] Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
There is considerable dispute over the effectiveness of such "gun-free zones". Opponents of such measures, such as OpenCarry.org, state that, much like other malum prohibitum laws banning gun-related practices, only law-abiding individuals will heed the signage and disarm. Individuals or groups intent on committing far more serious crimes, such as armed robbery or murder, will not be deterred by signage prohibiting weapons. Further, the reasoning follows that those wishing to commit mass murder might intentionally choose gun-free venues like shopping malls, schools and churches (where weapons carry is generally prohibited by statute or signage) because the population inside is disarmed and thus less able to stop them.[90][91]
In some states, business owners have been documented posting signs that appear to prohibit guns, but legally do not because the signs do not meet local or state laws defining required appearance, placement, or wording of signage. Such signage can be posted out of ignorance to the law, or intent to pacify gun control advocates while not actually prohibiting the practice. The force of law behind a non-compliant sign varies based on state statutes and case law. Some states interpret their statutes' high level of specification of signage as evidence that the signage must meet the specification exactly, and any quantifiable deviation from the statute makes the sign non-binding. Other states have decided in case law that if efforts were made in good faith to conform to the statutes, the sign carries the force of law even if it fails to meet current specification. Still others have such lax descriptions of what is a valid sign that virtually any sign that can be interpreted as "no guns allowed" is binding on the license holder.[citation needed]
Note that virtually all jurisdictions allow some form of oral communication by the lawful owner or controller of the property that a person is not welcome and should leave. This notice can be given to anyone for any reason (except for statuses that are protected by the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other CRAs, such as race),[citation needed] including due to the carrying of firearms by that person, and refusal to heed such a request to leave may constitute trespassing.
Brandishing and printing [ edit ]
Printing refers to a circumstance where the shape or outline of a firearm is visible through a garment while the gun is still fully covered, and is generally not desired when carrying a concealed weapon. Brandishing can refer to different actions depending on jurisdiction. These actions can include printing through a garment, pulling back clothing to expose a gun, or unholstering a gun and exhibiting it in the hand. The intent to intimidate or threaten someone may or may not be required legally for it to be considered brandishing.
Brandishing is a crime in most jurisdictions, but the definition of brandishing varies widely.
Under California law, the following conditions have to be present to prove brandishing:
[1] A person, in the presence of another person, drew or exhibited a [deadly weapon, other than a firearm] [firearm, whether loaded or unloaded]; [and] [2] That person did so in a rude, angry, or threatening manner [or] [2] That person, in any manner, unlawfully used the [deadly weapon] [firearm] in a fight or quarrel] [.] [; and [3] The person was not acting in lawful self-defense.][92]
In Virginia law:
It shall be unlawful for any person to point, hold or brandish any firearm or any air or gas operated weapon or any object similar in appearance, whether capable of being fired or not, in such manner as to reasonably induce fear in the mind of another or hold a firearm or any air or gas operated weapon in a public place in such a manner as to reasonably induce fear in the mind of another of being shot or injured. However, this section shall not apply to any person engaged in excusable or justifiable self-defense. Code of Virginia 18.2-282[93]
Federal law [ edit ]
Gun Control Act of 1968 [ edit ]
The Gun Control Act passed by Congress in 1968 lists felons, illegal aliens, and other codified persons as prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms. During the application process for concealed carry states carry out thorough background checks to prevent these individuals from obtaining permits. Additionally the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act created an FBI maintained system in 1994 for instantly checking the backgrounds of potential firearms buyers in an effort to prevent these individuals from obtaining weapons.
Firearm Owners Protection Act [ edit ]
The Firearm Owners Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 allows a gun owner to travel through states in which their firearm possession is illegal as long as it is legal in the states of origination and destination, the owner is in transit and does not remain in the state in which firearm possession is illegal, and the firearm is transported unloaded and in a locked container. The FOPA addresses the issue of transport of private firearms from origin to destination for purposes lawful in state of origin and destination; FOPA does not authorize concealed carry as a weapon of defense during transit. New York State Police arrested those carrying firearms in violation of state law, and then required them to use FOPA as an affirmative defense to the charges of illegal possession.[citation needed]
Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act [ edit ]
In 2004, the United States Congress enacted the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act, 18 U.S. Code 926B and 926C. This federal law allows two classes of persons – the "qualified law enforcement officer" and the "qualified retired law enforcement officer" – to carry a concealed firearm in any jurisdiction in the United States, regardless of any state or local law to the contrary, with certain exceptions.
Federal Gun Free School Zones Act [ edit ]
The Federal Gun Free School Zone Act limits where a person may legally carry a firearm. It does this by making it generally unlawful for an armed citizen to be within 1,000 feet (extending out from the property lines) of a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a K–12 school. Although a state-issued carry permit may exempt a person from this restriction in the state that physically issued their permit, it does not exempt them in other states which recognize their permit under reciprocity agreements made with the issuing state.
The law's failure to provide adequate protection to LEOSA-qualified officers, licensed concealed carry permit holders, and other armed citizens, is an issue that the United States Congress so far has not addressed.[citation needed]
Federal property [ edit ]
Some federal statutes restrict the carrying of firearms on the premises of certain Federal properties such as military installations or land controlled by the USACE.[94]
National park carry [ edit ]
On May 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed H.R. 627, the "Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009," into law. The bill contained a rider introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) that prohibits the Secretary of the Interior from enacting or enforcing any regulations that restrict possession of firearms in National Parks or Wildlife Refuges, as long as the person complies with laws of the state in which the unit is found.[95] This provision was supported by the National Rifle Association and opposed by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, among other organizations.[96][97] As of February 2010 concealed handguns are for the first time legal in all but 3 of the nation's 391 national parks and wildlife refuges so long as all applicable federal, state, and local regulations are adhered to.[98] Hawaii is a notable exception. Concealed and open carry are both illegal in Hawaii for all except retired military or law enforcement personnel. Previously firearms were allowed into parks if cased and unloaded.
Full faith and credit (CCW permits) [ edit ]
Attempts were made in the 110th Congress, United States House of Representatives (H.R. 226) and the United States Senate (S. 388), to enact legislation to compel complete reciprocity for concealed carry licenses. Opponents of national reciprocity have pointed out that this legislation would effectively require states with more restrictive standards of permit issuance (e.g., |
formative years, and find out why I can’t stand the latest 2K wrestling games!
WWF Wrestlemania – Commodore Amiga 600 (1991)
My first taste of being a virtual wrestler and boy was I excited. And boy was I disappointed. Man was this game just awful. A simple ‘career mode’ so to speak which see you fight your way through 5 of the evillest bad guys the WWF had to offer at the time.
The ring was MASSIVE. Like, twice as large as it should have been in relation to the wrestlers! They looked tiny and if they used this ring in today’s WWE shows, you’d be screwed if you had a submission hold put on you in the centre of the canvas. It’d take you half an hour to scramble for the ropes.
It sounds terrible too. If you like to hear wrestlers constantly utter ‘ooh’ as they strike each-other, feel free to get those headphones on and crank the volume to 11. The in-game action is silent other than the afore-mentioned grunts, and the audience who only pipe up when a move is carried out.
It’s not all doom and gloom mind you. The wrestlers themselves looked fantastic, with all the right details thrown in for you to recognise who was who. Everything looks great in-game, except for that bloody ring size.
The game was very well received back when it was released in 1991. I hated it, and it left a sour taste in my mouth. I hated the idea that I would never play a wrestling game I could love. Then I played Wrestlefest.
WWF Wrestlefest – Arcade (1991)
Now this was everything that Wrestlemania wasn’t. It was an arcade game so automatically it looked better, sounded better, and felt a better experience all-round. It also featured a mode not seen before with its Royal Rumble feature. Featuring 6 wrestlers in the ring, it felt like total chaos and with the ability to have 4 players at any one time, it was a great experience for friends to enjoy together. It introduced new wrestlers when previous ones had been eliminated, it truly felt innovative at the time.
Graphically, the game featured amazing visuals, and these wouldn’t be touched until the 16-bit Royal Rumble / Raw games came along. Some would even argue they looked better than these later titles. It was a little limited in it’s controls, but seeing as it was an arcade game, this can slide. It was meant to be fast-paced so as the kids could keep pumping their coins into it when they struggled to beat the Legion of Doom (and they would).
Voice-over work left a lot be desired mind you. The Legion of Doom sounded like they’d been sucking helium after being kicked in the junk. But this was a minor hiccup in a game that the majority would argue was one of the first really wrestle games. While I didn’t play it a lot as a child (arcades were becoming hard to come by in the early 90s), the few times I did stood out to me massively.
Saturday Night Slam Masters – Arcade, Mega Drive, SNES, FM Towns (1993)
I played this one when my dad rented it for me. He saw a wrestling game, and thought I’d like it. I loved it. It felt a little like Wrestlefest but there was something definitely different going on here. It was effectively a beat-em-up a la Streetfighter, but in a ring. And you could only perform wrestling moves. And Final Fight’s Mike Haggar was a playable character!!!
The game looked gorgeous, with very vibrant and unique characters. Audio featured the usual tinny effects you could expect in the early 90s, but it made the game come across just like an arcade beat-em-up, and people who may usually scoff at wrestling in general could very well be tempted to try this bad boy out.
The console port wasn’t so fast-paced as the arcade version, so it never felt too manic and there was a good variety in the characters, the move styles on offer and if there can be one main complaint about the game, it’s simply that there are only two modes to be found; 1 vs 1, and you guessed it, 2 vs 2. Play it on the SNES and you could have 4 players in the battle which was a nice touch.
If you’ve never played this before, let alone heard of it, you have to give it a try. It’s an absolute blast and is one of the most-under-rated wrestlers of all time.
WWF Royal Rumble / RAW – Mega Drive / SNES / Game Gear / 32X / Game Boy (1993, 1994)
As a child, I LOVED THESE games. I’ve bundled them together as they’re near identical games, with a simple roster update and a couple of changes in game modes. It felt very similar to Wrestlefest in how it played, though it was a lot less fast thankfully. The games also looked almost as good as Wrestlefest, though in different ways. They were more realistic, featured a moving crowd, and the commentary team were even featured ring-side. There were some nice details here.
The games featured the best audio I’d ever heard in a wrestler before, with constant audience background noise and the best wrestling themes we’d ever heard in-game. They had actual authentic tracks playing which lent so much to furthering the feeling of actually performing in a RAW TV show. All the genuine special moves were here and recognisable and we even got the chance to knock the referee out, leading to opportunities to strangle and eye rake your opponent!
It was a dream come true for me and my mates, and we used to royally piss our parents off when we played it at each others houses. As we were so good at the games we could never beat each other, which lead to ridiculously over-long matches and parents who were just itching for some peace and quiet away from our happy screaming selves. They should have been thankful we were in instead of doing our usual games of ‘Knock and Run’.
Mid to late 1990s Games
This was a sour period for me, as I had actually drifted away from watching wrestling. It had just died off for me, and I just missed the beginning of the NWO / Attitude era so wasn’t excited about anything it was offering at the time. There were just no good games to play either. There was the god-awful ‘Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game’, which took our favourite grapplers and stuck them in some bizarro Mortal Kombat style game. The moves were ridiculously OTT, the game was way too fast and worst of all; the wrestlers were digitised, based on their real-life counterparts. It was a shocker.
WWF Warzone and Attitude followed toward the late 90s and my friends absolutely loved these. I freakin’ hated them. I thought they looked crap. The wrestlers looked like they’d poo themselves, and moved awkwardly. I urge you to go Youtube Stone Cold Steve Austin entering the ring to pose for the crowd, he genuinely looks smashed out of his mind. The presentation was good though and you could see the effort that Acclaim had put into the games to make them look as authentic to the real thing as possible. They were also two of the most advanced wrestling titles to this point, introducing Create-a-Wrestler modes, more match types than you could shake a stick at, and of course they were released during what is inarguably the most popular period in WWF/E history.
Bizarrely, it was a game which was released the year before Warzone which caught my attention, and it wasn’t even a WWF release…
WCW / NWO: World Tour – N64 (1997)
I have no idea what compelled me to play this game at the ripe young age of 14. I hated WCW with a passion, and I hadn’t played any wrestling game at length for a good few years at this point. I genuinely don’t know what caught my attention about it, but I somehow found myself buying it with my pocket money, and never looking back. AKI knew how to make a wrestling game.
It was just so in-depth with its awesome grappling system. You felt in total control of everything your wrestler was doing, and you never got bored playing it. There was a multitude of moves available, and even just how long you pressed a button for would affect what kind of move your character would pull off.
You had a wide range of wrestlers, including not only from WCW and NWO, but also a wide range of Japanese characters too. Glacier looked so freakin’ cool and if it wasn’t him I was playing with, it would be the almighty ass-kicking Joe Bruiser who could floor a guy with 2 or 3 punches. Why a boxer was ever featured in this game is another question, but you couldn’t resist the guy’s stopping power.
Sadly, the game looked very iffy, with wrestlers not always looking the best representation of their real-life counter-parts. The models looked very disconnected as well, almost Rayman-like with their floating limbs. Audio was also at its worst with terrible tunes and lacklustre sound effects. Thankfully, the game played like a dream so these hiccups could be forgiven.
This was it. This was THE wrestling game. You couldn’t top it. No way…
WCW / NWO: Revenge – N64 (1998)
And so AKI topped World Tour with this phenomenal sequel. Starting with an incredible Intro with a tune which sounds just like Van Halen’s ‘Hot For Teacher’, the difference in quality between this and its prequel is immediately felt.
Everything is so much better. A more familiar roster including new faces like Mr. Perfect, Chris Jericho, and Bret Hart, they also looked a hell of a lot better with way more detail. Audio was improved, and there was a hell of a lot more to do. A wider array of moves was on offer and the ability to change the attire of the wrestlers was a very welcome feature.
The game played even better than World Tour did as it flowed better and was a little faster. More modes were on offer, managers were now a feature at ring-side, and there were just loads of little neat touches too. Wrestlers would now climb over the top rope, you could slide in and out of the ring, and physical belts were also on offer for the first time.
If World Tour was Chris Jericho’s 1999 WWF debut, Revenge was the beginning of the rise of Stone Cold Steve Austin in 1997.
WWF Wrestlemania 2000 – N64 / Game Boy Colour (1999)
Whilst playing World Tour and Revenge, my friends and I would always pre-suppose the idea of AKI making WWF games. We never imagined it could ever happen, but then in 1999, our dreams came true when AKI released WWF: Wrestlemania 2000. Suddenly we were able to play with the wrestlers who we were most enamoured with! The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Undertaker, all looking just like they should and with the right move-sets.
Although the game felt at times like a re-skin of Revenge, it was still welcomed with open arms. And boy did it have some awesome new features. Cage Matches and First Blood matches were introduced, as well as a limited story mode. You could create your own PPVs and even make your own belts. The biggest feature however, was the Create-A-Wrestler mode.
This was a HUGE attraction for fans who wanted non-WWF wrestlers in the game. If you wanted Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, hell, even Marty Jannetty (someone would!), the options were there to allow you to do so. Choose your moves, the attire, height, weight, stance, entrance music, almost everything you could think of. The amount of customisation was ridiculous.
I remember making my own wrestler, ‘Ogre’, and getting involved with an online wrestling e-fed. I’d be writing all of my own promos, as well as helping to simulate matches for the fed. These were great times in my gaming life and I truly felt a part of something thanks to WM2000. I also remember listening to Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Surfacing’ album a sh*t-load at this time. Imagine HHH coming out to ‘Angel’.
So Wrestlemania 2000, an excellent wrestling game no doubt, but come on, we all know what’s coming next…
WWF No Mercy – N64 (2000)
Mick Foley falling off the Cell. The Montreal Screw-Job. Kurt Angle in a miniature cowboy hat. Combine all of these epic moments together and you MAY just come close to how good WWF No Mercy is. AKI simply nailed it with this release and while it has its flaws, it’s as damn near close to a perfect wrestling game as you’re ever gonna get.
Create-a-wrestler was expanded upon with more moves and better clothing options, and you could even create female wrestlers. A ‘Smackdown Mall’ accompanied this, which effectively featured locked items you could only unlock / buy with money you earned in the game through the story and survival modes. More match types were introduced including ladder matches, iron-man matches and even a mode where you could participate as the referee! If you wanted to screw Chris Jericho out of a victory by slow counting, you could be the bastard in the relationship!
We could smash wrestlers through tables, with stars and legends such as Andre the Giant and Shawn Michaels. You could also fight backstage, making hardcore matches truly live up to their name. Belts could be defended in exhibition mode, and we got to see a wider variety of props and weapons to use whilst laying-eth the Smack-eth Down-eth.
Story Mode was an awesome added feature, though it came with its own issues. It felt like it was unfinished. The writing is always ‘off’, and the storylines that branch out before you can seem really odd. As Big Show was removed from the game right before its release, he was also removed from his starring role in a large part of the story mode’s plot. Which superstar could replace this behemoth??
…Stevie bloody Richards.
Now I like the guy, but when he’s rammed down your throat as the no.1 contender in the WWF Heavyweight Belt plot, it stands out like a huge sore thumb. He was never a main eventer, and surely WWF and AKI could have come up with a better alternative? Otherwise, the mode was fun to play, and the story would often change dependant on match outcomes. You’d also win the afore-mentioned money for the Smackdown Mall here.
The game is just absolute heaven for any wrestling fan and nearly 20 years later, I am still playing it on occasion. Still updating my roster with the latest superstars. STILL KICKING RICHARDS ASS BECAUSE HE’S NO BIG SHOW. It’s one of the greatest sports games of all-time, easily up there with NHL 94’ and Sensible World of Soccer 96/97. As a wrestling game, nothing has come close to touching its quality, not even the highly regarded WWF Smackdown! 2: Know Your Role. Which leads me to…
Late 90s / Early 00s Games
I HATE the Smackdown series with a passion. Why, oh why, did my school mates like this crap? Wrestlers seemed to be rolling around in the ring all the time to dodge moves, and bigger wrestlers like Rikishi would be doing athletic moves way beyond his ability. If you tried to slam a heavy guy in No Mercy, your wrestler might not manage it because of the weight difference. Not so in the Smackdown games.
There were so many things wrong with this series. Animation sucked, as did the AI performance. Yet, with the lack of competition out there, it continued to be the biggest selling wrestling game on a yearly basis. The highest rated wrestling game on Metacritic is currently Smackdown 2: Know Your Role, currently sat at 90. WWF No Mercy currently occupies 2nd spot with an 89 rating. Insanity I tells ya.
The series would continue past Smackdown to Smackdown vs Raw which I avoided like the plague, and then onto the 2K series which is what we have to put up with today. I recently played WWE ’16 as I got it for free through Xbox Games with Gold. I deleted it very quickly when some bizarre control stick feature came up when I was trying to administer a submission hold. It was just way too convoluted.
Life wasn’t all bad at this time though. The Fire Pro Wrestling series had been making waves in an almost cult underground fashion, and the true cool kids were playing this game. The series really began to take off in the early 90s but sadly the yearly releases were only hitting Japan. So you were only playing this through importing or through roughly translated roms over the internet. It wasn’t until 2001 that North America and Europe finally got its hands on a Fire Pro title.
In my eyes, and I reckon the majority would agree, the best Fire Pro was the PS2 classic Fire Pro Wrestling Returns. With a ridiculous roster of over 300 wrestlers, and the most in-depth Create-a-Wrestler mode you’re ever likely to see, the possibilities were endless with this one. Barbed wire matches, MMA octagon matches, lumberjack, Survivor Series matches, and countless others.
It’s a difficult game to get into and takes a fair amount of effort to truly get the most out of it, but stick with it and you’ll be blessed with a fantastic experience.
Finally… one of the lesser known wrestling games out there, but also one of the all-time greats. I give you…
Extreme Warfare Revenge – PC (2002)
If you love your football games, you know what Championship and Football Manager games are. Released in 2002 Extreme Warfare Revenge is essentially the wrestling version of these. You’re the guy running the promotion, responsible for 99% of the decisions, and it’s down to you to make the promotion succeed or go bust. You can start from the top with the WWE if you like, having access to the most money and the best roster of wrestlers. OR, you could start from the bottom of the ladder, and begin with your own backyard wrestling promotion, with wrestlers who will work for free.
Match types are plentiful, with ladder matches, bra and panties, Royal Rumbles, submission, no DQ, first blood, and many more. What makes this one stand out is that you truly are responsible for your wrestlers futures. YOU decide who’s getting pushed and who’s going to jobber status. YOU decide who’s getting the belts. YOU decide the commentary team, the PPV names, who your next acquisition is, if your going to send a wrestler to rehab to battle his ‘demons’. It’s all down to you and you can easily get lost in this forever.
Wrestlers retire, making way for young generic wrestlers to come up through the ranks. Relationships are built between stars, whether it’s through love or through hate. Fire one wrestler and his friends and relatives can cause backstage havoc as a result. You can see who’s bring in the most money through merchandise sales and browse the in-game internet to scope out the latest news and rumours.
Ultimately, success will depend on your TV and PPV ratings. Pit wrestlers with great chemistry against eachother and they’ll give you the absolute best matches on the card. They’ll get over naturally, and you’ll find yourself forced to push them into new angles as it’s what the fans desire. The same works in reverse however; choose the wrong opponents and they can give you a stinker, which can see even the top stars slowly have the fans turn against them.
I’ll never get bored of this game and as it’s free, anyone can download it. You can download roster updates too so if you want to play with the current day WWE roster, you can do. Want to play with an early 90s roster? Go for it. What to make your OWN entire promotion from scratch at the level of WWE so you can go straight into battle against them? Go for it. You’d be an absolute idiot to not give this game a chance if you’re any kind of a wrestling game fan.
Sadly, the developer decided to go down the money route, and began to release the Total Extreme Wrestling series which, without being able to use any real-life properties due to no licence, just stunk the place up. Sure the options were all there and a huge amount of freedom was afforded to you as the promoter, but it’s never been the same since Extreme Warfare Revenge.
In Conclusion…
So, that concludes my wrestling game history. I haven’t fallen for any wrestling game since EWR, so we’re talking 15 years that nothing has taken my fancy. It’s a shame that we’ve lost the best developers, and are hamstrung with the same crap on a yearly basis being released by Yukes and THQ. Where is the Revenge and No Mercy engine today? I guess AKI have it locked up somewhere, possibly never to be used again. Fans are always wishing for a new game using the engine but, I guess we’ll have to make do with the modding community who’ve done some absolutely fantastic things with the engine and truly made it their own.
I hope you enjoyed my little walk down memory lane, looking at the games that I loved whilst growing up, and talking about the games I hated! Yeah, I know I didn’t discuss ECW, TNA, the Gamecube WWE games, but as I said at the start of the article, I simply didn’t play everything. I’ve heard good things about the Yukes Gamecube games, but then you hear the same things about the Smackdown and 2K games so… I don’t know. I know I wouldn’t have liked those ECW games on the Dreamcast and such, looked too much like Attitude for my liking.
There’s a game out there for everyone. I’ve heard some say the AKI games were over-rated, whilst I love them and despise anything post 2000. Some hold Wrestlefest as the best and anything since was simply downhill. Love em’ or hate them, we all share one thing in common; we love wrestling, and everything it embodies.
Oh, we share two things in common actually, we all freakin’ hate babyface Roman Reigns and John Cena. TURN THE BEGGARS VINCE!!!
Fan of Retro Gaming? Then visit FunstockRetro.co.uk – The #1 for Retro Gaming in the UK and Europe!etcd 2.0 Release - First Major Stable Release
• By Brandon Philips
Today etcd hit v2.0.0, our first major stable release. Since the release-candidate, in mid-December, the team has been hard at work stabilizing the release. You can find the new binaries on GitHub.
For a quick overview, etcd is an open source, distributed, consistent key-value store for shared configuration, service discovery, and scheduler coordination. By using etcd, applications can ensure that even in the face of individual servers failing, the application will continue to work. etcd is a core component of CoreOS software that facilitates safe automatic updates, coordinating work being scheduled to hosts, and setting up overlay networking for containers.
The etcd team has been hard at work to improve the ease-of-use and stability of the project. Some of the highlights compared to the last official release, etcd 0.4.6, include
Internal etcd protocol improvements to guard against accidental misconfiguration
etcdctl backup was added to make recovering from cluster failure easier
was added to make recovering from cluster failure easier etcdctl member list/add/remove commands for easily managing a cluster
commands for easily managing a cluster On-disk datastore safety improvements with CRC checksums and append-only behavior
An improved Raft consensus implementation already used in other projects like CockroachDB
More rigorous and faster running tests of the underlying Raft implementation, covering all state machine and cases explained in the original Raft white paper in 1.5 seconds
Additional administrator focused documentation explaining common scenarios
Official IANA assigned ports for etcd TCP 2379/2380
The major goal has been to make etcd more usable and stable with all of these changes. Over the hundreds of pull requests merged to make this release, many other improvements and bug fixes have been made. Thank you to the 150 contributors who have helped etcd get where it is today and provided those bug fixes, pull requests and more.
Who uses etcd?
Many projects use etcd - Google’s Kubernetes, Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, Mailgun and now Apache Mesos and Mesosphere DCOS too. In addition to these projects, there are more than 500 projects on GitHub, using etcd. The feedback from these application developers continues to be an important part of the development cycle; thank you for being involved.
Direct quotes from people using etcd:
"We evaluated a number of persistent stores, yet etcd’s HTTP API and strong Go client support was the best fit for Cloud Foundry," said Onsi Fakhouri, engineering manager at Pivotal. "Anyone currently running a recent version of Cloud Foundry is running etcd. We are big fans of etcd and are excited to see the rapid progress behind the key-value store."
"etcd is an important part of configuration management and service discovery in our infrastructure," said Sasha Klizhentas, lead engineer at Mailgun. "Our services use etcd for dynamic load-balancing, leader election and canary deployment patterns. etcd’s simple HTTP API helps make our infrastructure reliable and distributed."
"Shared configuration and shared state are two very tricky domains for distributed systems developers as services no longer run on one machine but are coordinated across an entire datacenter," said Benjamin Hindman, chief architect at Mesosphere and chair of Apache Mesos. "Apache Mesos and Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) will soon have a standard plugin to support etcd. Users and customers have asked for etcd support, and we’re delivering it as an option."
Get Involved and Get Started
After nearly two years of diligent work, we are eager to hear your continued feedback on etcd. We will continue to work to make etcd a fundamental building block for Google-like infrastructure that users can take off the shelf, build upon and rely on.
Brandon Philips speaking about etcd 2.0
CoreOS CTO Brandon Philips speaking about etcd 2.0 at the CoreOS San Francsico meet up:Some later took to Twitter to point out
Amy Schumer has been accused of stealing a joke from the late comedian Patrice O'Neal, it has been reported.
The 34-year-old used a short routine about sex positions at the end of a sold-out show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York City.
But after the performance was broadcast on HBO on Saturday night, Twitter users pointed out the similarities with a joke used by O'Neal in his 2007 Nasty Show.
Amy Schumer (left) has been accused of stealing a joke from the late comedian Patrice O'Neal (right)
Responding to a review by Decider contributor Sean L. McCarthy, who referenced O'Neal, Schumer tweeted: 'Thanks man. I have never seen that Patrice bit but I will watch today. I love and miss him'
Schumer used a short routine about sex positions at the end of a sold-out show at the Apollo Theater (pictured)
O'Neal, who died in November 2011 at the age of 41 after suffering a stroke, described unsavoury sex acts as part of his live performances.
Schumer was accused of describing similar X-rated positions, but gave them different names - the 'Abraham Lincoln', and the 'Houdini'.
The Trainwreck actress has not officially responded to the claims, but retweeted comedian Jim Norton who addressed the 'idiotic accusations' in a Facebook post.
Responding to a review by Decider contributor Sean L. McCarthy, who referenced O'Neal, Schumer tweeted: 'Thanks man. I have never seen that Patrice bit but I will watch today. I love and miss him.'
One Twitter user called Zencik tweeted Schumer to say: 'So it's just a total coincidence you told both jokes in the exact same order?'
However, Jim Norton jumped to her defense, writing in his Facebook post: 'I think these fans are acting in what they feel is Patrice's defense because they love him, and I can appreciate them feeling protective about anything involving him.
Schumer (pictured during her Live at the Apollo show, which was broadcast on Saturday) was accused of describing similar X-rated positions but gave them different names - the 'Abraham Lincoln', and the 'Houdini'
The actress and writer has yet to respond to the claims, but retweeted comedian Jim Norton who addressed the 'idiotic accusations' in a Facebook post
Some Twitter users pointed out the similarities between the jokes used by Schumer and O'Neal
'But they don't love Patrice more than I do, and I am telling you, without reservation, that she did not steal those jokes from him.
'Even comedic geniuses like Patrice would do silly things sometimes onstage. Those terms have been in the Urban Dictionary for years, Patrice did not come up with them (I'm not saying he didn't change any of them to make them original, but they have been around for as long as I can remember).
'To think that Amy would watch Patrice do something onstage and then decide to close with it on her HBO special is simply ludicrous.'
Norton went on to say that O'Neal had 'a lot of respect for Amy' adding that the first time he had heard her name was when the comedian 'was talking about how funny she was'.
'There are very few things more repulsive to a comic than joke thief. Which is why accusations of joke stealing should be made with caution, because it's such an ugly thing to accuse a comedian of.It’s official. Getting my open water diving certificate has been the best decision I made on this travels. It started with a panic attack and not willing to get out of the boat and ended with me not wanting to leave Labuan Bajo, so I could do never-ending diving with mantas, turtles and sharks. And this is how it all started.
We arrived in Labuan Bajo (one of the main port entries in Flores and a hub for diving and Komodo tours) with a group of travellers we met on the ferry. We all ended up staying in a lovely guesthouse, Chez Felix that had some beautiful views overlooking the bay. Each night we treated ourselves to some amazing dinners, including delicious pizzas, pastas and fresh fish. Apart from eating we had few other things on our agenda too. The initial plan was to do some snorkeling, visit Komodo island, where we could come face to face with the world’s biggest lizard, the Komodo Dragon and move inland to discover the island and find out what Flores has got to offer. But as usual the plan changed.
The day after we arrived, together with Chris we strolled down the main street of Bajo and walked in to Komodo Diving Centre wanting to find out about their diving and snorkeling options. We were given information about the prices, boat and Komodo’s strong currents (at certain dive sites) and then the question was thrown.
So, how many divers?
Me and Tim exchanged looks, only because we briefly spoke about me learing how to dive and as we were discussing what to do, someone had said ‘if you want to learn how to dive, you may as well do it at one of the world’s bests diving sites’
2 divers and 1 snorkeler was the answer.
We spent the rest of the day doing nothing (as there is not much to do in Bajo) and the main activities involved around food and DIY banana coffee shakes. (I love my backpacking life!) The following day our alarms went off at 6am (see everyone, sometimes we need to get up as early as you do). We were ready to hit the sea!
Now, thinking back I picture myself standing on the edge of the boat, with the unfamiliar feeling of carrying a heaving tank and wearing clumsy fins. I look down at my diving instructor Ria who’s already in the water and I think to myself: I’m insane. I can’t do it. The more I think, the more freaked out I get. How do I just step into the water with one hand holding my mask and the other hand on the weigh belt? Will I remember to breath? Will I not sink?
Don’t think about it! Just do it.
This was the motto of my open water course. I may have doubt myself when I was on the surface but once in the water I absolutely loved every single minute of it. I may have struggled with clearing my mask and I may have forgot to equalise (mistake that resulted in terrible earache) on the first two dives but above all I felt really comfortable under the sea. What also kept me going was overhearing other divers talking about these dream-like, magical diving sites they had never ever seen before. It made me feel jealous. I wanted to dive there too.
I was lucky enough to have Ria on each of my dives during my course to myself. She figured me out straight away, ignored begging looks on my face along with ‘go up’ signs and did not let me out of the water until I got the things right. The less thinking I did the more I enjoyed doing the skills and passing the practical part of the course was a real fun. The theory gave me a bit off a belly ache but with 94% final result it wasn’t too bad!
I have never done diving before, so there is no way I can compare diving sites in Komodo to any other sites. Snorkeling in Similans was great due to fantastic visibility, but with all coral being dead the magic was missing. With Komodo one thing was for sure, each person I spoke to said I shoot myself in a foot by starting my diving in these reefs, simply because I may struggle to find anything better! Soft and hard colorful corals, thousands of brilliant reef fish, majestic turtles, giant mantas, sharks and blue ring octopus, it all stolen my heart and made me want to embark on my new diving journey! And if I was ever to recommend a diving school, team from Komodo Diving Center was just fab!
P.S I completely forgot about the main reason for visiting Flores, the Komodo Dragons. We did indeed went to see the world’s largest lizards but if I was to give it a miss I would not had been disappointed. Our trip to Rinca, an island inhabited by Komodo Dragons, was plotted into one of the days on the boat. A guide from the national park took us for a short walk around the island in search for wild lizards, but unfortunately all we saw was three rather ‘domesticated’ dragons resting around the ranger huts. I’m not saying I hoped to see a komodo dragon dining on a deer but a bit more action would had made things a bit more interesting!
by KingaArchived News » Playtest 20140525
Posted by Paul Chote at 2014-05-26 00:00 +1200
We have just released playtest-20140525, which is the first release candidate for our upcoming June release.
The focus of this playtest has been improving our low-level engine code, but there have been a few nice player-facing improvements, too:
Fixed the shellmap issues that were present in the previous playtest.
Added a “Battlefield News” indicator, so we can keep you up to date on with the latest community news.
Further improvements to the lobby and replay interfaces.
Significant reductions in load time.
More balance improvements!
More bug fixes!
The full list of changes compared with holiday release is available on our wiki.
This announcement is briefer than usual: as the final release only a couple of weeks away, we have decided to save the usual set of screenshots and details for the proper release announcement.Apple goes to great lengths to keep its iOS platform secure, but a presentation at the upcoming Black Hat hacker conference will point to the unassuming charging port as its greatest vulnerability. The team of security researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology succeeded in building a proof-of-concept charger that can hack any iOS device in about a minute even if it is running the newest software version.
When they take the stage, the team will explain how the way iOS handles USB connections makes it vulnerable to exploitation. Using the custom prototype charger, the researchers managed to push arbitrary code onto iOS devices in mere seconds. This essentially means plugging an iPhone into a rigged charger could jailbreak it, or even infect the device with malware, thus bypassing all Apple’s security measures.
The proof-of-concept charger has been dubbed “Mactans”, and is based on a BeagleBoard mini-computer. The BeagleBoard is a low-power open source hardware platform from Texas Instruments. It’s runs on an ARM Cortex-A8 and come as tiny 3-inch square board. It’s a bit too large to fit inside Apple’s stock plugs, but there’s no reason the system couldn’t be miniaturized, or just mounted behind a USB wall plug. When not limited by time, this could be forged into a very sneaky and effective hack.
The BeagleBoard was chosen because it is simple to work with, and is very inexpensive — just $35-40 online. This makes the hack — even in its embryonic state — seem much more plausible. There are plenty of vulnerabilities detailed at these conferences that sound terrible, but require so much expensive equipment as to be unfeasible.
The Georgia Institute researchers will be on stage in July to offer up details of the vulnerability. At the same time, they will explain how users can protect themselves, and how Apple might make this and similar attacks more difficult to pull off.A University of Utah study of two African tribes found evidence that men evolved better navigation ability than women because men with better spatial skills -- the ability to mentally manipulate objects -- can roam farther and have children with more mates.
By testing and interviewing dozens of members of the Twe and Tjimba tribes in northwest Namibia, the anthropologists showed that men who did better on a spatial task not only traveled farther than other men but also had children with more women, according to the study published this week in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
"It's the first time anybody has tried to draw a line between spatial ability, navigation, range size and reproductive success. Most of this chain has been assumed in the scientific literature," says Layne Vashro, the study's first author and a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology.
Anthropology professor Elizabeth Cashdan, the study's senior author, says, "Some of the links have been demonstrated, but this study looks at the whole chain and that's what is novel about it."
"Among the most consistent sex differences found in the psychological literature are spatial ability and navigation ability, with men better at both," Vashro says. "In the anthropological literature, one of the most consistent behavioral differences between men and |
function(err) { if (err) { console.error(err); return next( new errors.InvalidContentError(err.errors.name.message), ); } res.send(204); next(); }); }); };
Start the Server
In order for our server to run, we’ll need to make sure that MongoDB is up and running locally (you can bypass this step if you decided to go with a DBaaS).
In a new terminal window, simply run the following command to start the process:
$ mongod
Now that MongoDB is started, we can run the following command from the main directory to start the server:
$ node index.js
Note: If you’re rapidly coding an API, Nodemon is a great to have in your toolbox. It will monitor your project directory and restart your API whenever a file change is detected. To install it, simply run npm install -g nodemon to install Nodemon globally. You can then start the API by typing nodemon. in the main directory.
7. Familiarizing Ourselves with Postman
Okay, we’ve taken the time to setup the necessary base infrastructure, setup the database, create our models and routes, etc. Let’s better understand how to use the API.
My tool of choice for testing REST APIs is Postman, a free application which can be downloaded here. Postman hits the sweet spot between functionality and usability by providing all of the HTTP functionality needed to interact with, and test an API. Best of all it’s intuitive user interface.
Once installed, load up Postman from a new tab you can set the URL to http://localhost:3000. Since we’re developing a JSON API (it’s the modern thing to do), let’s go ahead and set the Content-Type header to application/json (under the Headers section of the dashboard).
With that in place, you can now hit the endpoints that you created! For example, we can send a POST to the /todos endpoint with the following payload to create a new todo item (notice that the response will be a 201 status code):
{ "task": "Eat Jelly Beans", "status": "in progress" }
We can then query the API via the /todos endpoint and get back the created object:
[ { "_id": "59a0867835f56c7a9476ce92", "createdAt": "2017-08-25T20:20:08.864Z", "updatedAt": "2017-08-25T20:20:08.864Z", "task": "Eat Jelly Beans", "__v": 0, "status": "in progress" } ]
To update the status to “complete”, simply send a PUT to the /todos/:todo_id endpoint (in our case /todos/59a0867835f56c7a9476ce92):
And finally, if you’d like to delete the object, you can hit the /todos/:todo_id endpoint with a DELETE request:
8. Querying the API via Mongoose String Query
Remember that awesome Mongoose plugin that we installed called mongoose-string-query? While we won’t be covering the queries here, a full rundown on the query options can be found on the GitHub repo. You can do everything from adding intense filters, to ordering in ascending order or descending order, to latitude and longitude lookups (should your todo list expand in functionality).
9. Wrapping Up
You now have five functional API endpoints to power a Todo List in which you can run full CRUD operations.
Building a basic REST API is an incredibly valuable step towards becoming an accomplished developer. Well done!!!
In some ways, we’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot more to building full-scale applications. That said, rest assured you are well on your way to adding all the new API functionality you can imagine, simply by following the concepts and patterns you’ve learned in this tutorial.
Next steps
One important aspect of API development that we didn’t cover is building out a test framework.
Writing tests is entirely up to you. However, they are highly recommended and are totally worth it from a time perspective (trust me, tests have saved me from frustration and production-level bugs many times).
For production applications, you’ll want to pick a great test framework/library like Mocha or Chai. To get started, and for early stages of development, a pragmatic approach can be to create repeatable tests with Postman, via the Jetpacks extension.
If you’re looking for a good read on MongoDB vs. Stream, check out this breakdown: https://getstream.io/activity-feeds/mongodb/
Also published on Medium.A friend recently proposed a bit of a puzzle: How many times does the time signature change in the Rush song Limelight? I hadn’t ever really tried to figure it out before so I thought I’d give it a shot, and rather than just erasing my work, I thought I’d go ahead and post it here in case anyone else is interested.
I’ve chosen to use additive time signatures, which may look a bit odd at first. When you see something like “4+3/4” it means that there are seven beats in the measure (4+3), but that the beats are arranged in a group of four then three (as opposed to three then four, or two then three then two, etc.) You can just as easily write this as 7/4, or as alternating measures of 4/4 and 3/4.
It’s also important to note that music can be written down in any number of ways. For example, in the verses I heard two measures or 3/4 followed by two measures of 4+2/4 (or 6/4). This could have been written as six measures of 3/4, but it would have been more awkward to count and syncopated. The music felt like it should be broken down like I have done it here.
Also, interestingly, at the end of the bridge and the start of the last chorus, the drums are playing in 4/4 while the rest of the band is playing in 3/4.
If you want to follow along, you can listen here:
Intro:
6 measures 4/4
4 measures 4+3/4
Verse:
2 measures 3/4
2 measures 4+2/4
2 measures 3/4
1 measure 4/4
1 measure 4+3/4
Fill 1:
1 measure 4+3/4
Repeat: Verse
Chorus:
7 measures 3/4
8 measures 4/4
Fill 2:
3 measures 3/4
2 measures 4+3/4
Repeat: Verse, Fill 1, Verse, Chorus
Fill 3:
2 measures 4/4
Bridge:
30 measures 3/4
Repeat: Chorus, Fill 3
Ending:Image copyright PA Image caption Paul Gascoigne has "complex issues"
Former England footballer Paul Gascoigne has been admitted to a treatment centre in the US.
The 45-year-old has willingly gone to an unnamed centre, his management company confirmed.
The former Newcastle United, Tottenham Hotspur and Lazio player has battled with alcoholism since giving up football.
A recent appearance at a charity event, when he broke down sobbing on stage, sparked widespread concern.
In a statement, GamePlan Solutions said that Paul Gascoigne was an alcoholic with "complex issues", which were being dealt with by professionals.
'Addiction problem'
It added: "Paul has been extremely touched and overwhelmed by the generous offers of help and support over the past few days.
"He is motivated to fully understand and control his addiction problem under guidance."
Gascoigne's drinking problems started during his playing days - he was admitted to the Priory Hospital, near Southampton, in 1998, shortly after his divorce from wife Sheryl.
Three years later, whilst playing at Everton, Gascoigne admitted himself to an alcohol rehabilitation clinic in Arizona on the insistence of his then manager Walter Smith.
In 2008, four years after retiring he was arrested in Newcastle and detained under the Mental Health Act.
He was later sectioned following reports that he was acting strangely in Hemel Hempstead.
More recently he has been treated at The Priory again and at the Providence Projects treatment centre in Bournemouth.View source on Github
By Greg Weber
Yesod 0.8
For a change-log see the beta announcement, although we sneaked in some features since the beta release. The migration guide goes over what you need to change in your application.
Originally Yesod 0.8 was mostly about internal consistency- the main goal was to remove the use of String and instead using Text or ByteString everywhere. But some nice features have managed to get into this release.
With every release of Yesod, we see more new contributors. Thanks to Chris Casinghino: he caught 3 bugs in the beta release (1 of them being a GHC bug). The other two required breaking API changes to fix. Also a big thanks to Rick Richardson- without his help we wouldn't be able to announce perhaps the biggest feature of this release: preliminary support for MongoDB in Persistent! This was a great example of collaboration in Yesod. There was an original implementation written quite some time ago. Rick finally picked it up and pushed it to completion, consulting with us along the way.
Also, thanks to Aur Saraf for the initial SQL join code, and for contributing a lot of good ideas for the final design.
Persistent
MongoDB support
Persistent is a universal, type-safe data store interface for haskell. Persistent was always designed with newer databases (NoSQL) in mind, but only a sqlite and postgresql backend were implemented. The addition of the MongoDB backend forced some under the hood changes, but has validated the extensibility of persistent. And it is a great case of the advantages of Persistent. By default, MongoDB is schema-less, and the haskell driver supports this as it should because some use cases can take advantage of this. However, for most use cases there is a known schema, and you are always a typo away from inserting the wrong key or querying a key that doesn't exist. With Persistent you know at compile time this won't occur. You also get automatic conversion from the driver type to a normal Haskell ADT that you define.
This is an alpha release. Some important features of MongoDB do not have full support yet. In particular, while we support embedded lists, maps, and primitives, embedding another ADT is not yet supported.
If you haven't tried MongoDB yet, it is perhaps the most feature-rich NoSQL database, and a great general purpose web application database for applications that don't need transactions. The main motivation for its use instead of a traditional SQL database are speed and easier scalability. The 1.8 release of MongoDB adds single-server durability, so it is still a great choice for small-scale web applications.
Join modules
Persistent is designed for high scalability- we have always thought about application-level joins first. This release adds both application level joins and SQL joins- take your pick and change it up when the need arises.
Future work
As mentioned above, there is still work to be done to fullly support MongoDB. More types of joins can be added also. Users generally want more database specific features. While we can add these features, it is also important for Persistent to make it easier to drop down and run queries that it cannot generate, but still receive haskell ADTs in response, or to support the addition of raw queries to what it generates. Persistent is a great library for the haskell community, and adding the next data store is always a fun, self-contained project to embark on. One direction we have always been thinking about is having key-value stores support the key-value portion of the Persistent API. I want to stress that while most of Persistent development does occur within the Yesod community, there is nothing specific to Yesod about it. And there is nothing stopping you from using it in a different web framework, or on a project that has nothing to do with web development.
Template languages
Miscellaneous
Attributes are now allowed on script and link tags created by widget functions.
addJuliusBody (Javascript inside the body of the page).
Lucius is now a first-class css templating language
The Hamlet template family originally include Cassius- a way to tersely describe css using whitespace layout.
table tbody width: 100px table tr height: 20px
The advantage of Cassius is a simple syntax that bypasses the need for brackets and semi-colons. We do love cassius for writing new css, but there is a cost to re-formating old css or re-formating cassius to normal css for use elsewhere.
Lucius uses familiar hamlet-style variable insertion, but it is a superset of css. The goal is that you can copy and paste any valid css into a lucius template. This release improves css compatibility and gives lucius the benefit of nesting:
table { tbody { width: 100px; } tr { height: 20px; } }
Hamlet adds conditional classes
Hamlet is really a joy to work with, but we still find things to improve. This release adds conditional classes. The following will conditionally add a class of "current".
<a href=@{MyRouteR} :isCurrentRoute MyRouteR:.current>.
Generalizing the Hamlet family of templates
At its core, the Hamlet family of templates are a new (for haskell at least) style of compile time, type-safe, easy to use templates. Hamlet templates automatically capture the variables in their environment so you don't have to waste time re-defining what is inserted. This makes their ease of use on par with dynamic languages, but we can do all the parsing at compile time and still have type-safe insertions.
Hamlet (html), cassius, and lucius (css) have specific parsing rules. However, Julius (javascript) has always been a pass-through template: variables are interpolated, but the source text is unmodified. We realized this was a starting point to extend the Hamlet family to other file types, and re-factored Julius. There is now a coffeescript (great language that compiles cleanly to javascript) module, and adding a template over any new file type is a fairly straight-forward task. The variable parsing is configurable. In javascript, it is #{var}, just as in hamlet or lucius, but in coffescript it is %{var} to avoid conflicts with coffescript syntax. We plan on using this to add a simple html template for those who either need to maintain better compatibility with existing html or are not yet enlightened about the joys of using hamlet.
Currently the templates are geared towards being used in Yesod- they support type-safe url insertion. When we get around to it we will release a version without url insertion so that users outside of Yesod have no extra overhead. Hamlet-style templates are by far the best haskell has to offer, with one drawback: given that the templates are parsed at compile-time, it isn't always convenient to reload them when developing. In Yesod, we are solving this (and re-loading in general) by creating a smarter development environment.
Development environment reloading
A new version of wai-handler-devel is underway that will efficiently reload code in development mode. This will finally get us out of the "haskell straight-jacket" and allow an ease of development on par with dynamic languages. Coinciding with this change is a change in the yesod executable.
the yesod command
Running "yesod" by itself gives you a list of commands.
Running "yesod init" gives the behavior previously held by "yesod", i.e. generate a scaffolded site.
Running "yesod build" is almost identical to "cabal build", but with one change: it performs a dependency analysis of external files included by Template Haskell (Hamlet templates, routes, entity definitions) and changes modification times as needed to force cabal to build modules. For example, if "Handler/Root.hs" references "hamlet/root.hamlet", and the latter has a later modification time than the former, the former's modification times will be changed to match that of the latter.
Running "yesod devel" runs the devel server (automatically re-compiles code) which now uses cabal for the compiling (passing in a special "devel" flag). Previously we were using the hint package (uses the ghc api) and re-loading the entire application. The new version uses direct-plugins (uses.hi files) and will load individual files.
If this sounds like overkill to you, keep in mind that best practice in dynamic languages is to have a file watcher that will run the test suite as changes are made (based on user defined rules that need to be adjusted) and that development mode (re-interpreting files when a request comes in) can be noticeably slow. By using (the type-safe language) haskell we have avoided the need to constantly run a test suite. But we need some smarts to achieve fast re-compilation. This project watching tool is another that will hopefully be shared at least among other web frameworks, if not in haskell projects in general.
JSON support
We are switching our default JSON library to the excellent aeson package. This adds speed, features, and easier compatibility if this package becomes the community's default json package. We are giving up enumerator streaming, but that should be addable to aeson when the need arises.
Miscellaneous features
Partial file sending.
Per-route limits on request body. By default, this is 2 megabytes. See the maximumContentLength method.
The Yesod.Core module now exports everything in its package. This is useful when you want to write an app without the entire Yesod framework.
Logging support built in. This should be extensible enough to support any backend you throw at it (hslogger seems to be popular for this). There is still work for us to do at least to document how to log efficiently in a production envrionment. The key will probably be to log to stdout/stderr and re-use good existing logging tools.
No longer depends on wai-handler-devel. This means that executables are much smaller. (Note: later releases in the 0.7.* already included this.)
New mini scaffolded site, which does not include persistent or authentication code (many fewer dependencies).
Scaffolded sites now keep routes and model definitions in external files. This should allow for add-on tools to automatically generate code for you.
The future: 0.9 - 1.0
Documentation- we know that this is really the biggest area for improvement in Yesod. By the 0.9 release we will probably make some improvements to the documentation site to make it easier for others to contribute. And we will hold up the 1.0 release until we have documentation that we can be proud of.
static file caching headers support - a rough implementation is already completed. This allows for a pure haskell deployment- Apache or Nginx are optional.
Support for other template types as first class citizens. So you can treat coffeescript as if it were javascript or use a different html template in the same way you would use hamlet.
Easier support for faster, non-blocking Javascript loading via something akin to require.js.
A complete i18n solution.
Reassessing our forms package, probably to use digestive functors. Yesod forms currently use polymorphism- that is a great feature, but the limit of this abstraction, like many other compile-time features in haskell is often the ability to decipher error messages. That is easy enough to deal with when you own the code, but when someone else is interfacing with your libraries, error messages are a part of that interface.
Embedded objects in MongoDB. We are leaving other persistent features off the official roadmap, but expect other improvements.
Performance improvements. We don't have anything specific planned here, but we eagerly tackle any solid reports of slow spots in the framework. We will probably take a closer look at performance aspects post 1.0
0.9 is a chance to finish all the features that we feel are needed for a 1.0 release, and then to have another cycle to reflect and make sure things are done right, well-documented, and that we aren't missing anything that we view as critical for a complete web framework.
As always, if you send a patch for or start working on a useful feature, we will make helping you our top priority, and we are always listening to the needs of Yesod users- so there is always a lot of variance in the roadmap.Taurus – King of Cups
January 2019 Monthly Reading
Taurus, this is a very significant month for you. There is a male that is seen, if you are a male reading this horoscopes, this person may resemble yourself and what you will become in your near future. If you are a female reading this horoscope then you will be protected by an influential male in your life. This man strives for success, is very conservative and knows how to be a strong protector. If you are looking for protection this month Taurus, then you prayers will be answered.
Taurus August 2018 Horoscope – The Fool Reversed Tarot Draw
Taurus, in August you must learn to stay focused and determined in August. When things may seem a little hectic, you must learn how to hold on to whats more important to you. Avoid procrastination and going to dream land. If you need to gain back some clarity in life, try going to the beach. Things with the color blue will make you feel content. Have a self motivating month Taurus!
July 2018 Taurus Horoscope
July is one of the months where you will need to look inside yourself and find some sort of release from your daily actives. A situation is highlighted this month. You must learn and understand that placing the blame on yourself isn’t a great idea. Remove tension from your life by getting involved in activities. Train to be prepared. Think of what decisions you will be making very carefully this month. This is one of the month where you must use your intuition and personal insight!
Taurus November 2017 Horoscope
Taurus, this month you may find yourself needing a time for self-reflection. When you feel that you are cornered or if you feel as if there is no progression in an aspect of your life, you must find a way to release your bottled up feelings. This November, its time to make good use of your internal feelings. Self-expression will get you a long way.
Taurus August 2017 Horoscope
Taurus, the month of August will treat you will a stronger focus. Things in life are seeming to progress, but you need to keep you vision on point.
Taurus July 2017 Horoscope
The month of July will bring you new choices and alternatives. When a decision goes up, you must make a choice. Take your time with your answers this month. Make sure you have all the facts before you make any forward movements in a situation. Taurus, some past reflection is all you need to guide you in making the right decision this month!
Taurus June 2017 Horoscope
Taurus, you will be receiving some kind of notification in June. When an opportunity presents itself in your path, you must be eager to take it. June is a month of action, so you must get to the prize before someone else does. You have an internal personality with a lot of judgment and with that, it is always important to remember that you have great ability to stand out of the crowd. This month brings you a new promotion, raise, job offer, and another much-favored job opportunity.
Taurus April 2017 Horoscope Message
Taurus, think more positively and positive things will come your way.
Taurus March 2017 Monthly Horoscope
Taurus, the month of March will bring you newfound fame. This is the month where you have the chance to showcase who you really are. When the spotlight is put on you, don’t be afraid to shine. This is a great month for enlightenment, family, children, and fame. A female is also indicated to have a strong importance for you this month. This female may be someone you always have admired, or if you are a Taurus female, this woman could represent you. Overall, you will find fame, love, and enlightenment revolving around you this month Taurus!
Taurus February 2017 Monthly Horoscope
Taurus, the month of February will bring you a dynamic message. This is the month that represents life for you. This can mean that something new in your life may be in fruition or you can start something new this month. Most of your concert this month will result in a positive answer at the end. Don’t be too shy or nervous in certain situations that may arise. This is a month where you are in the spotlight and your love life is shining!
Taurus January 2017 Monthly Horoscope
Taurus, the month of January will bring swift change and a need of quick action. This is the month where you can let your feelings take over. By speaking up and fighting for what you believe in, you will take the year to a great start. Trust your gut feeling and allow your drive to take over. This is a great month for love, finishing past tasks, and starting a new chapter in your life. Have a rebel month!
Taurus December 2016 Monthly Horoscope – Six of Pentacles
Taurus, the month of December will bring you love and relationship. Something is seen blooming this month. A positive vibe is in the air that comes with a wise nature. This is a great month for increasing your finances and making a new plan for your life. You will experience a wonderful month Taurus!
Taurus November 2016 Monthly Horoscope – Justice
Taurus, the month of November will bring you Justice. Taurus, you are one that may have tons of opinions,but you do not voice most of them. This month, you will have an advantage over something. It is time for you to earn justice and when you have this moment, don’t forget to speak your mind. There is growth and intellect seen for you this month. If you are going to any legal hearing, you will be successful in the end. Have a liberating month Taurus!
Taurus October Monthly Horoscope – The Chariot
Taurus, the month of October will have some travel in the works. Taurus, you will be navigating through something this month. It may be a long distance location, a mental state of mind, or changing a lifestyle. All of the travel done this month will be on the positive side for you. Taurus, you will find yourself connected with your emotions and will have a spiritual influence guiding you. Allow yourself to take control of your senses and don’t ever ignore your instincts. Have a very influential and moving month Taurus!
Taurus September Monthly Horoscope – The Hanged Man
Taurus, the month of September will give you a new outlook on things. You are trying out new things in life, or at least you will in the near future. Allow yourself to look at the world from different perspectives. Use everything that comes along your path as a lesson and practice some self-discipline. This month you may sacrifice something or decide between two paths. In any situation, you have the power to control your vision of the future by looking at your outcome in a different light.
Taurus August 2016 Monthly Horoscope – The Hanged Man
Taurus, the month of August will bring you uniqueness. You need to start looking at things from a different perspective. The past,present, and future are passing and coming oh so quickly. You must open yourself up to knowledge and look at all the decisions you have ahead of you. Think wisely Taurus!
Taurus July 2016 Monthly Horoscope – Ten of Swords
Taurus, the month of July will bring a realization into your life. Past actions may now have lead to certain consequences. You must acknowledge your actions with your social circles and home life. Try not to come out to harsh. Know that things happen in life for a reason, good or bad we must not defeat ourselves with blame. There is a bit of conflict and slowness for you this month, allowing your self to accept your surroundings will allow you to move ahead from this period. Have a great month Taurus!
Taurus June 2016 Monthly Horoscope -The Hierophant
Taurus, the month of June will bring a new opening. There seems to be a light for you Taurus. If you have dealt with a recent problem and you aren’t sure the end of it or if you are starting a new venture and you aren’t sure where it will end up, this month will have some sort of significance for you. This month you will experience a taste of religion, mystery and something of magic works. There will be a light on you this month. If someone gives advice, please acknowledge their sayings. This is a great month for making a new purchase and deciding to start up something new that you feel is related to you in some way.
Taurus May 2016 Monthly Horoscope -Ace of Pentacles
Taurus, the month of May will bring you your hearts desire. Something that you have been working towards will come to a climax. The future is looking very bright for you and finances are looking much greener. You strive to earn your own stability in life and this month your greatest wish may be granted. Have a wonderful month Taurus and manifest!
Taurus April 2016 Monthly Horoscope
Taurus, the month of April brings you a very feminine energy. You will find a female to be very influential to you this month. This female may represent yourself if you are a women or it may represent a symbolic figure if you are a male. This will be a very creative and promising month for you. A great time for manifestation and your inner child to bloom.
Taurus March 2016 Horoscope
Taurus, this month the Knight of Swords was drawn for you. This card indicates that you will be taking on something of urgency this month. Something will be needed from you by others. This is the time to make a quick change, take charge, and fight for what you will need to earn yourself. At times of emergency the best thing to do is stay calm and respond to situations with knowledge that you have verified in the past. Have a great month Taurus and remember to be responsible at all times!
Taurus Monthly Horoscope Read your tarot draw for the month of February 2016. Taurus – The Hanged Man
Taurus, there is a situation this month that will put you in a certain mood. This situation may cause a certain unbalance or a situation that may be on hold for the moment. All things that you may go through this month will be temporary. A situation will be as difficult as you make it. Learn as much as you can from the lessons you have ahead and make sure you focus on small details.
January 2016 Monthly Horoscope. January 2016 Tarot Draw for Taurus: The Emperor
Taurus, the month of January 2016 will bring you a great structure. You may have been confused in the past which direction to take in life. This month you will be goal oriented and you will have a great business ethic. Focusing on your work, will take you to great success. This card also indicates a male figure that will be a great influence to you.
Taurus Monthly Horoscope Read your tarot draw for the month of December 2015. Taurus – The Sun
Taurus, the month of December brings you a new light on every situation in life. You will see yourself feeling very positive and self confident this month. Something that you have been wanting for a while now will come to fruition. The Sun also indicates pregnancy,marriage, great beginnings, and success in all new starts of life. Allow yourself to believe and your dreams will come true. If there is something that you need to be answered this month, The Sun indicates that the outcome will be to your favor.
Taurus Monthly Horoscope Read your tarot draw for the month of November 2015. Taurus – The Empress
Taurus, this month you may be influenced by a feminine power. This female may be your mother, your friend, or your boss. This female makes very wise choices for her family life and her business life. She will help you this month, so don’t ignore her advice. If you have something that you want to tell this female, Taurus make sure that you let it all out! This card also indicates that this will be a very lucky month for you. The more you make yourself available this month, the more opportunities will fly your way!
Read your tarot draw for the month of September to October 2015 – Taurus- Four of Cups
Taurus, the month of September through October will bring you reflection,choice, unexpected conditions and an opportunity that may seem small at the moment, but the outcome results in your choice. Don’t act with impulse, rather weigh out what options you will have in front of you and make your decision to move forward in your life.
August Horoscope 2015
Read your Tarot Draw for the month of August 2015 – Taurus -Six of Pentacles
Taurus, expect yourself to give back this month. There is something within you that may feel a little wanting to help someone else or do something humane. A small amount of wealth will appear to you this month, it can be material wealth, or it can be a feeling of richness from within yourself. This is a great time to look at your life in a different perspective, you have the balance needed this month to make all the right decisions for every things that may come at you. Trust your word and enjoy what is surrounding you this month Taurus!
July Horoscope
Read your Tarot Draw for the month of July 2015 – Taurus
Tarot Draw – Two of Pentacles
Taurus, this month you will be facing a major decision to make. You are young and free spirited, at times you may be insecure because you’re not to sure of what will happen if you take an action. This month be prepared to weigh out two decisions. The Two of Pentacles is an images of a young boy who is holding an infinity type symbol with one pentacle on one side and another on the other side. This indicates that you will have 2 choices in your life this month. This decision will be very important for you to make so think wisely and don’t be too impulsive. This card also indicates a good time for seas travels and possible good news from a desired area in your life.
April Aquarius Tarot Horoscope
Tarot Card Draw:
Ace of Wands
Taurus, this will be one of the best months for you in this year. This month indicates that you should not be fearful, don’t second guess your self, and it will have a ‘just do it’ vibe, and what ever your heart feels right above will turn out just as you have imagined. You may see a beginning in your journey with yourself spiritually, or with another person or even a job opportunity. You will have artistic ideas roaming through your mind this month, so don’t hold anything back, and do what you feel. A great vibe this month, surrounded my positivity, and possibility.Image: Pacific Tsunami Warning CenterIf we had any evidence that Republican House members were capable of feeling shame, we’d expect them to be so red right now. Mother Jones reports that one of the items on the GOP’s budgetary chopping block is … tsunami monitoring. Last month, they voted to hack out nearly a third of the funding for the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which (go figure) warns about tsunamis in the Pacific:
In February, the union representing the National Weather Service warned that the Republican cuts could place the residents of Hawaii in mortal danger. “People could die… It could be serious,” Barry Hirshorn, Pacific region chairman of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, told Hawaii’s Star Advertiser. The House budget includes a 28 percent cut to the National Weather Service that would result in staffing cutbacks to Hawaii’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which monitors potential tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.
Because there’s no way a tsunami could hit the U.S. OH WAIT
This is getting to be a trend with these guys. Remember when Bobby Jindal mocked the Obama administration for funding volcano monitoring, and then Eyjafjallajokull erupted and massively disrupted European air travel? I’m not NECESSARILY saying that Republicans cause natural disasters, but it’s just as logical as saying sunspots cause climate change.
Seriously, it’s one thing to not believe in science. It’s quite another to be so committed to your Medieval vision of how the world works that you’re willing to stake other people’s lives on it. Call it the Jenny McCarthy phenomenon: You go around having whatever crazy beliefs you want, until they start making people die. Then folks tend to get pissed.
But the GOP is willing to take that gamble: Climate change isn’t real, so we don’t have to worry about a future full of increasingly devastating disasters, and that money would be better put towards their real objective: destroying the EPA preventing women from getting health care NASCAR advertising styrofoam cup activism JOBS somehow.
Related:An elderly man is ripped from his bed in the dead of night. Blindfolded, the last thing he feels is the blade slitting his throat. A taxi driver, made to kneel on the side of the road, trembling as a gun is put to his head and the trigger is pulled. In one summary execution, the bodies of five men are shown convulsing under the force of the bullets being fired into their backs.
The men of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the jihadists now rampaging across northern Iraq are proud of their murders. The real footage, posted online as propaganda videos for the group, reveals the cruel psychopathy of men whose humanity has been lost to its extremist cause.
Less than one week ago the jihadists seized control of Iraq’s second city, Mosul, where they have set to work imposing the hardline rules and summary justice of their “Islamic State”.
As many as 500,000 Iraqis escaped Mosul as the city fell and the Iraqi army melted away.
But now, tens of thousands have decided to return.
In the Sunni dominated city, the removal of the Iraqi army by ISIS has been interpreted as a local victory; as a means of empowering Mosul residents against Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Shia dominated national government who they feel has kept their people “oppressed”.
“For seven years we lived in a prison. The people who have come now [ISIS], are better than the Maliki army,” Maher, 36, told the Telegraph. He wouldn’t reveal his name for fear putting his family in danger. “All of Mosul feels this way.”
An English teacher, with a soft manner and kind eyes, Maher bore no similarity to the masked men in the ISIS adverts proffering holy slaughter.
But the sympathy he felt for his new occupiers sharply illustrates the threat that is now being posed to Baghdad, and the challenges that Mr Maliki will face to regain control of northern Iraq.
As |
? Cars cannot use more than 100kg of fuel per race Fuel flow must not exceed 100kg per hour No refuelling mid-race Cars can be topped up in other sessions at a rate of 0.8 litres per second
That is an immutable fact regardless of whether you have deliberately fragile tyres as F1 uses now, or durable, consistent ones, as was the case before the Pirelli era.
Because of this, teams are even this year often starting races with less fuel in their tanks than the maximum allowance of 100kg.
I don't believe that was the case in Canada, which is one of the tracks with the heaviest fuel consumption.
But nevertheless this is a remarkable testament to the technology contained within these turbo hybrid engines, which are now doing races on less than two-thirds of the amount of fuel that was routinely used only two years ago.
Having said all of that, the degree of fuel-saving being done at the moment seems to me to be too much.
Alonso makes a good point
Media playback is not supported on this device Alonso explains 'amateur' radio rant
F1 had refuelling throughout my career. Even so, there were races when you under-fuelled the car because it was quicker.
But if we were asked to save fuel it was not by the method used now, which is called 'lift and coast' and involves a driver lifting off the throttle for a period of time before braking for the corner. We usually did it by short-shifting - changing gear before we reached maximum revs.
In other words, it did not affect your driving in the corners, which is the essence of an F1 driver's skill.
There were occasional races when we might lift and coast, but it was not commonplace and it did not affect the racing as it did in Canada.
Back then, to have had a driver come on the radio, as Alonso did on Sunday, and say "let me race, we look like amateurs", would have been unthinkable.
Fundamental change is needed
Media playback is not supported on this device Max Mosley calls for F1 cost cap
The sport's bosses have agreed to make changes for 2017 that will make the cars five or six seconds a lap faster. That will certainly make a difference in making the cars more challenging.
It's a good first step. But they need to think a bit more deeply about what they really need to do.
After Canada, people were talking about the need to turn grands prix back into flat-out sprints. It's a laudable aim.
But at the same time, we all know that Bernie Ecclestone wants Pirelli to remain as the tyre supplier into a new contract starting in 2017.
If the tyres remain the same as they are now, sprint races are impossible, no matter what you do to the cars.
That's because the tyres simply fall apart if drivers push flat-out for more than a couple of laps. No matter how hard these current tyres produced by Pirelli are, they need managing over a race stint.
But what change?
Ask 10 people and you'll get 10 different answers. Personally, I thought the refuelling era was great, because the cars were fast and demanding and the drivers were on the limit all the time.
But at the same time it is hard to argue with the facts. From 2009 to 2010, when nothing had changed other than the fact that refuelling had been banned - Pirelli and the DRS overtaking aid had not yet been introduced - the number of on-track overtakes more than doubled year-on-year.
That is a compelling argument against refuelling, however much I might like to see it return.
One positive aspect there definitely was to refuelling, though, was that we used to qualify with the amount of fuel with which we would start the race. And that led to different strategies, which in turn led to place changes, even if they were not on the track.
By contrast, right now, if you line the cars up in the order of fastest first and then set them off, it should not be a massive surprise if there is then not an awful lot of overtaking at the front of the field.
It seems to me that F1 has drifted too far from what made it great in the first place.
Sports such as football have remained relatively unchanged and their appeal has passed from generation to generation.
F1 has become too close to the category immediately below it, GP2, so it is too easy for drivers to make the transition, which in turn diminishes the appeal of the star names, whose greater ability has in the past differentiated them from the norm more easily than it can now.
F1 has to project the sense that you are watching a feat of amazing human skill.
It's terrific that the sport's bosses recognise there is a problem and are considering making some changes. But even then they are not going far enough.
They need to have a more fundamental think about what F1 should be, take the time to do it properly and act on that. Half-measures are not enough.
The core appeal of F1 is the gladiatorial aspect of man and machine on the absolute limit at incredible speeds, with the risk - however remote and undesired - that someone could get hurt.
Stray too far from that, and the sport will lose its wow factor.
David Coulthard was talking to BBC Sport's Andrew BensonThe Thing in The Basement 3.8/5 Loading... Loading...
I should take this opportunity to tell that whether or not you find this story scary, or entertaining, or whatever it is you are looking for, is of no concern to me. I am taking this opportunity to share with you something that happened to me on October 27 of 2009. I have never shared this story with anyone and thought this would be the perfect venue for it. Enjoy (or not.)
I tried to act like I didn’t hear what I just heard, but the sound came from downstairs and it was unmistakable. Glass breaking.
A screech.
I laid in my bed immobile, staring at the ceiling, waiting to hear something else. I cursed myself for being overcome with fear. If my wife hadn’t gone out that night she would’ve been laying right next to me. In which case I would’ve put on a “tough guy” face and went to investigate. But she wasn’t there, and I was lying in bed with terror coursing through every vein in my body, trying to convince myself that I had imagined the sound. That was until I heard the growl, a low, repulsive growl.
I didn’t know if it was coming from downstairs or the space between my ears. Either way I had to get up and check, or I would go crazy. I slowly sung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up. I began to stand up but my knees betrayed me when I heard the crashing. Like something, the something downstairs, was hurling itself against the walls.
There had been a rash of break-ins in my neighborhood that week and it was hard to think that I wasn’t the most recent victim. If that was true however, what was that shrieking noise? It sounded like a 200 pound bird mixed with a hungry lion. That was impossible of course but then what in the world was it? Whatever it was, it had me glued to my bed, paralyzed with fear.
I regained my composure and slowly opened my door. The living room window at the end of the hallway let in the faint shining of the moon. It cast a pasty light over the hallway and the living room beyond it, transforming the room into a maze of grotesque, elongated shadows. The shadows were creepy but at least they provided an uneasy sense of stability. The foreign lamp in the corner cast a horrifying shadow but at least I knew what it was. The plant in the middle of the room portrayed a web of elongated black appendages across the floor, but at least I had a grip on that. I had no idea what I was dealing with downstairs.
All I could hear downstairs was the sound of movement. I walked sideways, slowly crossing my feet as I traversed the hallway. At the end of it, I encountered the broom closet. I opened it, reached in and found an old-fashioned broom. The one that I had etched “Quidditch” into because it reminded me of a witch’s broom. I gripped it tightly and continued my long journey downstairs. I turned the corner and edged toward the stairs. I proceeded down them as slowly as a child does when he’s walking down the steps into a frigid pool. As I made my way down, I heard the thing growl. Or was it a moan? It was like the kind of growl that a lion makes when it’s just been caught in a trap.
Frustrated.
Pissed off.
As my feet touched the cold cement floor of the basement I realized that I hadn’t even put socks (let alone shoes) on. All I had on was some pajama pants, a t-shirt and a fistful of broomstick. The thing wasn’t in the main room in the basement. But then again there were no windows in this room either, and I had distinctly heard it crash through a window. It had to be either in the bedroom or the storage closet. I looked around and saw that both of the doors were closed and that’s when I realized how quiet it was. I never believed in the phrase “too quiet” but right then, at that moment, it was too damn quiet. I inched towards the door nearest me, the closet door, walking sideways again. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear a noise again or not. If I did I thought I’d have a heart attack. If I didn’t, I thought I’d die of anticipation. The door crept closer and closer to me, still no sound.
I reached out towards the door knob. I took one step towards it and grabbed it.
Still nothing.
I twisted the knob as fast as I could and flung the door open. I was attacked almost simultaneously. I didn’t feel the pain right away but the blood ran from my forehead immediately. Something sharp had come down hard on my head with such force that I stumbled back and landed on my butt, broomstick still in hand. I began to swing it wildly, connecting with nothing. Bewildered, in pain, and petrified, I crawled back until my back met, rather roughly, with a wall. Panicked, I reached up and wiped the blood from my eyes. Finally, opening my eyes, I was able to see my nemesis. A fire poker lay harmlessly on the ground in the threshold of the room. In my haste, I had knocked it off of its rack while swinging open the door.
I smiled. It was hard not to laugh at myself. I had been scared half-to-death by a household item. The storage closet was clear but what about the – The growl came right on cue.
I whipped my head to the left to get a look at the bedroom door. Below the door, through the tiny crack where the door didn’t quite reach the cement, I saw something. Something was moving in that room. As if it knew that I could see it, the movement stopped. It emitted a low sound, resembling a purr. It was like it was waiting for me, anticipating my next move. My legs wouldn’t allow me to stand. Panic grasped me so violently that It was hard to breath and my vision blurred. I slowly rolled to one side until most of my weight was on both elbows. I managed to crawl two feet away from the door when the thing inside moved slightly and I felt that I was going to pass out.
I regained composure just in time to stop myself from throwing up. I could taste the vomit in my mouth and it caused my eyes to water as I began to bring myself to my feet. If I was going to approach this thing, I’d have to do it standing up and cautiously.
I was about ten feet from the door. I almost tripped over myself several times because I was taking such small steps. I was sure I was going to get splinters from how tight I was holding this broom but I ignored that as I began to reach out to grab hold of the doorknob. I almost retracted my hand immediately when I felt the warm slimy metal but then I realized that it was my own sweat pouring down my arm. I tried to will myself to do what I knew needed to be done. I found that I was slowly turning the knob. I opened the
door slightly without looking through the opening. The low whine of the creaking door became somehow deafening. I found that my eyes were closed again so when the door was completely open I couldn’t see what was in front of me.
That low growling came again and I felt warm, wet breath on my face. I’ve been trying since that day to come up with some adjectives for what that breath smelt like but I never can. It was worse than anything that can ever be described by characters on a page.
This was the first time I truly regretted going down there. My left eyelid found itself slowly creeping open and then my right eye snapped open, hoping to make a liar out of the left one.
I had to be in bed sleeping What stood in front of me couldn’t
be real. Right in front of me, looking down on me, was the most vile-looking demon creature that could possibly be conceived by the human mind. I’m 6’1” and it stood at least a foot taller than me. It’s eyes were thin vertical slits that framed blood-red eyeballs. It’s head was a gross hybrid of a horse’s face attached to a Rottweiler’s skull. Its teeth looked sharp enough to cut diamond and it’s snout emitted a pinkish mist as it exhaled. It had the body of an overgrown reptile with t-rex arms and the webbed wings of a pterodactyl. It stood on two legs. Two incredibly muscular, incredibly hairy legs that bent backwards at the knees. Its feet were long, too long, and there were two-foot talons coming from what I assumed were the big toes.
It glared at me. It picked me apart, I assume, planning on how it was going to pick me apart literally. It let out a deathly shriek and my world came to a stand-still. My heart came to a stop and my blood stopped flowing.
Somewhere, somewhere miles away, a broomstick fell out of a man’s hand as he urinated on himself.
I lost consciousness momentarily so I didn’t feel myself hit the floor. When I opened my eyes I managed to lift my leg up, hook it around the door, and try to swing it closed. The beast roared and lifted its leg. It planned to put that talon right through my stomach. I closed the door just in time as the talon came crashing through the wood. I sprung to my feet. Apparently, somewhere deep inside of me, a survivor resided. I had just seen the infamous Jersey Devil, that had to be what it was, and it was in my house right now. I put the full brunt of my weight against the doorknob. The creature let out an unbearable roar. I could feel it scratching, trying to claw it’s way through the door. It was pissed off.
The shrieks became more and more erratic and I began to have the sense that it was jumping up and down. It finally hurled itself against the door. The force pushed me back and I found myself dazed and with distance between myself and the door. I frantically scrambled back to the door and repositioned myself against it. I pushed harder against the door but then I realized that I wasn’t being met with any opposition. The thing had also fallen silent. I stepped back a little bit, still with my hands on the knob, and stared at the door. I stood there for what felt like hours listening, almost hoping for a sound of movement or something.
Nothing.
I backed away slowly. I stared into the wooden door, too afraid to peek through the hole through which the monster had borne his talon through. Somewhere on the other side of this door an unearthly creature resided. It wasn’t moving, I could hear it when it moved, but I knew exactly where it was. It was right across from me on the other side of the door, staring just like I was. But somehow I could feel its eyes on me. Its presence tied a knot in my chest where my heart was supposed to be. I tried to take a deep breath but it got caught in my throat. Both of my hands came up to grasp my throat as if that was going to help.
The monster was doing more damage to me now than when I could see it! After an agonizing battle to catch my breath I was left light headed. I had enough wit about me to spot the broomstick out of the corner of my eye. I dashed over to it and picked it up, holding it like a baseball bat. I was ready to strike if the creature decided to break through the door. I gripped the stick so hard that it hurt my hands.
A minute later the anticipation got the best of me and I flew forward, with bravado acting as the wind under my wings. I kicked right at the doorknob and the force blew the door right off the hinges. I was surprised by my own power, but the surprise that gave me chills was what was staring back at me in the bedroom.
In the bedroom, my eyes fell upon what lie beyond the door.
Nothing.
I cautiously moved forward to investigate, carrying the broomstick in front of me like a sword. There was nothing, the room was just how it had always been. I began to laugh at myself, almost hysterically. I began to think that I had imagined the whole thing. Maybe I had had a little too much to drink at the bar that night and it was finally catching up to me. I knew I shouldn’t have been up late watching those horror movies the night before!
This train of thought ended when my gaze fell upon the window in the corner. Shattered, wide open and letting in the night’s cold air, I didn’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. I walked towards it, and upon closer inspection I found the jagged edges to be drenched in a thick maroon liquid.
The beast was real.
The beast was real and it injured itself when it broke into my house. I sat on the side of the bed and stared out the window. The night sky looked the same as it did every night, but I knew this was a very different night entirely. I was just relieved that the monster was gone, so I took the broom, left the bedroom and began to think of a way to explain this to my wife. I knew she would never believe it if I told her the truth. I was almost to the stairs when I heard a faint shriek out in the distant night. I ran back to the window, with a surge of eagerness for some reason, and tried to catch a glimpse of the monster. I saw nothing but the night sky and began to retreat back up to my room again.
The monster was gone for the night, but I had a feeling that it would one day be back again.North Korea, which fired dozens of artillery shells at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong this morning, could make one or two bombs’ worth of enriched uranium per year if its new enrichment facility is fully operational, a nuclear analyst says.
The shells killed two soldiers and set houses ablaze, according to Reuters, in one of the heaviest attacks on South Korea since the Korean war in the 1950s. The two countries then exchanged further fire.
These events closely follow reports on 20 November by an engineer and two nuclear policy experts from the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University in California that they saw an industrial-scale uranium enrichment plant in a visit a few days earlier to North Korea.
Nonetheless, the possibility that North Korea is merely making fuel for a peaceful nuclear power plant cannot be ruled out, says engineer Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and his two colleagues Robert Carlin and John W. Lewis.
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‘Stunning’ views
Although North Korea had previously announced its intention to enrich uranium, most analysts believed it did not have a large-scale capability to do so. But Hecker’s team say they were given a “stunning” view of a major new enrichment facility at the country’s Yongbyon nuclear complex.
“We saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than 1000 centrifuges all neatly aligned,” Hecker writes in a report posted on the Stanford website.
North Korean officials told the team that the plant has 2000 centrifuges that are already being used to separate fissile uranium-235 from the more abundant uranium-238.
If that is true, North Korea could make 30 to 40 kilograms of highly enriched uranium per year, enough for one or two nuclear weapons, says Hui Zhang of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Civilian power
Although North Korea is believed to already possess plutonium-based nuclear weapons, uranium-based weapons can be more efficient, allowing them to produce more powerful explosions, says Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC.
Uranium can also be used to trigger nuclear fusion of heavy isotopes of hydrogen, unleashing vastly more explosive power than is possible with uranium or plutonium alone, Alvarez says. But he adds that to make fusion weapons, North Korea would first have to develop other capabilities, including the ability to make the hydrogen isotope tritium.
North Korean officials told the visitors the facility is intended to make low-enriched uranium fuel for a nuclear power plant it is building to generate electricity. “These facilities appear to be designed primarily for civilian nuclear power, not to boost North Korea’s military capability,” Hecker writes in the report.
Hecker accepts that they could quickly be switched to making highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium. But he argues that if North Korea wants to make nuclear bombs it would make more sense for it to restart plutonium production at the dormant plant it once used for this purpose.
Act of war?
Zhang says the number of centrifuges is appropriate if they are really intended to make fuel for a small, experimental nuclear power plant like the one North Korea is building. He and Alvarez both say they suspect North Korea has revealed this new capability in order to influence any future negotiations over its nuclear activities.
“I think the North Koreans are pushing very hard to convince the United States of its nuclear ambitions and where it stands right now as a way of increasing their bargaining leverage,” Alvarez says.
As far as the situation on Yeonpyeong is concerned, North Korea is claiming South Korea fired the first shot, according to the BBC. South Korea says it was conducting a military drill in the area before North Korea fired.
Jung Hoon-lee, professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, told the BBC World Service: “If this is not an act of war, I don’t know what is… We fired back in accordance with the rules of engagement. This is the bare minimum, one has to wonder are we really doing enough?”Breathtaking footage from Norway shows humpback whales gracefully hunting underneath the Northern Lights. But this isn't the first time that whales have made headlines in recent days. In fact, the marine animals have been gaining a lot of attention lately.
The video, filmed off the coast of Kvaløya (Whale Island) near the city of Tromsø, was captured by photographer Harald Albrigsten while he was testing equipment – including a special camera capable of capturing footage in the dark without losing image definition.
This pair of friendly whales seemed more than happy to have a human visitor in the open seas earlier this month. The two followed a paddleboarder in Western Australia, proving the animals are quite sociable and curious.
This whale was also part of a marine duo, but his companion was actually a seal who enjoyed catching a ride on his much larger friend.
But not all whale headlines were as serene and fun-loving. This big guy was downright scary, leaping out of the water and landing on a couple's kayak. The impact completely submerged the two, but they were left uninjured...and lived to tell a truly amazing tale.In interviews following Wolf Parade's hiatus announcement back in 2010, they made it sound like the band probably wouldn't get back together. Spencer Krug, at least, didn't believe it was ever going to happen. "It had become a bit of a predictable grind," he said in a phone interview with Pitchfork earlier this week. "We wanted more time, we wanted to try other things, we were getting sick of each other."
Then, in 2014, after a period of time spent living in Helsinki, Krug moved to the woods on Vancouver Island. Suddenly, after years of being located in different cities across the world, the members of Wolf Parade weren't as spread out anymore. Aside from Dan Boeckner, who travels from Montreal for practices, they all live near each other again and have access to a recording studio. In late 2014, they decided to get in a room together, plug in their instruments, and see what happened.
After some jamming and recording, Wolf Parade have announced a handful of live shows. While they've definitely been working on new music, Krug is hesitant to nail down when, how, or even if that new material will surface. "I don't know how those songs are gonna see the light of day," he said. "I think eventually we'll put out new stuff. I hope so. That's part of the plan."
Pitchfork: When and how did you guys decide to get the band back together?
Spencer Krug: I think we started talking about it in late 2014 and then all through last year. We just wanted to get the old band back together [laughs]. We just started jamming again. I live on Vancouver Island now, and it just so happens that three of us live here: Dante DeCaro also lives on Vancouver Island and the drummer [Arlen Thompson] lives just an hour north of us. Until I moved here from Helsinki in 2014, we were always in drastically different places. Dan was in L.A. for a little while, I was in Helsinki, and Dante was in Toronto. We were just spread around and everyone was doing their own thing.
Once the three of us by chance ended up here on the island, we started talking about wanting to play music together again. Dan would fly out here every once in a while. We have a studio nearby, and we just started playing, you know? And we weren't drumming up the old songs or anything. It's not like we plugged everything in and were like "one-two-three-four!" and started playing "This Heart's on Fire" or something. It was just about jamming and trying some new stuff. We were sort of just pretending we had never been a band before to some extent. We just spent a year just jamming, recording our jam sessions, just sort of fooling around and writing. It was good.
Pitchfork: How many times do you feel like you guys met in the last couple years?
Spencer Krug: A handful—five or six. Everyone is still busy doing their other things, and Dan has to come up from Montreal. It's not like we can just get together every weekend or anything. But it is a lot more convenient than it ever has been.
Pitchfork: Do you guys have concrete songs? Have you started recording anything?
Spencer Krug: We have been writing and we have been recording. How and when those songs see the light of day is too early to say. I don't know the answer to that. I don't know what form they're going to take in the world—which ones will turn into songs and which ones will just get forgotten and pushed to the wayside. But the focus was to be creative together again. It wasn't to learn how to play our old songs together.
When we first we started talking about it, there was a very unanimous agreement that we didn't want to just have a reunion and go out and do a cash grab reunion tour and quit again. It wasn't anything about that. It was about, "Let's start being creative together again because it was fun and rewarding the first time, so let's give it another shot."
Five years ago when we broke up, everyone wanted to do different things. We took the time to do those things, and then the three of us just ended up back on the island, so it seemed natural and like a fun experiment. We wanted to see if we could still write music together, what would it sound like now, how different is it from the past, and how much is the same. That was the focus. There are hours and hours of recorded jams out there on someone's hard drive—some of which are getting turned into songs, some we'll never hear again.
Pitchfork: What's the goal with your shows? Is it to shake the cobwebs out and see how the new material works in a live setting?
Spencer Krug: A bit of both, but I would like to think that the cobwebs are getting shaken out as we speak—as we're getting back in the studio together. At some point we will be remembering how to play the songs that we haven't played in five years, and that'll be a fun exercise. We want to represent the band that we used to be when we start playing shows again as well as represent new ideas.
Pitchfork: Let's go back to the initial hiatus: Why did you decide to stop the band? Did you guys think you would come back?
Spencer Krug: The main thing was everyone wanted to try other things and we didn't really have the time to do it. Wolf Parade, though it didn't take up all of our time, took up a significant enough amount of our time that we weren't able to really go deep into our other projects. I think at the time, Dan had Handsome Furs, I was just starting Moonface, and Dante had his solo work that he wanted to work on. It had become a bit of a predictable grind or trajectory. We were growing wary of just getting tired and tired of each other. All pretty understandable human things. We wanted more time, we wanted to try other things, we were getting sick of each other.
We've always been a band to put happiness before money, so we just said, "You know, for now, let's just forget this and take a break. If we never get back together then we never were meant to." At the time, it really felt like we probably wouldn't get back together. It felt pretty final, at least in my mind and probably in Dan's mind. I think probably everyone was like, "That's probably it."
But we didn't want to completely burn the bridge because we are like a little family and we knew that we might want to reunite one day. We just said, "Maybe, but don't be surprised if we don't." It was an honest answer—it was like, "We don't think we're going to get back together, but we don't know for sure, so we're calling it hiatus." And then it turns out five years later all those things that seemed like such a big deal five years ago, actually, like anything, you let enough time pass and you go, "Hmm, this is not such a big deal. Let's get back together."
Pitchfork: So you gave yourselves time to come back fresh.
SK: I'd say we came back very fresh. [laughs] It had been a long time since we played together. We hardly saw each other in that time. Everyone was really spread out and busy doing other things.
Pitchfork: Did you guys stay in touch?
SK: Yeah, sure, of course we talked. We remained friends—emails and stuff—but everyone was in different parts of the world. I think the first time that we all got together, we didn't really play music. It was all about sitting down together for a couple of days and just catching up. Then like a bit of jamming but there was no agenda.
Pitchfork: One of the reasons you guys decided to walk away from Wolf Parade was to pursue individual projects. That said, this year it sounds like you guys still have a lot going on.
SK: That's true. Part of the agreement when we decided "OK, we're going to give this a shot again" was that it was not going to consume our lives and time in the way that it had in the past—that we're going to be more in control of the snowball, so to speak. Wolf Parade has to conform to the other things that we've already built up in our lives. It's not like we stopped the band so we could make time to pursue other things and then we built those things up and now we're going to allow Wolf Parade to swallow those things back up.
We might be a little less active than the first time, but I don't even want to say that because I don't know if that's true. We're just going to be really busy again—same as we always were. Operators have another record coming out, I made another record as Moonface with this band called Siinai in Finland—that's coming out this summer. I already recorded the next Moonface record after that. Dante has just finished an LP under his own name. You're correct—everyone has their own things that are still on the go.
Pitchfork: Do you still feel good about playing the old records?
SK: Totally. They're still fun songs to play—whether or not we're any good at playing them anymore remains to be seen—but we're gonna still play the songs that we loved to play before. When we play a show this year, it's going to be largely old material. Any band that has two or three records behind them, that's just how the set ends up. You have to start picking and choosing from your back catalogue and play your favorites, and then you have time for two or three new songs, and then chances are you've been on stage for a good hour and it's time to go.
Pitchfork: What are your plans right now?
SK: Just to keep jamming, writing, practicing, recording, being in the same room together with all our instruments. Because that's the priority, right? That's the reality that you have to make happen—get everyone in a room with their instruments turned on. From there it's anyone's guess as to what exactly is going to happen, but as long as you're making music together, you're making progress of some kind.If you see extra mouse cursors moving around: don’t worry, they’re part of the demo. You can always disable them if you want.
I’ve written a follow-up on this article, in which I improved a lot of the code. Be sure to read that one too!
If you’re using a browser that supports web sockets, you might see some extra mouse cursors moving around. These are actually other people also looking at this page right now, live, as we speak. If you don’t see anything, try to open up this page in another browser window next to this one and move your mouse in it.
This is an experiment I did to play around with Node.js and web sockets. I’ve put everything in a Gist in case you want to try it out yourself. I’ll explain how it works in this article.
Web socket server
Using @miksago‘s node-websocket-server made it extremely easy to send and receive messages from a web socket. Here’s the code that runs the server:
var ws = require ( __dirname + '/lib/ws' ), server = ws. createServer (); server. addListener ( "connection", function ( conn ){ conn. addListener ( "message", function ( message ){ message = JSON. parse ( message ); message [ 'id' ] = conn. id conn. broadcast ( JSON. stringify ( message )); }); }); server. addListener ( "close", function ( conn ){ conn. broadcast ( JSON. stringify ({ 'id' : conn. id, 'action' : 'close' })); }); server. listen ( 8000 );
After including the node-websocket-server library and creating the server, I add some listeners to know when clients disconnect or send a message and make sure messages get sent to the other clients. Whenever it receives a JSON message, it includes the connection’s id before broadcasting it to the clients to make it possible to find out which cursor we need to move.
I saved it as server.js, so starting the server is as simple as running node server.js. To make sure it keeps running, I daemonized it with God, using the same config file I used in the “Daemonizing Navvy with God” article.
Receiving messages
Now, in a regular javascript file — with some jQuery — I included into this page, I connect to the web socket like this:
var conn ; var connect = function () { if ( window [ "WebSocket" ]) { conn = new WebSocket ( "ws://jeffkreeftmeijer.com:8000" ); conn. onmessage = function ( evt ) { data = JSON. parse ( evt. data ); if ( data [ 'action' ] == 'close' ){ $ ( '#mouse_' + data [ 'id' ]). remove (); } else if ( data [ 'action' ] =='move' ){ move ( data ); }; }; } }; window. onload = connect ;
As you can see, this connects to the server we just started. When a message is received, it checks the action it’s supposed to perform. If the action is “move”, it’ll move a mouse cursor on the screen using the move() function I’ll show you later. If it’s “close”, it means that the client disconnected and his cursor has to be removed from the screen.
Sending messages
Now we’re able to receive messages, move and delete cursors. The last thing we need is the client to be able to send out messages:
$ ( document ). mousemove ( ratelimit ( function ( e ){ if ( conn ) { conn. send ( JSON. stringify ({ 'action' :'move', 'x' : e. pageX, 'y' : e. pageY, 'w' : $ ( window ). width (), 'h' : $ ( window ). height () })); } }, 40 ) );
Whenever you move your mouse, the.mousemouse() function gets triggered that sends some JSON with the mouse position and screen size to the socket. The ratelimit method makes sure that there’s a forty millisecond interval between messages.
Moving the cursors
So, when the other clients receive a “move” message, it calls the move() function, like I showed you before. It looks like this:
function move ( mouse ){ if ( $ ( '#mouse_' + mouse [ 'id' ]). length == 0 ) { $ ( 'body' |
through the first Die Hard, John McClane has successfully contacted the police, and they're making their way to the office building where Hans Gruber and his group of long-haired German terrorists have set up camp. However, their raid is cut short when Gruber unleashes his secret weapon: a rocket launcher that his goons use to blast missiles at the SWAT cars.
"Is there a way we could make them die a little softer?"
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The cops can't get anywhere near the building without getting blown to shit. But John McClane is nothing if not resourceful: He grabs a load of C-4 explosive that he borrowed from a dead terrorist, secures it to a chair using an old school computer monitor and drops it down an elevator shaft. What follows is one of the great moments in classic cinema:
The C-4 explodes upon impact at the floor where the missile-launching terrorists are, killing them and making the building a little less insanely dangerous. Thank God for John McClane, right?
The Blind Luck:
How did McClane know the C-4 would explode on that exact floor? He is on the 38th floor when he drops the explosives, and the hostages (including his wife) are on the 30th or so. He doesn't have a detonator switch to set the bomb off, so how did he know the chair would blow on the terrorists' floor as opposed to, say, landing on an elevator and getting carried up to some other random floor (like, say, the one where all the hostages are)? Hell, what's to say it doesn't bounce off the walls of the shaft at some point on the way down, blowing some key structural support and bringing the whole building down? Or at least a huge part of it?Jason Brennan and Neil Sinhababu
Jason Brennan (left) and Neil Sinhababu (right) on political liberties and hedonism.
In this episode, Brennan and Sinhababu air two different arguments on two different topics. First, Brennan argues, contrary to a widely held view, that a given individual’s political liberties should not be considered valuable for that individual: he contends that political liberties do not achieve the ends that would give them such value. Then (starting at 35:21) Sinhababu presents his argument in favor of universal hedonism: he contends that emotional perception (which often seems contrary to hedonism) is unreliable, whereas phenomenal introspection (which he thinks supports hedonism) is reliable.
Related works
by Brennan:
“Political Liberty: Who Needs It?” (draft)
The Ethics of Voting (forthcoming)
with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty (2010)
“Polluting the Polls: When Citizens Should Not Vote” (2009)
by Sinhababu:
“The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism” (draft)
“Possible Girls” (2008)
Blog: The Ethical Werewolf
See also:
Juan Comesaña, “We Are (Almost) All Externalists Now” (2005)
Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision (1997)
Gelman, Silver, and Edlin, “What is the probability your vote will make a difference?” (2008)
More video:
Jason Brennan’s diavlogs (BhTV)
Neil Sinhababu and Jesse Bering (BhTV)
[display_podcast]Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
April 15, 2017, 12:27 AM GMT / Updated April 15, 2017, 12:27 AM GMT By Andrew Rafferty
Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said Friday that North Korea poses a cyber-threat to the United States but a military strike from the nuclear power is unlikely amid escalating tensions between the two nations.
“In the case of North Korea, you know, a kinetic threat (missile attack) against the United States right now I don't think is likely, but certainly a cyber-threat,” Kelly told NBC News’ Chuck Todd.
“We would raise various threat levels in the event that something happened and we felt as though that there was a possible threat,” he added. "You always want to caution on the side of — come down on the side of caution."
The full interview with Kelly will air on NBC News’ “Meet The Press” on Sunday.
Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea are near a boiling point over the communist nation’s nuclear program.
Leaders in Pyongyang have announced a "big event" is coming soon, which U.S. officials believe could be a sixth nuclear test.
Senior U.S. military officials told NBC News they were prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons if they learned North Korea would carry out a nuclear weapons test. The U.S. positioned two destroyers in the region, with one 300 miles from the nuclear test site.
North Korean leaders this week declared they would “hit the U.S. first” with a nuclear weapon if they felt threatened. Officials promised a "merciless retaliatory strike" against the U.S. if signs pointed to American military action.
Despite its nuclear capabilities, military officials say North Korea does not have the technology to strike the U.S. with a weapon of mass destruction. They do, however, threaten U.S. allies like South Korea.Common belief holds that Hank's case against Walt in Breaking Bad is composed almost entirely of circumstantial evidence. He seeks a statement from Skyler, telling her that he has "bits and pieces" but needs her help to get the whole picture. Hank is limited by what he's been able to piece together from several case files, but we, as viewers, have seen the story entire. With that in mind, what does Hank know, and is it enough to put Heisenberg away for good?
Let's recap: Hank's investigation started with Krazy-8 and his cousin Emilio, the first big break for Walter White. As Hank revealed, he was a DEA informant that would sell out the competition and then scoop up their clientele. His last piece of information was on Captain Cook (and his cousin Emilio, just for completion's sake). As we know, Captain Cook was Jesse Pinkman. At the scene of their disappearance, Hank found Krazy-8's car, evidence of a meth cook, and a gas mask from Walt's school. This led him to investigate Walt's chemistry storeroom, where he found a massive amount of beakers and flasks missing. He jokes with Walt about people beginning to suspect him, and then makes an arrest in the form of "Huge" Hugo, the janitor who happened to have a small amount of marijuana in his car.
From there, Gonzo and No-Doz, Tuco's henchmen of dubious intelligence, were brought to Hank's attention. While investigating Tuco, he discovers Jesse Pinkman's car and hauls him in for questioning. Unfortunately, he doesn't manage to make anything stick before Jesse slips free. But then he catches a break. Brandon "Badger" Mayhew gets caught trying to sell Blue Sky to an undercover police officer, and agrees to sell out Heisenberg. Unfortunately again, Walt and Jesse, through Saul Goodman, have hired James Edward Kilkelly, a man who likes prison more than freedom, to take the fall for him. Hank's investigation is stymied yet again.
But then, dropped right into his lap, is Gale Boetticher. Here at last, he catches a big break. And, with help from Walt, comes to the conclusion that Gale wasn't Heisenberg, merely aping his work. From there, he gets on the trail of Gustavo Fring, and blows that whole operation out of the water. He even finds the laundry that housed the superlab, though Walt drives them into traffic to keep him from discovering it.
And then, after Gus's death? The laptop is wiped clean. Michael Ehrmantraut stonewalls their every attempt at intimidation and finally drops off the map. Then, Walt orchestrates his masterpiece and murders every witness they had slated to testify. Finally, of course, he gets his luckiest break of all and finds the link between Walter White and Gale Boetticher — the copy of Leaves of Grass inscribed in Walter White's bathroom.
Then, of course, there's the spectacular(ly comical) break-in at the chemical factory. Jesse and Walt manage to steal an entire oil drum of methylamine, and also get themselves filmed doing it. Hank watches it again with fresh eyes after catching on to Walt, and you can see the realization in his eyes.
In short, it's been a long string of close-calls and near-misses, with each move hampered by Walt. In hindsight, Hank's able to spot the breadcrumbs. But will he be able to put them together? The pieces are there to be put together, there's no doubt about that. All it's going to take is a little police work. And Hank Schraeder's shown he's not averse to a little leg work. Even when his legs didn't work.
To make sense of all this, we called up former federal prosecutor Moe Fodeman, -- now on the other side, defending those accused of white collar crimes. He's seen plenty of action over the years, including U.S. vs. Ronnell Wilson, who was tried for murdering two NYPD offers in a botched illegal-gun buy, and prosecuting renowned defense lawyer Robert Simels for conspiring to silence witnesses through money and violence. Here, Foderman weighs in on Hank's chances of capturing the elusive Walter White.
1. Hank should know: Circumstantial evidence can be a powerful tool.
"Prosecutors tell jurors all the time that circumstantial evidence can be more powerful than direct evidence. Direct evidence is evidence that someone saw something, heard something, or smelled something. Circumstantial evidence is evidence that requires one to make an additional leap about the significance of that evidence. You're offering some fact and from the fact, you're asking a juror to draw an inference. Judges frequently explain the difference to jurors this way: Direct evidence is "I saw it raining." Circumstantial evidence is you're in a closed courtroom and someone walks in with a soaking-wet umbrella. You didn't see it raining, no one told you it was raining, but it's a pretty good inference to make that it's raining out. It's an easy leap. A defendant's finger prints at the scene of the burglary can be strong circumstantial evidence that the he committed the burglary — after all, why else would his fingerprints be at the scene? But if the defendant had been a guest in the apartment before, the evidence of his fingerprints being in the apartment isn't nearly as significant, and the inference that he's the burglar is much weaker. Bottom line is that circumstantial evidence can be weak or powerful. It all depends on how strong is the evidence the fact exists and and how strong is the inference to be drawn from that fact."
Advantage: Hank
2. The handwriting connection lacks science... which Breaking Bad is wholly concerned with.
"As a prosecutor, I used handwriting experts a lot and it's routinely admitted in court. But it's not science like DNA. The expert is making a judgment as to whether two writings are a match or not. So the first question is: Is it a match? The second question is, if you believe that it is a match, what is the significance of the fact that this handwriting matches? Just like the fingerprints at a crime scene, a handwriting match can be incredibly significant, or it can be irrelevant depending on the circumstances."
Advantage: Walt
3. The only person left who could flip on Walt is Pinkman. Hank needs Jesse to turn if he wants this method of prosecuting.
"Federal criminal cases are often made by using accomplice testimony. Agents get the goods on one guy, convince him that the only way to save himself is by cooperating with law enforcement and testifying against his partners in crime. Once the 'cooperator,' as they're commonly referred to in the business, flips, then the rest of the case is about corroborating the cooperator's story and showing the jury this admitted criminal isn't just making stuff up about the defendant to save his own skin. That's a typical federal case. The problem for law enforcement is it's not always to easy to get the goods on the first guy, and even when you do, it's sometimes even harder to get a criminal to switch teams."
Advantage: Hank (only if he can get Jesse to turn)
4. Hank's little breadcrumbs could be enough to bring Walt down.
"Not all criminal cases have an accomplice, or an eyewitness, pointing the finger at the defendant saying that's the man who did it. Sometimes, prosecutors prove their case by piecing together pieces of circumstantial evidence which, when taken collectively, establish guilt. Maybe there's an innocent explanation for one of these facts, maybe two of them, prosecutors argue, but, at some point, coincidence after coincidence after coincidence has to be proof beyond a reasonable doubt. These little pieces of a puzzle would never all point at the defendant unless he was in fact guilty. No eye-witness, no one saying I did it with this guy, but little pieces that all add up. That can be a powerful case and people are convicted of it all the time. Just ask Scott Peterson — he's on death row for killing his wife and nobody testified they saw him do it. But between the inconsistent stories to the police and family members, strange behavior after the crime, an affair with another woman, other pieces of evidence, prosecutors convinced a jury that taken together, it proved him guilty."
Advantage: Hank
5. Walt's hands-on, small-operation approach could be his demise.
"Usually a high-level, successful drug-lord is never getting his hands dirty. He's not handling drugs or money himself. You're not going to have him delivering drugs to an undercover officer or informant, and you're not going to catch him on surveillance video with drugs or money. If he's good, he's only dealing with his top lieutenants and those closest to him. These drug lords are smart. They insulate themselves so they're not interacting with the whole organization. They're ultra-careful on the telephone and change their phones frequently, in case law enforcement is listening. Usually, in the end of the day, to get the highest-level people in a drug organization, it goes back to getting an insider to flip."
Advantage: Hank
6. Walt's cover-ups and pattern of weird behavior could easily come to bite him in the ass.
"Some of the most powerful evidence in a criminal case can be a defendant's attempt to cover his tracks and obstruct the investigation. I was involved in an insider-trading case recently where soon after a defendant learned he was under investigation, the FBI surveilled him eating his cell phone's SIM card. You generally don't do that unless you did something wrong. A suspect's change in behavior, his attempts to conceal evidence, or obstruct the investigation in some way, can be strong circumstantial evidence of guilt. It's not the behavior of an innocent person."
Advantage: Hank
Conclusion: After listening to an actual expert break down how cases really operate, it's clear that Hank has more than enough pieces to bring down Walt, the video surveillance tape being a pretty damning piece of evidence. But how Hank goes about collecting all these nuggets will be telling for Walt's future. It's the family connection that's going to make it tough for Hank; as much as Breaking Bad is a show about morality, power, becoming evil, and mortality — it's rooted in familial loyalty in strange, roundabout ways.
PLUS: A Lot More Breaking Bad on Esquire.com >>This is bound to cause a stir. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the influential Kaspersky security firm today made the comment that will rile some: “I think they [Apple] are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” he said. But that is only the beginning. He went on to say that:
For many years I’ve been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It’s always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms.
Mac security has been recently thrust into the public discourse as several flaps have turned into real stories. The Flashback malware hit a huge number of machines, with TNW reporting later on that some 650,000 Mac machines still had the bad code. Even more, a new study out has some rather stark figures, from the perspective that Macs are invulnerable: One in five Mac computers carry Windows malware but only 2.7% harbor Mac OS X malware.
Now, 2.7%, how bad is that? Not too bad I would say, but Kaspersky sees this as a growing problem, just waiting for exploitation:
Cyber criminals have now recognised that Mac is an interesting area. Now we have more, it’s not just Flashback or Flashfake. Welcome to Microsoft’s world, Mac. It’s full of malware.
Yes, I use PCs, but I’m not trying to stir up another boring argument. The fact is that Macs are likely set to attract more negative attention, as Kaspersky noted, when they reach higher market share numbers. That is just common sense. What is perhaps a bit unsettling is how Kaspersky described Apple’s progress on the security front.
Microsoft has learned the hard way in this area, it is well-known. Security problems bugged Microsoft software for years, and the firm paid for it in consumer sentiment and mindshare. It was expensive, in many ways. But the company, with its Security Essentials product and more robust Windows 7 operating system, has turned the tide.
Mac’s turn next to live that gauntlet? I wouldn’t say so. I expect Apple to realize, and address the issues quickly; I doubt this will get out of hand. However, if you do run OS X daily, some common sense and perhaps even some security software would not hurt.
Read next: Play World of Warcraft, get the person of your dreams? Well, there's one stipulation...Kevin Spacey arrives at the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on Monday, Aug. 25, 2014, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
By one very important measure, Netflix looked like a big loser at Monday night's Emmy Awards.
The streaming network had been nominated for 31 Primetime Emmys, but walked away from the most important categories empty-handed. The company reportedly spent more than $100 million to produce its marquee original shows "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black," which were bested by "Breaking Bad" and "Modern Family" in the Outstanding Drama and Comedy series categories, respectively.
The New York Times hailed last night's awards show as "a win for broadcast and cable television," which is widely considered to be having a sort of new golden age.
Yet not all is lost for Netflix. The Emmys are basically a huge marketing opportunity for television, prompting people to watch shows they may have missed the first time around. New audiences are likely to watch Emmy winners like "Sherlock," "Scandal," "Louie," "American Horror Story" and, of course, "Breaking Bad," which scored five Emmys Monday night -- so a good night at the Emmys, driving demand for quality programming, could send new customers to Netflix.
And perhaps even more importantly, Netflix helped to create that good night at the Emmys. The service, which allows people to catch up on past seasons of shows, also helps keep great programming in circulation.
Netflix doesn't release viewership data, but third-party researcher SimilarWeb said that "Breaking Bad" was the most popular show on Netflix last year. Vince Gilligan, the show's creator, has even attributed the success of his show about a high school science teacher-turned-meth dealer to Netflix. "I think Netflix kept us on the air," he told reporters after last year's Emmy Awards, according to Variety. "Not only are we standing up here (with the Emmy), I don't think our show would have even lasted beyond Season 2... It's a new era in television, and we've been very fortunate to reap the benefits."
That new era of television has dawned in part because technology allows consumers to watch -- and binge-watch -- whenever they want. Consumer time spent watching video on the Internet -- through Netflix, YouTube, HBO Go, Amazon Prime Instant Video, and Hulu -- is up 54 percent this year, according to Nielsen.
Many popular new shows, including "House of Cards," "Mad Men" and "True Detective," have succeeded in part because viewers can pause, rewind and watch multiple episodes in one sitting from almost anywhere.
That ubiquitous availability has also helped HBO's hit shows and movies, including Emmy winners and nominees like "Game of Thrones," "Silicon Valley," "Veep" and "The Normal Heart." HBO Go, HBO's streaming platform, has grown 40 percent in the last year to 11.3 million registered accounts in the U.S.
Broadcast networks like NBC and ABC have also joined the trend, making current seasons of their shows available on-demand, according to USA Today. Rentrak, a media measurement company, says that video-on-demand viewership is up 122 percent since 2010.
Investors didn't seem to mind that Netflix didn't win awards in the major categories Monday night (to be fair, the company took home seven awards). The stock closed Tuesday at $479.36, near its all-time high.The 10,000th Syrian Refugee Has Arrived in the U.S.
LOOK: Breathtaking Wedding Photos Show Couple on Active Volcano
A reindeer mass death has scientists in Norway scratching their heads.
Officials said a lightning strike killed 323 reindeer on a mountain plateau. Experts don't know if the reindeer were killed in a single strike or multiple. It's common for the animals to huddle together during a storm.
Lightning strike kills more than 300 reindeer in Norway https://t.co/AVXHabznmm pic.twitter.com/fK63D8i56Y — KOKH FOX 25 (@OKCFOX) August 29, 2016
The creatures were found piled on top of each other, many with their antlers tangled, in the isolated area. Five of them were found alive but injured, and had to be shot. 70 calves were among the dead.
A spokesman for the country's environmental agency said it's not unusual for animals to be killed by lightning, but this was an unusually large number.
"We've never had anything like this with lightning," Kjartan Knutsen said.
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Apartment Residents Warned About Clown Trying to Lure Kids into WoodsJanuary 2
Hey Huntresses and Huntsmen! The end of 2018 was a wild ride; we launched Bendy and the Ink Machine to console, hit some major game development milestones on our unannounced project, and have been laying the ground work for a whole slough of new community projects and focused content (our new Community Discord, Community Beta site, weekly streams, weekly community game nights, Office Hours, watch parties, etc!) Interested in joining the new Discord? Jump into the conversation HERE at the Official RT Games Discord: https://discord.gg/kf2BfjX As for the new RWBY: Grimm Eclipse update, we ran into a few snags with compatability issues between the older version of Unity that was used to create the game and the version used in the outset to create the new DLC (which caused some bugs, ie the dark screen that was patched when the Unity version was rolled back.) This created a few additional complications with our port and a lot of work for our dev team and third party partners on top of trying to balance this against our other projects. We are happy to tell you the new content should be available to consoles this upcoming month! Once we flip the switch on PS4 and Xbox One, we will also be rolling out the new game mode on all three platforms!It's been a wild ride and lots of learning, juggling priorities and growth for our team. We are SO excited to FINALLY put this in your hands and are very grateful to everyone who has shown as so much patience, understanding, and support.Please watch Twitter and the Community Discord for the fastest way to receive updates and news! We hope the new year treats you well and is filled with wonderful games and gaming experiences.Thanks again, and we'll see you back on Remnant in no time!!!On July 14 the first official game of 2015/2016 season will take place at Chornomorets Stadium in Odesa.
Champions of Ukraine and national cup holders FC Dynamo Kyiv will face FC Shakhtar Donetsk.
The match will start at 21:00.
FC Dynamo Kyiv
2014/2015 Ukrainian Premier League: 1st place (20 wins, 6 draws)
Best striker in 2014/2015 Ukrainian Premier League: Artem Kravets (15 goals)
Best assistants in 2014/2015 Ukrainian Premier League: Jeremain Lens, Andriy Yarmolenko (11 assists each)
2014/2015 Ukrainian Cup: cup holders (6 wins, 2 draws, goal difference – 13:3)
Sparrings during summer break: Universitatea Craiova (2:0), Legia Warsaw (0:0), Skënderbeu Korçë (3:0), Eintracht Braunschweig (2:1), Fortuna Düsseldorf (1:0), Viktoria Plzeň (match not finished)
Transfers during summer break –
joined the team: mf. Petrovic (Gençlerbirliğ), mf. Moroziuk, fw. Moraes (both – FC Metalurh Donetsk), gk. Koval, mf. Miakushko (both – return after loan move)
left the team: mf. Haruna (Anzhi Makhachkala), mf. Kalytvyntsev (FC Chornomorets Odesa, loan move), df. Betao (contract expired)
Doers speak
Aleksandar Dragovic, defender: “Victories in sparrings give us confidence. Still it doesn’t matter whether we win these games or lose. We must win on July 14”.
Mykola Moroziuk, midfielder: “I think the game will be difficult for both sides. I guess we are moving in the right direction, so we’ll get ready for the match and succeed”.
Artem Kravets, striker: “We want to win every competition. Of course our aim is to win the trophy. Super Cup is very prestigious in Ukraine”.
FC Shakhtar Donetsk
2014/2015 Ukrainian Premier League: 2nd place (17 wins, 5 draws, 4 defeats)
Best striker in 2014/2015 Ukrainian Premier League: Alex Teixeira (17 goals)
Best assistant in 2014/2015 Ukrainian Premier League: Luiz Adriano (10 assists)
2014/2015 Ukrainian Cup: runners-up (6 wins, 2 draws, goal difference – 14:3)
Sparrings during summer break: Neftchi Baku (1:0), Skënderbeu Korçë (2:0), Eintracht Braunschweig (1:2), Legia Warsaw (0:0), Monaco (3:0), Sion (2:3), Basel (3:1)
Transfers during summer break –
joined the team: fw. Eduardo (Flamengo), df. Sobol, mf. Kobin, mf. Hryn, mf. Malyshev, mf. Bolbat, mf. Karavayev, fw. Ferreyra (all – return after loan move)
left the team: fw. Douglas Costa (Bayern Munich), mf. Fernando (Sampdoria), fw. Luiz Adriano (Milan), mf. Ilsinho
Doers speak
Yaroslav Rakytskyi, defender: “Considering our sparrings, I’m sure we’ll reach our best conditions by July 14. We have to win the Super Cup”.
Alex Teixeira, midfielder: “We have to win the trophy! Last season Shakhtar lost in the domestic league and national cup. I’ve never lost in Odesa before. Victory will be a great start of new season”.
Olexandr Hladkyi, striker: “It’s good we won the last starring of the training camp. That gives us confidence”.
Copyright © 2015 FC Dynamo KyivThe news: This is Phoenix Coldon.
Image Credit: Madame Noire
On Dec. 18, 2011, she drove her 1998 Chevy Blazer out of her family driveway in St. Louis County, Mo., at 3 p.m. Three hours later, the vehicle was found at an intersection 25 minutes away in East St. Louis. The driver's door was open, the car was empty and the engine was still running.
Phoenix was 23 years old. She hasn't been seen or heard from since.
Image Credit: Google Maps
The Coldons commemorated their daughter's 26th birthday on May 23, a bittersweet moment considering the circumstances. But her disappearance represents a much larger problem: As of today, more than 64,000 black women remain missing across the United States.
Background: The Daily Mail explored this phenomenon in early 2012, and recently reposted their story to draw new attention to the issue. The statistics, in addition to others published by the FBI and the nonprofit Black and Missing Foundation, paint a grim picture of race and disappearance in America.
Image Credit: Daily Mail (Note: Image is from 2012)
The numbers: Despite representing 12.85% of the population, black Americans accounted for nearly 226,000 — or 34% — of all missing persons reported in 2012. According to the FBI's National Crime Information Center, the comparison with other racial groups is unfavorable: Whites and Hispanics are a combined 80.1% of the population, but account for 60% of missing persons.
This is especially troubling when you break down the numbers by age. Black and Missing reports that 37% of missing minors and 28.2% of missing adults in 2013 were black. No fewer than 270,000 minorities have gone missing since 2010, 135,000 of whom were black and 64,000 were black women, according to the Atlanta Black Star.
Image Credit: Black and Missing Foundation
It gets worse: The reasons for these disappearances vary, and cannot all be attributed to foul play. But a telling pattern emerges in how they're documented by the media, with critics citing a stark racial divide in news coverage of such incidents.
Essence points to a 2010 report titled "Missing Children in National News Coverage," which found that while black children accounted for 33.2% of missing children that year, the media exposure rate was an unimpressive 19.5%. While black men go missing at statistically higher rates, coverage of black female disappearances is particularly telling in light of the attention similar stories get when white women are involved.
"If you Google 'Natalee Holloway,' how many impressions would you get?" Black and Missing cofounder Natalie Wilson told ABC News last year. "If you Google 'Unique Harris,' who's missing from D.C., the story is not the same."
Image Credit: AP
She added, "We cannot wait until the news cycle. We have to get this information out right away. Our people deserve to be found. We deserve awareness so that their families can get closure."
The reasons: Natalie and her sister Derrica Wilson started the Black and Missing Foundation in 2008 specifically to raise awareness and provide resources, advocacy and pressure around this issue. Derrica has a background in law enforcement. Among the reasons she cites for disproportionate black disappearance figures are poor training and dismissive attitudes.
"I spent six months at the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Training Academy in Ashburn, Va., where we had only two hours of training on missing persons cases," she told Essence. "In the field, I've seen a majority of black missing children classified as runaways, who don't get Amber Alerts."
Plus: "For black adults, police usually link their disappearances to criminal activity, so they aren't valued as much. Training needs to be enhanced so police forces know how to handle these cases."
Natalie told the Daily Mail that lack of newsroom diversity also skews the way black missing persons are covered by the media. And while the plight of missing black women has received more coverage of late (albeit notably through international cases, like the 276 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in April), it's still not nearly at a conscionable level.
So many remain missing: The families of girls and women like Relisha Rudd, Kamira Baxter, Cerra Lapsley, Makayla Randall and many others still anguish over their missing loved ones. Phoenix Coldon's family has spent their entire life savings and countless hours searching, posting flyers, distributing mailers, maintaining a Facebook page and appearing on TV and radio shows in a relentless effort to find their daughter.
"Some people say that they are impressed with our efforts to find Phoenix," mother Goldia Coldon told the Huffington Post. "But I feel that we have not done enough... I don't know what else to do."
As the numbers clearly indicate, the Coldons are not alone. And so the search continues.Eyes front, drummer boy! Lucky Rutgers marching band gets a fantasy evening with Victoria's Secret models
Rutgers drummers told of appearance on annual Victoria's Secret runway show in August
Group of 15 students - 14 males and just one female - have been practicing for months
Drummers enjoyed taking photos and chatting to Victoria's Secret models, as well as Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy, in New York on Wednesday night
The male members of Rutgers University drum line couldn't believe their ears when they learned they were going to appear with a bevy of supermodels in recording the Victoria's Secret fashion show.
Things got even better on Wednesday night when they got to spend time and take photos with the celebrated models, as well as musicians Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy.
And the amusing snaps taken by some of the students during the filming of the annual runway event, to be screened in December, show their cheeky disbelief.
Scroll down for video
Dream night out! Rutgers drummer Paul Nalesnik posed for this amusing shot with Victoria's Secret model
Proud: The Rutgers drum line started the annual runway show in full military regalia
Smiles: Several members of the Rutgers University Marching Scarlet Knights posed with models during Wednesday's event
Timothy Smith, director of the Rutgers University Marching Scarlet Knights, told NJ.com of the moment he told the drummers about the performance request back in August.
'I asked a group of 18- to 21-year-old mostly male students if they'd be interested in performing at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show,' Smith said. 'They didn't wait a nanosecond to say, 'Of course!''
On Wednesday the students discovered that the models have to pass the door of their dressing room to get to the runway and didn't waste any time in saying hello.
The group of 15 students consisted of 14 males and one female.
Drummer Paul Nalesnik was one of several who got his photo taken with a lingerie model and his face says it all. Nalesnik quickly made this his Facebook profile picture.
Show: Models (left to right) Magdalena Frackowiak, Lily Aldridge, Karlie Kloss, Doutzen Kroes, Adriana Lima, Candice Swanepoel, Behati Prinsloo, Lindsay Ellingson, and Alessandra Ambrosio dazzled on the runway
Union Jack: The band performed as a 'British Invasion' themed section of the show
Pricey: Candice Swanepoel got the glory of the opening look, wearing a $10 million bra decorated with diamonds, rubies and sapphires that was cleverly dubbed the 'Crown Jewels'
Several grinning members of the Marching Scarlet Knights posed with models during Wednesday's event.
'The girls stopped and wanted to have their pictures taken with our guys,' Smith continued. 'They were so nice and enthusiastic. The same for Taylor Swift.
'She (said), 'Hey, how are you doing? Good luck.' I had hoped it was going to be a good experience, but my goodness, this totally exceeded my expectations,' the director told the website.
Rutgers Marching Scarlet Knights reportedly got the rare invite to appear on the show through one of Smith's contacts.
The drum line kicked off the show in military dress appearing as part of one of the British Invasion theme. They had spent several months practicing and preparing for the show.
VIP: The band got plenty of attention, including from a make-up artist
Inspection: The band going on the runway
The Victoria's Secret Angels worked their magic on the catwalk, weaving between chart-toppers Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy, and some fancy sets and stage tricks, yet somehow keeping the spotlight mostly on themselves.
Swift donned a Union Jack costume and a sparkly silver mini-dress, but she never put on the lingerie that makes this annual fashion show so famous.
She did give a lively performance of I Knew You Were Trouble that got the crowd at the Lexington Avenue Armory on its feet.
Favorite models Karlie Kloss, Joan Smalls, Alessandra Ambrosio and Doutzen Kroes paraded in outfits that fitted the other themes of Snow Angels, Shipwrecked, Parisian Nights, Pink Network and Birds of Paradise.
Glamor: Model Izabel Goulart walks the runway at the 2013 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show (left) while Cara Delevingne appeared as an English soccer player (right)
Performance: Taylor Swift donned a Union Jack costume and a sparkly silver mini-dress, but she never put on the lingerie that makes this annual fashion show so famous
At her fitting for her Psychedelic Angel costume, with hand-painted thigh-high boots and maybe the biggest wings of the show, Kloss said that while the garments are skimpy, they take months to make.
Candice Swanepoel got the glory of the opening look, wearing a $10 million bra decorated with diamonds, rubies and sapphires that was cleverly dubbed the 'Crown Jewels.'
She was quickly followed by Cara Delevingne as an English soccer player and Lily Aldridge, who often gets the good-girl outfits, as a punk in a tartan plaid skirt that no school would allow.This article is from the archive of our partner.
An economic researcher |
his style of play," Carroll said. "We love the way he is physical and aggressive and tough. So, you see C.J. come off because he really has special qualities that he can add to the third-down aspect to our offense. We’re hoping that the other guys can complement what we’re already getting from Thomas. Each guy has his stuff. We think we can fit that together.
"We’ll come to appreciate that even more, but I think the message of who we are and what we’re about has been Thomas. We’re really excited to continue to see that, and we’ll see if we can fit it together in a really special fashion. They are unique. These guys are not from the same mold, which we really appreciate."
The Seahawks might have drafted three running backs, but they expect second-year man Thomas Rawls to be the No. 1 option. Brace Hemmelgarn/USA TODAY Sports
Who we are and what we're about. Carroll's message was clear: Assuming health, Rawls is the Seahawks' primary ball-carrier.
He piled up 830 yards as a rookie, leading the NFL in yards per carry (5.65) and average yards after contact (2.68). That's key and part of what made Marshawn Lynch so special. Even if the blocking isn't great and Rawls is getting met in the backfield, he can still create positive yardage.
In the six games that Rawls started and finished, he averaged 21 carries, and he showed the coaches everything they wanted to see in his first season: Vision, toughness, smarts and ball security.
So why did the Seahawks draft three running backs, then?
One reason is what Carroll mentioned. They are different backs and will serve different roles. Prosise, for instance, was picked to be the third-down back and will spell Rawls on passing downs. It's the same setup as last year, except that Prosise replaces Fred Jackson.
Then there's the aspect that will be of interest to fantasy owners once August rolls around: Rawls' health. He suffered a season-ending ankle injury in December, and while the team expects him to be full-go by the time Week 1 rolls around, the Seahawks need a contingency plan. Last year, they had to play guys such as Bryce Brown and DuJuan Harris late in the season.
If Rawls suffers a setback or goes down with a different injury during the season, the Seahawks should have options. Prosise would probably see a bigger role, and Collins would get a chance to carry the bulk of the load depending on how the competition plays out this summer. Brooks and Christine Michael will likely be competing for roster spots.
Only two teams ran the ball more times than the Seahawks (500 attempts) in 2015, and that was with Russell Wilson leading the league in passer rating. Rawls' recovery from the ankle injury will be a major story line to watch this spring and summer, but if he's healthy, he's going to be the bellcow. And physically, if Rawls is close to where he was last season, he should be in store for a monster year.Bitcoin PR Buzz Bitcoin PR Buzz Accepts Ethereum for Press Release Services
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Images courtesy of Bitcoin PR Buzz, Ethereum.4-28-16 9:32 AM EST: Before I dig into the latest news doin's all up in here, just wanted you to see the new ad uploaded this morning by the Cruz Crew.
And for those of you already habituated into either not liking or not trusting Carly Fiorina for whatever reason, remember this. Ted Cruz has been riding all across this country with this woman, day after day, and week after week, and it very well could be, that in addition to the vetting he and his team have done, along with all that personal time with her, he just might have gotten to know her on a much deeper and meaningful level than you think you do.
However, if you'd like to continue judging her based on the cover an inner chapters you believe you see and can read, that's certainly your right...but is it right? You decide. I think she'll be a most effective firecracker, and so does Mr. Cruz.
Please donate if you can. Top right corner. No PayPal account required.UPDATED: Producer Jerry Bruckheimer reveals script issues behind the move, which follows the summer flop "The Lone Ranger": “We’re supposed to start [shooting] in March and you start spending a lot of money now.”
The next installment in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise will be delayed beyond its planned summer 2015 release date, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
PHOTOS: Big Stars, Big Bombs: A-Listers Fall Victim to Summer Box Office Flops
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer says the decision to push Pirates of Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which is set to return Johnny Depp to the Capt. Jack Sparrow role, was made because of script issues. He is hopeful that the film can be ready for summer 2016.
“We have an outline everyone loves but the script is not done,” Bruckheimer revealed in an exclusive interview with THR.
The move comes in the aftermath of The Lone Ranger's failure at the box office this summer. Disney has said that the $250 million-plus production from the team behind the Pirates movies could lead to a $190 million write down for the studio.
Asked whether the potential price tag of the next Pirates film played a role in the delay, Bruckheimer replies, “It’s all a factor. We want a script that everyone’s signed off on and a budget that everyone’s signed off on.” (Such projects have cost as much as $300 million in the past.) Coming up with a great script is “always hard,” Bruckheimer says, and after this summer, “everybody’s more cautious.” The summer saw several costly movies underperform.
Disney now hopes to keep the cost of the fifth Pirates movie under $200 million — a goal the studio is unlikely to meet. But bringing in Kon-Tiki directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, who made their film on the water for a price, should help keep costs down. Nonetheless, industry observers have anticipated a tough negotiation between Disney and Bruckheimer, given the size of the Lone Ranger write down.
PHOTOS: Johnny Depp's Life and Career in Pictures
Bruckheimer says it was necessary to push the project because “we’re supposed to start in March and you start spending a lot of money now.” According to the producer, the Pirates filmmakers weren’t happy with screenwriter Jeff Nathanson’s initial script, and he’s now at work on a second attempt based on the well-received outline. But Bruckheimer asks, “How do you budget an outline?”
A source says the studio thought the original Nathanson script "was too expensive but it was also really complicated and hard to follow."
Asked whether he’s still confident that the project will come together, Bruckheimer says, “With any movie, you’re never confident. But it’s a billion-dollar franchise.” The last Pirates movie, 2011’s On Stranger Tides, grossed $1.04 billion
Disney is flush with product so the studio is not pressuring for a start. And the summer of 2015 already is packed with major films, including Warner Bros.' tentatively-titled Batman vs. Superman, set to open one week after Pirates' original July 17 date. Disney's schedule for 2015 still includes Star Wars: Episode VII, another Avengers movie and a Pixar film, Inside Out.
Email: Kim.Masters@thr.com
Twitter: @KimMastersMarseille Tarot: Towards the Art of Reading, by Camelia Elias
EyeCorner Press, 9788792633422, 197 pp. (incl. references), 2015
It was Camelia Elias’ tarot blog, Tarotflexions, which first drew me to her work. Her observations there are smart and incisive, and her approach to tarot is quite different from mine, which means I’m always learning something new. Her essay in The Magiculum was one of the strongest in that collection, and I was excited to see a more focused effort on tarot, and this book certainly delivers.
Marseille Tarot focuses on Elias’ preferred deck, Carolus Zoya’s Tarot de Marseille, a deck created in Turin at the end of the 18th century. The book includes numerous full colour images, and the deck is based on a common Marseille pattern, so while this particular deck is unavailable for purchase, the insights provided here can easily be applied to any Marseille deck, or even other tarot patterns.
As I mentioned, Elias’ approach to tarot is quite different from mine, and understanding her background helped me ground my appreciation of the way she works with tarot. While my background is steeped in history and occult theory, Elias has a background in shamanism and Druidry, is a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, and is well versed in the logic of cunning folk magick. Cunning folk traditions are largely oral, and Elias uses a visual argument to determine a card’s meaning, its relationship to its neighbours, and follow its story. She works from the idea that “imposed meanings are not really as interesting as derived meanings,” and makes a conscious decision to steer clear of tarot history, and finds no benefit in “squaring off” against historical research of the cards.
In Elias’ practice, she doesn’t distinguish between the way she reads the tarot and regular playing cards, and where most tarot books tackle the trump cards, and then delve into the pips, with each card getting its own unique definition and description, Elias’ approach is more holistic. Each trump card does indeed come with an image from the Zoya Tarot de Marseille, keywords, function, health indicators, and list of public functions it could suggest when paired with other trump cards, and a brief three card reading, denoting how the cards interrelate, but the pips are another story.
Rather than provide individual descriptions for each of the pips and court cards, Elias gives broad descriptions for each suit, number, face card, and explains how each of these interrelate. The pip colour symbolism she describes is based on French-suited cards, with cups and coins deemed symbolically red, and swords and batons symbolically black. This is analogous to the cards in Italian playing cards and tarots where cups and coins are “round” or “female” suits, and swords and batons are “long” or “male” suits. The symbolic logic she presents is intuitive, for example, “Hearts and Coins are close to us; we hold them in our hand. Swords and batons create distance,” and I like its style. There’s an internal logic to the number symbolism she uses that I also like. Card reading becomes a sort of intuitive storytelling, and there’s a poetry to her style that I admire.
As a general rule, she uses a cunning folk method with visual cues from the cards to “find a way to own the image” she reads. In the event of conflict between the two, she sides with the image, and what’s happening with the cards, and deems veering from this “stubbornness and sheer dogmatism.” There’s certainly sense to that. Unusual correspondences are given for each suit: coins are equated with diamonds, and are associated with spring, fire, and the east; cups with hearts, summer, water, and the south; batons with clubs, autumn, air, and the west; and swords with spades, winter, earth, and the north. This will provide quite different interpretations to those found in most modern tarot decks, and may take some getting used to.
Elias raises the important question of agency in a reading, and her method for determining who has it, and how it’s being directed, comes from the positions of the figures on the cards, and visual observations that help build that narrative. Various spreads are offered, such as the French Cross and the Council of 13, though Elias finds more nuance in line readings, and makes a solid argument for their use. Elaborate spreads may look fancy, but if they don’t provide as much information to the client, then what use are they really? As she notes, the primary function of any reading is to uncover blind spots, and we each should do this in the best way we know how. She advises sticking to the cards, even when what they have to say isn’t very nice. It’s not for us, as readers, necessarily to determine how that plays out.
Elias takes interpretations in new directions, sees new things in the cards, specific to Zoya’s deck, but often relevant to other Tarots des Marseille, guided by intuition and a personal connection to the cards. Her three card readings give a synthesis of all three cards, rather than break them down one by one to examine them individually. As a result, the readings can be blunt, and while they’re rarely presented in the way I would to a client, each reader has their own style, and Elias’ style seems to suit her clients. She says,
If some don’t like what the cards suggest, they go home and change their situation. Some never want to heed attention and can feel downright insulted by the cards. To each their own. But the reader is not responsible for people’s feelings, for what people make of the reading, or for what they get out of it. The reader is responsible for delivering a useful statement, and for staying on track and true to the cards. If clarifications are asked for, the reader is also responsible for trying to make things clear. Is there one precise sentence that gathers the essence of the cards on the table? Then fling it. Demonstrate how what you say is useful.
Being useful is a primary goal in my readings too, but I have a different approach, and instead follow Austin Osman Spare’s method, as outlined in Two Tracts on Cartomancy, where he, as the reader, decides what information is useful to impart, and how.
Likewise, when Elias says, “As modern card readers are rediscovering old traditions, some are quite excited at the idea that one can actually read the Tarot without always having to lecture on each individual card and how it might relate to the tree of life, ceremonial magic, or astrology. “ I would agree, but suggest that while card readers can become familiar with these associations and base their readings on them, they don’t necessarily have to share this basis for interpretation with their clients any more than those who read in a cunning folk style have to share their basis for interpretation. This comes down more to the style of reading and sharing information, rather than necessarily the basis for the associations being made.
For today’s tarot readers, overwhelmed with a variety of choice in the rich symbolism available in contemporary decks, the Tarot de Marseille may seem opaque: trumps that tell a story we’ve forgotten, court cards with little relatable political significance, and pips devoid of scenes and figures. And yet these very factors that distance it also keep it clean, and provide a unique opportunity to get back to basics. In Marseille Tarot, Camelia Elias’s stripped down approach does just that. The clear, direct style of her cunning folk method is refreshingly devoid of the overwrought mysticism that often obscures more historical and occult approaches to tarot, and is definitely worth exploring.
Footnotes:Generalization from previous experiences to new situations is a hallmark of intelligent behavior and a prerequisite for category learning. It has been proposed that category learning in humans relies on multiple brain systems that compete with each other, including an explicit, rule-based system and an implicit system. Given that humans are biased to follow rule-based strategies, a counterintuitive prediction of this model is that other animals, in which this rule-based system is less developed, might generalize better to new stimuli in implicit category-learning tasks that are not rule-based. To test this prediction, rats and humans were trained in rule-based and information-integration category-learning tasks with visual stimuli. The generalization performance of rats and humans was equal in rule-based categorization, but rats outperformed humans on generalization in the information-integration task. The performance of rats was consistent with a nondimensional, similarity-based categorization strategy. These findings illustrate through a comparative approach that the bias toward rule-based strategies can impede humans' performance on generalization tasks.Salon has been repeatedly enticing its Twitter following today to click through to the site to read how the “bizarro” story of George Zimmerman heroically helping rescue a family of four from an overturned SUV just days after his acquittal is “falling apart.”
Looks like the bizarro story of George Zimmerman rescuing people from a car crash is falling apart. http://t.co/zr9bVm2m4v — Salon.com (@Salon) July 27, 2013
Fact-checking the story about George Zimmerman's heroic car-crash rescue — and it doesn't seem to add up. http://t.co/znZy2iFVSG — Salon.com (@Salon) July 27, 2013
There are growing holes in George Zimmerman's car-crash/hero story — and lots of people asking questions. http://t.co/ebxRZOlcWl — Salon.com (@Salon) July 27, 2013
Is George Zimmerman's heroic car crash rescue just another lie? Lots of people are puncturing holes in his story. http://t.co/rbOlvzQA27 — Salon.com (@Salon) July 27, 2013
OK, we’ll click! Salon must have some pretty damning evidence proving that the whole thing was set up to help rehabilitate Zimmerman’s image. Maybe it’s this bit:
One blog advancing the conspiracy narrative that went viral posted screen shots of what appears to be the Facebook page of the officer who responded to the crash, which shows that he posted numerous photos and messages supporting Zimmerman days before and after the accident. … That conspiracy blog even claims that it has a source, whom it does not identify, who saw phone records showing that the officer alerted Zimmerman about the crash before authorities arrived so Zimmerman could end up in the police report and look like a hero. We asked the unnamed blogger for more info about his or source, but the blogger didn’t respond.
LOL. So-called publication http://t.co/RnC2lHFheQ says Zimmerman rescue story's "falling apart," cites unnamed blogger citing unnamed source — Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) July 27, 2013
Quite a bombshell! To be fair, we doubt reporter Alex Seitz-Wald was responsible for the tweets promoting his story, which also notes that the family that Zimmerman allegedly assisted, by choosing not to speak to the press, has only “helped fuel the conspiracy narrative.” As a friend of the family explained to the Daily Mail, however, the family is afraid to come forward for fear of being targeted by mobs. “There are a lot of crazies out there. If they say anything in support of him it could backfire,” she noted.
Speaking of backfiring, Salon’s bait-and-switch hasn’t gone unnoticed.
So is @Salon part of the Zimmerman truther crowd? They don't think he rescued a family?!?!? -> http://t.co/DGihGwNhW9 — Mary Chastain (@mchastain81) July 27, 2013
Not what the story says MT @Salon bizarro story of George Zimmerman rescuing people from car crash is falling aparthttp://t.co/nxTiTuoad0 — John Flowers (@MrJohnFlowers) July 27, 2013
https://twitter.com/Closetrighty/status/361154792514535426
Is George Zimmerman an alien bounty hunter? Without proof, the answer is unequivocally "YES". @Salon — Dr. Kankokage (@kankokage) July 27, 2013
Theorists will speculate for ages on what really happened at the Zimmerman car crash..We may never read a police report and find out! @salon — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) July 27, 2013
https://twitter.com/LeftyBollocks/status/361234602729275393
@Salon I'm not surprised; there were "growing holes" in George Zimmerman's "TM the aggressor story", as well. — Mary (@mryfrtsn) July 27, 2013Denis McDonough (Michael Bonfigli/Christian Science Monitor)
White House chief of staff Denis McDonough pushed back against the notion his president is played out in the wake of his last State of the Union address, promising “audacious executive action” in Barack Obama’s final year in office.
During a breakfast with reporters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, McDonough responded to the observation that the president’s final speech before Congress lacked the usual pledge to “go it alone” if lawmakers failed to act. Coupled with the feeble executive actions on gun control announced earlier this month, had President Obama rethought the utility of acting unilaterally on issues important to the White House?
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“We’ll do audacious executive action over the course of the rest of the year, I’m confident of that,” said McDonough, explaining that President Obama’s decision not to outline specific executive actions was more about a commitment to process than a lack of willpower.
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“Process is your friend, but process also dictates what you can do,” McDonough said. “And we do want to make sure that the executive actions we undertake are not left hanging out there, subject to Congress undoing them.”
In addition to gun control, the White House has expressed interest in further unilateral actions on immigration reform, and in working around Congress to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay. But McDonough said the White House is considering executive action on any and all issues, and that the main question President Obama plans to ask himself is “Why not?”
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“And so that’s the spirit through which we’ll approach this last year,” McDonough said.A new test server patch has been released. Honestly, the biggest and most jarring change is the image above, which is the new MapleStory icon! RIP to the original icon. 😦
There’s a few other additions, but this patch is mainly events, which I won’t cover until they come to the official server next week.
Maple Achievements
The Achievement Renew feature has been added. On the My Achievements page, you can press the Renew button to update the progress of certain achievements. When new achievements are added, you can use it once per character.
You can only use this feature in towns and while your achievements are renewing, you will not be able to do anything else.
New achievements have been added.
Growth
Stat [Ability] Unlock 3 Ability slots (10) [Ability] Achieve Epic rank after resetting your Ability (20) [Ability] Achieve Unique rank after resetting your Ability (30) [Ability] Achieve Legendary rank after resetting your Ability (40) [Ability] Acquire the following Abilities (100) +1 attack speed stage increase 50% buff duration increase 30 attack/magic attack 20% item drop rate increase 20% meso rate increase +1 monsters hit on mobbing skills [Ability] Consume a total of 1,000,000 Honor (10) [Ability] Consume a total of 10,000,000 Honor (20) [Ability] Consume a total of 100,000,000 Honor (30)
Job
Story Complete the Adventurer’s Book (20) Complete the Dual Blader story quests (20) Complete the Cygnus Knight story quests (20) Complete the Resistance story quests (20) Complete the Zero story quests (20) Complete the Aran story quests (20) Complete the Mercedes story quests (20) Complete the Luminous story quests (20) Complete the Evan story quests (20) Complete the Eunwol story quests (20) Complete the Phantom story quests (20) Complete the Mikhail story quests (20) Complete the Kinesis story quests (20) Complete the Xenon story quests (20) Complete the Kaiser story quests (20) Complete the Angelic Buster story quests (20) Complete the Demon story quests (20) Complete the Cadena story quests (20) Complete the Illium story quests (20)
Skill Achieve level 1 Mikhail’s Soul Driver (30) Achieve level 2 Mikhail’s Soul Driver (30) Achieve level 3 Mikhail’s Soul Driver (30) Achieve level 4 Mikhail’s Soul Driver (40) Achieve level 5 Mikhail’s Soul Driver (40) Achieve level 1 Oz’s Flame Gear (30) Achieve level 2 Oz’s Flame Gear (30) Achieve level 3 Oz’s Flame Gear (30) Achieve level 4 Oz’s Flame Gear (40) Achieve level 5 Oz’s Flame Gear (40) Achieve level 1 Irena’s Wind Piercing (30) Achieve level 2 Irena’s Wind Piercing (30) Achieve level 3 Irena’s Wind Piercing (30) Achieve level 4 Irena’s Wind Piercing (40) Achieve level 5 Irena’s Wind Piercing (40) Achieve level 1 Icarut’s Vampire (30) Achieve level 2 Icarut’s Vampire (30) Achieve level 3 Icarut’s Vampire (30) Achieve level 4 Icarut’s Vampire (40) Achieve level 5 Icarut’s Vampire (40) Achieve level 1 Hawkeye’s Shark Wave (30) Achieve level 2 Hawkeye’s Shark Wave (30) Achieve level 3 Hawkeye’s Shark Wave (30) Achieve level 4 Hawkeye’s Shark Wave (40) Achieve level 5 Hawkeye’s Shark Wave (40) Acquire the Empress’ Enhancement skill (20)
Item
Collection Collect the Goddess Minerva’s Diary and return it (20) Collect the Goddess Lakelis’ Old Notebook and return it (20) Collect the Librarian Wiz’s Old Book and return it (20) Collect the Librarian Wiz’s Old Letter and return it (20) [Medal] Acquire the Fallen Empress Saviour medal (20) [Medal] Acquire the King of Root Abyss medal (30) [Medal] Acquire all Dream Breaker medals (40) [Medal] Acquire the Evolving System Master medal (30) [Medal] Acquire the Tristan’s Successor medal (20) [Medal] Acquire all Ghost Park related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire the Knight of Roses medal (10) [Medal] Acquire all Dimension Invade related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all the SEED related medals (40) [Medal] Acquire all the FriendStory best friend medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all Urus related medals (40) [Medal] Acquire all Heroes of Maple related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all Black Heaven related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire the Butterfly’s Dream medal (20) [Medal] Acquire all Hard Hilla related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire the Tangyoon’s Acknowledged Dish medal (10) [Medal] Acquire all Empathy related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all Charm related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all Craft related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all Will related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all Charisma related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all Insight related medals (30) [Medal] Acquire all the Exorcism related medals (20) [Medal] Acquire the Variety Hair Changer medal (30) [Medal] Acquire the following Explorer medals (30) Beginner Explorer El Nath Mountains Explorer Ludus Lake Explorer Undersea Explorer Mu Lung Dojo Explorer Nihal Desert Explorer Minar Forest Explorer Ossyria Explorer Maple Explorer Sleepywood Explorer Victoria Explorer The One Who Touched the Sky
Enchantment [Scroll Trace] Use a total of 100,000 Scroll Traces (20) [Scroll Trace] Use a total of 1,000,000 Scroll Traces (30) [Scroll Trace] Succeed 100 times with a Scroll Trace 15% scroll (20) [Scroll Trace] Succeed 1,000 times with a Scroll Trace 15% scroll (30) [Scroll Trace] Succeed 100 times with a Scroll Trace Innocent Scroll (30) [Scroll Trace] Succeed 100 times with a Scroll Trace Clean Slate Scroll (30)
Adventure
Exploration [Area Exploration] Explore Asylum (20) [Area Exploration] Explore Morass (20)
Quest Complete the Fame increasing quests (30) Complete Henesys’ quests (20) Complete Perion’s quests (20) Complete Kerning City’s quests (20) Complete Ellinia’s quests (20) Complete Sleepywood’s quests (20) Complete Orbis’ quests (20) Complete El Nath’s quests (20) Complete Aqua Road’s quests (20) Complete Ludibrium’s quests (20) Complete Leafre’s quests (20) Complete Kritias’ quests (20) Complete Leben Mine’s quests (20) Complete Ariant’s quests (20) Complete the Door to the Future quests (30) Complete Pantheon’s quests (20) Complete Helisium’s quests (20) Complete Mu Lung’s quests (20) Complete Herb Town’s quests (20) Complete the Temple of Time quests (20) Complete Root Abyss’ quests (20) Complete Mechanical Grave’s quests (20) Complete Aswan’s quests (20) Complete the Deep Sea quests (20) Complete the Road of Vanishing quests (20) Complete Chew Chew Island’s quests (20) Complete Lacheln’s quests (20) Complete Arcana’s quests (20) Complete Morass’ quests (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Fairy Academy Elinel (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Gold Beach (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Riena Strait (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Mushroom Castle (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Elin Forest (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Lion King’s Castle (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Fantastic Theme Park (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Korean Folk Town (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Golden Temple (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Crimsonwood Citadel (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Kerning Tower (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Stone Giant Colossus (20) [Theme Dungeon] Complete Omega Sector (20) [Dimensional Library] Complete Episode 1. White Mage (20) [Dimensional Library] Complete Episode 2. Becoming an Empress (20) [Dimensional Library] Complete Episode 3. Black Witch (20) [Dimensional Library] Complete Episode 4. Bard of the Snowy Mountain (20) [Cross Hunter] Complete the Prologue (20) [Cross Hunter] Complete Chapter 1 (20) [Cross Hunter] Complete Chapter 2 (20) [Cross Hunter] Complete Chapter 3 (20) [Cross Hunter] Complete Chapter 4 (20) [Black Heaven] Complete Act 1. Black Wing’s Leader (20) [Black Heaven] Complete Act 2. Charge, Crystal Garden (20) [Black Heaven] Complete Act 3. Clash in the Skies (20) [Black Heaven] Complete Act 4. Flare of the Counterattack (20) [Black Heaven] Complete Act 5. Towards the Core (20) [Black Heaven] Complete Act 6. Black Heaven (20) [Black Heaven] Complete Black Heaven 10 times (40) [Heroes of Maple] Complete Act 1. Slumbering Dragon Island (20) [Heroes of Maple] Complete Act 1.5. Reunion (20) [Heroes of Maple] Complete Act 2. Abraxas (20) [Heroes of Maple] Complete Act 3. Strange World (20) [Heroes of Maple] Complete Act 4. World Tree (20) [Heroes of Maple] Complete Heroes of Maple 10 times (40) [FriendStory] Complete the Prologue. World Beyond the Wardrobe (20) [FriendStory] Complete Chapter 1. Cygnus and the Student of Destiny (20) [FriendStory] Complete Chapter 2. Idol Orca and Stalker Turmoil (20) [FriendStory] Complete Chapter 3. Nurse Hilla and P.E. Teacher Magnus (20) [FriendStory] Complete Chapter 4. Fortune Telling Girl Cassandra and the School Ghost Story (20) [FriendStory] Complete Chapter 5. Unidentified Student Teacher and Students in Crisis (20) [FriendStory] Complete Chapter 6. Transfer Student Demian and Burning Rock Soul (20) [FriendStory] Complete FriendStory 10 times (40) [FriendStory] Complete all of FriendStory’s hidden stories (30)
Battle
Boss [Papulatus] Defeat Easy Papulatus 10 times (10) [Papulatus] Defeat Easy Papulatus 100 times (20) [Papulatus] Defeat Easy Papulatus 1,000 times (30) [Papulatus] Defeat Normal Papulatus 10 times (10) [Papulatus] Defeat Normal Papulatus 100 times (20) [Papulatus] Defeat Normal Papulatus 1,000 times (30) [Papulatus] Defeat Chaos Papulatus 1 time (20) [Papulatus] Defeat Chaos Papulatus 10 times (30) [Papulatus] Defeat Chaos Papulatus 100 times (40)
Game Related
The MapleStory executable file’s icon design has been changed. It does change slightly based on the size of your icon too. I’m going to miss the old icon 😦
When you participate in Urus using Quick Matching and have 10 or more people, based on the ratio of party members that received an E rank, those who did not receive E ranks will have their scores increased. The rankings will reflect the total scores before this increase.
When fighting Hekaton, characters who do not move for a certain period of time or do not deal any damage will not receive rewards.
Hekaton’s HP will no longer increase when characters enter past the 10 minute mark.
The Spark Damage Skin icon’s sample image has been changed.
When your character stands still, if a pet is covering you, it will automatically move after 3 seconds.
Pet commands will now be shown in the pet’s tooltip. The pet food seller NPCs Cute, Laya, Moody, Patricia, and Wilson will no longer sell Pet Guides.
Silver Karma Scissors can now be used on items which previously required only the regular Karma Scissors.
I don’t think GMS has Silver Karma Scissors but they were added with Additional Options and they cost 20m mesos so you no longer need to spend NX to trade any equipment that require Karma Scissors (Hopefully they do something about Platinum Scissors too haha).
If you try to enter Chaos Root Abyss without having cleared Normal Root Abyss 10 times, you will now be shown your number of Normal Root Abyss clears.
Arcane Symbols that have been locked using Item Locks can no longer be levelled up or used as reinforcement material for other Arcane Symbols.
The following errors have been fixed.
Fixed an error where sometimes a character could not perform any actions after using a Mannequin.
Fixed an error where reviving in town after death would sometimes consume 2 Safety Charms.
Fixed an error where the remaining time displayed in boss content UI would be different from the actual remaining time.
Fixed an error where certain Road of Vanishing quests’ NPC images would not appear in the Completed Quests tab.
Fixed an error where Zeros comparing weapons with other Zero characters would not display the correct increase in range.
Fixed an error where Burning Fields did not apply to Forgotten Road of Time 1.
Fixed an error where debuff effects did not apply to the boss Lucid in her rage phase.
Fixed an error where the Boss Matching buff for Caoong and Papulatus did not persist after death.
Fixed an error where pets did not pick up certain items in World Merged Party Quests.
Fixed an error where certain Cash equipment and effects would not appear on the Character Select screen.
Skill Related
You must now have a weapon equipped to use skills that deal damage to enemies.
An error where Night Walker’s Element: Darkness‘ defense ignore effect would overwrite other skills has been fixed. However, Element: Darkness’ defense ignore effect now only applies to Night Walkers.
The following errors have been fixed.
Fixed an error where certain attacking skills could be used in Meisterville.
Fixed an error where Mercedes’ Union effect applied to Guided Arrow.
Fixed an error where Dark Knight’s Beholder Enhancement Core enhanced Beholder Impact.
Fixed an error where Evan’s Magic Amplification increased |
the near term, its entire business model was predicated on avoiding paying retransmission fees.
Had the Court ruled the other way, the decision would have likely upended the entire television industry. Here's the decision in full:
Have more to say about this topic? We take your questions every week in our weekly livechat, Switchback, Fridays at 11 a.m. ET. The comment box is open, so submit your questions now.Porsche’s 2017 GTE contender could feature a turbocharged engine after all, with the new-generation 911 RSR having been spotted testing at Monza, ahead of its race debut early next year.
Two of the new rear-mid engined Porsches, along with a 2016-spec Porsche 911 GT3 R, are at the Italian circuit this week, in what’s believed to be one of the first tests with the GTE car outside of its Weissach test track.
While initial reports pointed towards the car retaining a version of its normally aspirated flat-six powerplant, photos and multiple eyewitness reports from Monza indicate the German manufacturer could have opted with a twin-turbo instead.
Side intakes are visible from the above photo, in the same position as the Porsche 911 Turbo S. The road-going model features a 3.8-liter twin-turbo flat-six.
Porsche unveiled preliminary details of its 2017 GTE car last month, although omitting any side profile photos, or technical details.
It’s understood the car also features a revised engine and gearbox placement, via waivers from the FIA and ACO, in order to be on a more equal playing field to the new mid-engined cars from Ford and Ferrari.
Aside from the new intakes, the photo shows a redesigned rear wing, as well as reshaped rear-end, likely due to the revised engine placement.
Both CORE autosport and Manthey Racing will continue operating the factory programs next year, in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and a planned full-season return to the FIA World Endurance Championship, respectively.Committed to Affordability
Kaléo continues to expand its efforts to help ensure patients can access EVZIO.
Commercially insured patients pay $0* through the EVZIO2YOU direct-delivery program. For patients with government insurance, many patients may get EVZIO at no cost. The EVZIO2YOU pharmacy will relay the cost of EVZIO to the patient. If the patient decides the cost is not affordable, the pharmacy may work with the patient's healthcare provider to offer an alternative naloxone. No other naloxone product, branded or generic, is less expensive than EVZIO for commercially insured patients who obtain EVZIO through the direct-delivery service.
Eligible patients with no insurance and an annual household income below $100,000 a year may get EVZIO at no cost through the kaléo Cares Patient Assistance Program. †
A Public Access Price of $178 per carton (two auto-injectors per carton, $89 per dose) is available to government agencies, first responders, health departments, those on the front lines of the nation's opioid overdose crisis, and other qualifying groups when they purchase directly from kaléo or authorized distributors.
Thanks to EVZIO2YOU, patients and care partners with commercial insurance and a prescription for EVZIO can obtain EVZIO for absolutely nothing out of pocket through the direct-delivery service.
* Full Terms and Conditions Only valid for commercially insured patients in the 50 United States and DC through the direct delivery service. Not eligible if prescriptions are paid for in part/full by state or federally funded program(s), like Medicare Part D, Medicaid, Vet. Aff., Dept. of Def., or Tricare, and where prohibited by law. OFFER IS NOT INSURANCE. Offer cannot be sold, purchased, traded, transferred, and cannot be combined with any other offer. Offer may change at any time, without notice. Call (877) 438-9463 for questions regarding eligibility.
†Patients who are eligible for Medicaid coverage may be eligible for assistance to receive EVZIO at no cost. Subject to aggregate and individual volume limitations, availability of EVZIO, and other terms and conditions. Kaléo reserves the right to discontinue the program at any time for any or no reason.
Committed to Access
As a company founded by patients with life-threatening conditions, we take our commitment to the needs of patients and their families very seriously. For us, the patient always comes first. We believe all patients should have the right to innovative products at reasonable prices.
There is no doubt, the complexity of our healthcare system has had unintended implications for everyone involved, but most importantly, for patients. To this end, we explored viable paths within the current healthcare system to make EVZIO available to patients in a responsible, meaningful and affordable way. The EVZIO patient access program is a continued commitment by kaléo to put patients first.Skip to comments.
Crash HealthCare.gov
Posted on by MelSmith
Everyone go to https://www.healthcare.gov and begin the signup process. It may be "free" (being paid for by future generations thanks to the debt) but it doesn't have to be easy.
We should learn from the leftists how to collapse the system. There is no doubt that the Obamacare IT system is almost as flawed as Obamacare itself.
Click on "Apply Now" and pick your state (or any state).
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To: MelSmith
I’m as reluctant to go to any government healthcare exchange as I am the DUmp.
I just can’t bring myself to do it. Anyone else feel that way?
by 2 posted onby Clump ( the tree of liberty is withering like a stricken fig tree)
To: MelSmith
I am fairly sure that there are serious legal issues with with post.
To: MelSmith
Health Insurance Marketplace: Please wait We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we're working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience! I have been sitting on this page for more than 5 minutes, LMAO. I live in MA but I picked FL - HUSSEIN said there would be a "few glitches" from what I'm hearing there's more than "a few". LMAO
by 4 posted onby rockabyebaby (We are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo screwed!)
To: MelSmith
Health Insurance Marketplace: Please wait
We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience!
To: MelSmith
Health Insurance Marketplace: Please wait
We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience!
To: JohnBrowdie
There is nothing illegal about checking out your options! I tried to get on there to see if I could get a better deal. Can’t get past the second page. I’ll try again in 20 min.
To: Clump
I’d rather have a colonoscopy than deal with Fedzilla.
by 8 posted onby Vigilanteman (Obama: Fake black man. Fake Messiah. Fake American. How many fakes can you fit in one Zer0?)
To: JohnBrowdie
I am fairly sure that there are serious legal issues with with post.
Big time.
To: MelSmith
I’m sure they’ll say this was totally Unexpected!
by 10 posted onby PoloSec ( Believe the Gospel: how that Christ died for our sins, was buried and rose again)
To: MelSmith
Health Insurance Marketplace: Please wait We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we're working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience!
To: isthisnickcool
You can send an e-mail on the “access” button at the bottom to let them know their are “glitches”.
To: MelSmith
To: MelSmith
AIN'T NO WAY I'M SIGNIN' UP!
by 14 posted onby skinkinthegrass (who'll take tomorrow,$pend it all today;who can take your income & tax it all away..0'Blowfly can :-)
To: MelSmith
Okay. I went to find Indiana. All I got was questions about the system such as, “Was this helpful?”, “What can we do to improve?”. I answered helpful to pass on to the next page. Got another question. I typed that I was trying to find Indiana. That took me to another question. That is where I stopped playing the 20 questions.
To: JohnBrowdie
Instead of that, then, let’s help Obama by joining forces to do a load test of the site to make sure it can handle a large number of users. If it doesn’t work properly, e-mail the White House with a description of your error to let them know.
by 16 posted onby JediJones (The #1 Must-see Filibuster of the Year: TEXAS TED AND THE CONSERVATIVE CRUZ-ADE)
To: skinkinthegrass
by 17 posted onby MeshugeMikey ( Un-Documented Journalist / Block Captain..Tyranny Response Team)
To: Clump
Mr. Al Kaholik, 1060 W. Addison, Chicago, Illinois, just signed up...
To: MelSmith
Why crash something that is designed to fail? This is a Cloward-Piven textbook case - to set up for Hillary’s coronation and convert the “failed” system to single-payer anyway. But, I refuse to be the rape victim, losing all dignity and privacy, and told to ‘lay back, be calm, and take it’. If Whorehouse Harry is calling us all anarchists, why not call him a rapist? Were the colonists called anarchists while fighting the King? Is anarchy a path back to a democratic republic?
by 19 posted onby SERKIT ("Blazing Saddles" explains it all.......)
To: MeshugeMikey
You’re too kind...I call it HitlerCare as he was one of the original socialized medicine proponents.
by 20 posted onby Jane Long (While Marxists continue the fundamental transformation of the USA, progressive RINOs assist!)
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FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John RobinsonBritish diplomats have accused Argentina of plotting an economic blockade of the Falklands amid fears that Buenos Aires is attempting to stop all flights from Chile reaching the islands.
The government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has publicly threatened to halt the weekly flight operated by a Chilean-owned airline between Punta Arenas and Port Stanley.
It is the islands' only air link with South America and their main connection with the outside world. British officials believe the service will disappear in an attempt by Argentina to make the Falklands too expensive for Britain to maintain.
"If the LAN Chile flight is cancelled it would be pretty difficult to resist the already credible thesis that there is an economic blockade of the civilian population of the Falklands," said a senior British diplomat in the region on Wednesday.
The move, which diplomats predicted would come soon, would further isolate the disputed island chain and ratchet up tension with London on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the war between Argentina and Britain.
British officials said that if LAN resisted, Argentina would simply ban the use of its airspace.
Fernández signalled the escalation in a speech to the UN last September, when she said Buenos Aires might block the flights, negotiated during a thaw in relations in 1999, if David Cameron's government refused to discuss sovereignty of the islands – which Argentina refers to as Las Malvinas. "We'll wait a little longer, but otherwise we'll be forced to review the standing provisional agreements," she said.
Cameron has continued to refuse to hold talks and recently angered the Argentinian government by accusing it of "colonialism" in its campaign to win back the islands. Argentina says Britain stole the territory, 300 miles off its south Atlantic coast, in 1833.
Argentinian commentators reported last week that Buenos Aires was squeezing LAN, a view which is shared by British officials. The cancellation of the route would leave the Falklands entirely dependent on the twice-weekly 8,000-mile military flight from London via Ascension Island, a volcanic island near the equator.
Barry Elsby, a member of the Falkland Islands' legislative assembly, said: "This has been rumbling for many months. It's a possibility we live with on a daily basis. It would be sad, especially for the Chileans who work and live here, because they would have to leave. And it would be a shame for a nation like Chile to be dictated to."
Instead of a 560-mile flight home to southern Chile, the islands' estimated 250 Chileans would have to travel via London.
Elsby said relatives of Argentina's 600 war dead would also suffer by losing cemetery visits. Once a month the LAN flights stop in Rio Gallegos, Argentina.
He played down the economic and political implications of the 3,000-strong population losing its main link to the outside world. "It would be an inconvenience but nothing that would harm the Falklands," he said.
Others have been less sanguine and warned of damage to tourism and exports.
The row puts LAN, which has one of the region's biggest fleets of aircraft, and Chile's conservative president, Sebastián Piñera, in an awkward position. Neither can be seen to bow to a neighbour's bullying, but there is commercial pressure for an accommodation.
The Falkland Islands flights are a profitable but tiny part of operations for LAN, which requires Argentinian co-operation for much of its international business. The airline, which Piñera part-owned before becoming president, has been unsuccessfully seeking permission from Argentina for a Buenos Aires to Miami flight.
Argentina has cancelled landing rights at Aeroparque, the capital's domestic airport, for LAN's flights from the Chilean capital, Santiago, and São Paulo, Brazil. It has transferred these to Ezeiza, the city's international airport, a major drawback for LAN because it is farther outside the city and deters potential passengers. Chilean commentators speculated this was done to gain leverage over the airline.
Fernández is understood to have raised the issue of Falklands flights with Piñera during a UN meeting in New York last September. She was expected to do so again earlier this month in Santiago, but the visit was pushed back because of her thyroid treatment.Poised for an unprecedented superhero movie showdown in May of 2016, the tension is building between Batman Vs Superman and Disney’s Captain America 3. We reported earlier that, though neither company has yet to blink here in the States, their reluctance to play chicken has begun to show through in the overseas market. Batman Vs Superman has already been pushed forward in Europe and now Variety reporter Brent Lang has quoted a Disney exec on the subject:
“We’ll see. We’re struggling with it” Alan Horn on #CaptainAmerica3 debuting against #BatmanvsSuperman — Brent Lang (@BrentALang) April 22, 2014
Despite the hype of the big face off, this is not the first hint that things will eventually go in a different direction. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say it was more likely that one of the big two studios will budge and try and capture an at least an open weekend solo.It's been 10 years since Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda released an album under the name Fort Minor. Since then, the MC/producer/instrumentalist has been asked daily about when there'd be more music from his old outlet for the hip-hop music he grew up loving and recording.
Linkin Park's 'The Hunting Party': Track-by-Track Review
That question was finally answered this week with the surprise return of Fort Minor via the single and 360 video for the track "Welcome." Shinoda will be playing a Fort Minor show in L.A. on Monday night at Exchange LA, and there will be more shows as well, but for now, no Fort Minor album is on the way. Linkin Park remains Shinoda's priority, but at least the door is open now for more Fort Minor music.
The day after he performed "Welcome" on Conan, Shinoda talked to Billboard about the resurrection of the Fort Minor name, the nerves of performing under it, and the balance of writing for Linkin Park and Fort Minor.
When you did the video game battle with Steve Aoki, you joked about all the demand you get for Fort Minor music. How much did people asking for this play into the timing?
I'm always writing, and oftentimes I'll write stuff and it just seems I'm sorting through ideas and other times it's like, "Oh, that's a Linkin Park song." This song was the first one in forever I listened to and I thought, "Oh my god, first of all, that's done, and second of all, it's Fort Minor."
What does it mean to you to know that even though you "hit it and quit it," as you say in "Welcome," fans have been waiting a decade for more Fort Minor music?
There's never been a lull in fan questions about new Fort Minor music. With Linkin Park, we do a meet-and-greet with 50 to 100 fans before every show, so I get a chance to talk to people in person, and in every single meet-and-greet there are a few people who ask about Fort Minor. And I always chalk that up to the fact those are the most hard-core fans, those are the ones who paid to be in the LPU [Linkin Park Underground fan group], they come to multiple shows a lot of times. It wasn't so much about people wanted to hear it; if that was the case, I would've done it earlier. But the truth of the matter is, when I did the first Fort Minor album the band was coming off Hybrid Theory and Meteora, which was really a time when we were known for one sound. Then we did Collision Course with Jay Z and I kind of missed the hip-hop songs I used to make when I was a teenager. So I made Fort Minor at that time thinking it would never fit in with Linkin Park. Then lo and behold a couple of years later, we broadened out our stylistic approach in the studio and my Fort Minor ideas could be incorporated into Linkin Park. On Minutes to Midnight, there were songs that had some elements of Fort Minor, notably "Waiting for the End" and "When They Come for Me." There's even one I consider a really modern Fort Minor-type song called "Until It Breaks," off Living Things. It's always kind of been there, but until this song it was always just something where I thought the Fort Minor ideas I had would be best served mashed up with the input of the rest of the guys in the band. And this is a song that came out of my head and it was basically done. It was 85 percent there, and I knew if I put it through the Linkin Park writing machine, it would change considerably and I didn't want that to happen to it. I felt like it was a good song on its own, and I was prepared to get behind it.
How has your idea of Fort Minor changed after a decade?
When I did Fort Minor originally, I didn't know it consciously at the time, but I was not comfortable standing up on a stage by myself. So I put old friends, people like Styles of Beyond, around me. I hired a band of guys who became friends. I had other friends I'd run into on the album like Black Thought, Common and John Legend. At the end of the day I look back on it and I was doing that partially because they were all really talented and I loved having them on the album and partially because I wasn't comfortable just standing up there by myself. In the process of touring with Fort Minor in those days, I did get more confident and in the years since then I've gotten more confident. It's still nerve-racking to do it -- like I stood up there and did a performance by myself on Conan last night and I haven't felt nervous like that in forever. I was super nervous just doing the one song. Part of it is because I'm not primarily a singer, but over the years, just from singing backup vocals to [LP frontman] Chester [Bennington] and doing more and more singing on the Linkin Park albums, I've gotten a little more comfortable with it.
Linkin Park's 'Hunting Party' Started at No. 1 on Top Rock Albums
How do you approach playing live with Fort Minor?
Fort Minor has always been a solo project. What this is all about right now is letting this be a solo project and seeing, "Can I entertain people for an hour by myself?" It's a challenge. It's gonna be difficult, but it's gonna be fun and I think I'm up for it. I've got a set together that's really exciting. Now, with that said, I'm also not letting this get in the way of Linkin Park. Linkin Park is definitely my priority, and the Fort Minor shows will be special events. There is no album, there is no tour, everything is focused around the 360 video and song. And at this point, the idea for me is just to leave the door open for the possibility of what can happen. I'm just riding the wave.
Does this open the door though for a bigger Fort Minor return?
Now that the door is open, I feel like the possibility is out there. It relieves some of the tension of having not put out any songs in like 10 years. Finally getting over that hump of putting out one allows me to have a little less pressure of what I put out to the fans because I want the bar of quality to stay high, but at the same time there is a lot of pressure on the first one back. So now that that's out of the way, we'll see what happens with something else.
Linkin Park Got Business Advice From Harvard, Starts Venture Capital Firm
Talk about the live show.
The show obviously is rooted in The Rising Tied album. What I wanted to do with it is kind of within the restraints of what I find tasteful. I want it to be tasteful; I wanted to create a show that entertains you at all costs. So I don't just stick to The Rising Tied and I don't just stick to the beats you heard on that record. I want to give people surprises along the way and make it entertaining all the way through. The show is a one-man show; that's part of the challenge that I put to myself. Basically I approached it as a mash-up between what a rap show is and what a DJ set is, in terms of being able to walk in with a computer and a couple of instruments, plug in and play. I've only announced one show and I don't plan on announcing that many more.
Are there songs from The Rising Tied a decade later you're particularly excited to play live?
There are songs I want to play because I feel they're really fun sonically or lyrically, like "Petrified" or "In Stereo." On the other hand, when I toured with Fort Minor 10 years ago, I never really played "Cigarettes" or "Kenji" that often, and this time those were the two songs I was most excited to play because I feel like they say the most. This show thematically is coming from a different place. "Welcome" is an underdog song. It's about feeling like an outsider and being totally fine with that.Los Angeles has its cyclist anti-harrassment ordinance, a regular LAPD-cyclist meeting, and a Department of Transportation shaking off its auto-centric mindset by laying lots of bike lanes – but let’s not fool ourselves, riding in LA hasn’t gotten than much safer.
For the most part, it is up to us and our Vehicular Survival Cycling skills to keep ourselves safe when riding on LA’s busiest streets.
The sage advice handed out by most experienced cyclists in California usually boils down to one-liners, especially the ever important “Control the lane!”
What is taught in a League of American Bicyclist class are important first steps to becoming a whole lot happier and safer when riding a bike on streets in the car-dominated U.S. However, I don’t think those classes go far enough. I “take the lane” and yet I find myself still being placed in dangerous situations by tuned-out car drivers. That is, until I pull out my ninja bike bag of dirty tricks!
What are the black magic tricks, the dark arts, that cyclists have developed to protect themselves on the road? I will share with you what I have learned and perhaps you can leave your own velo gris-gris in the comments section below.
Invisible Loogie Wall
Have you ever seen someone spit and thought, “Ew!”? Imagine that someone was on a bike in front of your car, and while you were approaching you saw them eject some sort of liquid from their mouths into the lane of travel. Pretty gross, right?
If you want to create an invisible force field around your bike, consider using your own saliva (and perhaps whatever you have in your water bottle when your mouth dries out) to gross out cars coming from behind – inducing them to change lanes and give you the space you need to ride in comfort.
Here is how it works:
This technique works best on individual cars on two to three lane roads, on straight sections, when traffic is moving below 45 mph. The purpose of this trick is to get a car in the right hand lane to move one lane over instead of swerving around you.
Listen for cars. When you hear one approaching, prepare your loogie.
Hock your loogie so that it is: visible to the driver and timed to allow them to make a lane change
Laugh when it works, ponder when it doesn’t
If you spit on/in the car, you are doing it wrong. The point is to get the car away from you – not to incite the driver to violence or mess up their precious windshield/wax job.
Lazy Left Arm
A whopping 10% of the U.S. population knows and understands the proper left arm signals for a right turn, left turn, and stopping. The tiny percentage who don’t understand (90%+) what these arm symbols mean ignore them and figure you’re waving to say hello, show your solidarity with them, or have a medical condition.
In other words, these hand signals should be used – but I have personally found their effectiveness to be virtually nil.
So, what is this black magic trick all about then? Well, it turns out that people driving cars don’t know what these hand signals mean – but they know they mean something! Use car drivers’ lack of knowledge to your advantage.
Here is how it works:
You are on a busy road with a platoon (a pack of cars) heading your way from the rear. You can hear them coming and you know that maybe your Invisible Loogie Wall will make the first one give you room, but cars number 3 and 4 won’t give a damn.
Leaving enough time for the lead car to see what is going on, take your left arm and make vague, twitching, waving-esque, wobbly, arm motions.
Are you signaling? Is that a signal for “Dead cat ahead?”, “UFO’s in the area?”, “Good pastrami two miles up?” I don’t know, but I’d better change lanes. Keep the pseudo waving/wobbling/flapping up until the last car has passed.
It turns out that the 3′ passing rule is about an arms length of room around a cyclist. You just gave yourself 5′ using an actual arms length. Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, so long as nobody you know saw you do it.
Warning! Do not hang your arm out so far that it can get hit or ripped off by a passing car. Though the weight savings would be significant from such an alteration, you will find that your hill climbing ability will be drastically reduced.
Face Time
You are on a street where cars are coming fast and furious. You didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before. You just watched a zombie movie. You are nervous, and being nervous on a bike means one thing: every time you hear car noises from the rear you ruin your own ride by doing a quick, corner of the eye, check of traffic approaching from the rear.
Your quick turn of the head signals to the drivers behind you that you know they are there and they can blow by you at, or above, the posted speed limit. The close brush with death you just had makes you even more nervous, which leads to further shoulder checks, which leads to even more close passing. On and on it goes until you die of a heart attack, write a nasty letter to the mayor, or give up bike riding.
Despair not, nervous riders! The problem is not your inspection of traffic coming from the rear. The problem is that you are not looking at the approaching drivers long enough.
Humans have an unbelievable ability to zoom in on each others eyes. It is part of our nature to try and see what others are seeing, and the power of stares is immense. Use this power to your advantage, and when you are feeling your weakest.
Here is how it works:
You hear cars approaching from behind and your nervousness is making your heart pound. You just read about a friend getting hit-and-run and you’re worried it is going to happen to you.
Instead of panicking and taking a quick look over the shoulder, you swivel your head around and look the driver dead in the eyes for one or two seconds.
Make sure not to lose control of your bike. Make sure to look that SOB right in the eyes with no expression on your face.
Feel the flow of dark side of the force as the nervousness fades away into confidence as the driver gives you a wide berth of respect on the road.
Worst case scenario, now you have a face to match with the make and model of the car that just hit you
This trick works best when you are at your worst. Just be sure to practice turning you head around without crashing into fixed objects or swerving too much before you try this at speed.
Chain Lock Spark Show
Anyone ever seen the movies or comic books starring Ghost Rider? He’s some sort of crazy motorcycle demon guy with a flaming head and chains, lots of chains. He reaps the souls of the damned for Satan, or something like that. I mean, that is what some boring neck-beard Wikipedia entry had to say about him.
The point being, he looks scary and he has chains. Chances are, even though you are on a bike, people in the U.S. think you are scary. They just do. Zombie movies wouldn’t be so popular if they didn’t.
Make use of the fear of the stranger on the road. When you are riding alone at night, feeling totally vulnerable to drunks, sleeping drivers, teenage boys, angry rednecks, and rapists – take the power of Ghost Rider into your hands.
Here is how it works:
You are riding alone at night.
Pull out a chain, a bike lock chain would be best. Wrap said chain around your left palm a few times with some hanging down.
Allow the tip of the chain to drag on the pavement every now-and-again, sending a tiny amount of sparks flying.
Combine this with Face Time when you hear a car approaching. Maintain a neutral expression unless they are passing at low speed. If they are passing at low speed, glare.
You are channeling Mephisto, and he is giving you the lane.
You get your chain stuck in your rear wheel, you lose.
Before you get out there and start waving chains around, spitting on cars, and staring down the aftermath, please keep in mind that it has taken me a few years of practice to hone these tricks and each needs to be practiced to ensure that the timing is right and that they are effective. My odds of causing a safe lane change feel pretty high, but I have done no rigorous study to prove that.
Now you can take your Effective/Vehicular Cycling to the next level, to the dark side. Safety flags and high-viz vests never did suit me.Ever since the Attorney General made it crystal clear that President Trump really wasn’t kidding when he said he would cut off DoJ funding to sanctuary cities, the response has been frantic. More than a dozen cities and counties, along with the state of California, have begun legal action challenging the right of the federal government to determine what the qualifications are to receive such grant money. Most of them will take quite a while to sort out, but the City of Richmond, California was one of the first out of the gate and managed to get their case in front of a federal judge already. It didn’t go well for them at all. (Daily Caller)
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a sanctuary city in California challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order withholding grants from jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities The city of Richmond, Calif., filed suit in March challenging the constitutionality of the order. U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed the case Monday, finding Richmond did not have standing to challenge the law. In his ruling dismissing the case, Orrick explained the city had not demonstrated that it had reason to believe Trump’s order would be enforced against them, and therefore didn’t have standing to bring a case.
So the case was tossed, but if you happen to be a fan of better border control and enforcement of immigration law I wouldn’t start popping the champagne corks just yet. The judge in this case didn’t make any sort of ruling over whether or not the DoJ policy is constitutional, correctly applied or anything else along those lines. All he really said was that the question was moot because Richmond lacked the proper standing to bring the challenge.
In order to have the case heard and decided, Richmond would have had to show some sort of damages, or at least potential damages from the policy. They haven’t refused any ICE detainers or done anything else to cement their sanctuary city status because ICE hasn’t issued them any. And nobody from the DoJ has singled them out for not being in compliance. That makes it pretty tough to show damages.
To figure out why they were attempting this in the first place you should look back to March of this year when the city brought the original suit. At the time they released all manner statements to the media bragging about how they were going to fight Trump’s executive order. Their position dates back to a 1990 “policy” approved by the city council which claimed they didn’t intend to “cooperate” with immigration officials. I’m not sure that Trump’s team even knew about it.
But who knows? Now that they’ve lost a court case, perhaps Jeff Sessions will add their name to the No Grants For You list just to make them feel better.DreamHack Winter qualifier has been postponed to next week and the organizers, FACEIT, have taken it upon themselves to cover the cost of the flight tickets for the two qualified teams.
The online qualifier that will hand out two slots for the $250,000 DreamHack Winter tournament was supposed to start yesterday, but it was postponed due to problems on the FACEIT platform which saw their website running extremely slow or not loading at all for most people.
Their decision after the problems last night was to hold the whole 128 team qualifier today, starting from 18:00, but after the community's reaction and some more troubles on the platform, they decided to move the tournament to next week.
To make up for the rising prices in flight tickets so close to the event, FACEIT have stated that they will cover the travel costs for the two winning teams.
"Yesterday night we issued a statement to explain why our platform went down, as well as to why we scheduled the entire tournament on one day.
The reasons for this are that we do not want to conflict with other events, such as the Fragbite Masters qualifier on Wednesday (who were kind enough to reschedule for us), and Techlabs during the weekend. The second reason is that if we wait too long, flight ticket prices will continue to rise.
The solution we offer is to schedule the qualifier next week regardless of these rising prices, on Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 November. As we understand this might be a problem for a lot of teams who wish to attend, FACEIT will be covering the costs of the flight tickets for the two qualified teams."
Here is the new schedule for the qualifier:
Tuesday, November 19th
16:00 Check-in opens
20:00 Round of 128
21:00 Round of 64
22:00 Round of 32
Wednesday, November 20th
19:00 Round of 16
20:00 Quarterfinals
21:00 Semi-finals
23:00 Final
The organizers also addressed one of the issues that caused their website problems, and urged the guilty parties to stop using scripts to check-in for the tournament.
"During the night we have been running an analysis with our service providers to spot the issues we were having. The result of these analysis, among other things, pointed towards some scripts ran by some of our users that were bombarding our APIs to trying to join and check-in to the tournament hundreds of times per second. This created an extremely huge amount of requests that we couldn’t possibly handle. We are taking actions in order to avoid this to happen again, at the same time we would like to urge the players who are running these scripts to stop. It is only overloading our systems and won't help anyone. Teams which continue will risk a ban from the tournament and from FACEIT."
Both finalists of the qualifier will secure a spot in the biggest Counter-Strike tournament to date, DreamHack Winter, which will hand out $250,000 in prizes, while the winners of the qualifier will earn a better seed.Apple banned a third prominent cartoonist from its app store, citing mockery of Tiger Woods and a policy against "ridiculing a public figure." If we're to let Apple censor our news, we should familiarize ourselves with the company's whims.
Apple's filtering of content is, of course, not technically censorship; we iPad and iPhone customers implicitly authorize the company to control our in-app iReading when we purchase the company's devices. And we're always free to read what we like on the Web.
But Apple's policies sure do hinder cartoonists who are trying to make a living selling their content to the many people who "own" Apple devices. And to what end? What's the purpose of Apple's anti-ridicule |
aren’t the first Sega games to ever be pulled, unfortunately. Just ask people who missed out on After Burner Climax or OutRun Online Arcade.The Aizhai bridge connecting the G65 Baotou Expressway near Hunan, China is the world's longest tunnel to tunnel suspension bridge. This incredible structure opened in 2012 and spans a total length of 1146 meters. On top of its length, the Chinese-built bridge boasts its height, soaring 336 meters off the valley near the center. You definitely don't want to drive across this bridge if you're afraid of heights.
A view from the underlying city [Image Source: Highest Bridges]
This is a bridge of firsts, with the engineers behind the structure attributing 4 impressive feats to the tunnel-to-tunnel bridge. As mentioned above, it has a 1146 meter main span making it the longest in its category. The construction of the bridge was also the first commercial use of a pylon and girder separation structures. The bridge is the first to use rock anchor suspension as well as pre-stressed carbon fiber for reinforcement. Lastly, during the erection of the steel trusses, workers used an innovative rail-cable sliding technique to hoist them into place.
A view of the bridge transitioning back into tunnel [Image Source: Highest Bridges]
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the bridge, beyond its record-setting attributes, is where it's located. The massive industrial structure is located above the quaint countryside near Hunan, China. Tunneling through thousands of meters of rock, the expressway seems to appear right out of the side of the mountain when seen from the town below.
[Image Source: Highest Bridges]
Chinese travelers would often commute over 4 hours to make the trip between Jishou and Chadong. Construction of the Aizhai bridge shortened that trip to just under 1 hour, making the structure incredibly helpful to locals and distant travelers. The local geography also made the roadway cheaper to construct for engineers. Due to the high mountains, the support towers were able to be shortened, allowing for more of the load to be carried through the land's natural rock.
One of the large concrete anchors tensioning the support cables [Image Source: Highest Bridges]
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[Image Source: Highest Bridges]
SEE ALSO: TOP 10 CIVIL ENGINEERING WONDERS
The impressive features of the structure have drawn crowds since its completion from thrill seekers and tourists everywhere. Some of the most notable events that occurred were the 2012 International Base Jumping Festival and Chinese tight rope walkers setting a world record, walking over 1400 meters. One of the base jumpers posted a video seen below detailing this daring flight.
Whether you see the bridge from below or on top of the walking platform, it continues to captivate visitors. For those who drive through the surrounding tunnels, it's not always obvious that the structure lies ahead, making the commute across the canyon that much more thrilling. The full extent of the beautiful bridge can be realized by watching the video of the structure below.
SEE ALSO: WORLD'S MOST IMPRESSIVE BRIDGE
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More anti-abortion laws have been passed since 2010 than in any other five-year period since 1973, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute. In the four decades since Roe v. Wade, states have enacted more than 1,000 laws restricting the procedure, and of those restrictions, 288, or nearly one-third, appeared after the 2010 midterm elections.
In last 5 yrs more state abortion restrictions were enacted than during any other single 5-yr period since #RoevWade pic.twitter.com/4a7XSBZ76v — Guttmacher Institute (@Guttmacher) January 13, 2016
Ten states accounted for most of the new abortion restrictions, and four states—Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Indiana—adopted 94 measures, which constituted one-third of all new anti-abortion laws in the last five years. Kansas tops the list, having passed 30 anti-abortion laws since 2011, followed by Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Indiana, all with at least 20 new laws.
In the five years immediately following Roe v. Wade, states enacted about 200 abortion restrictions. Those measures mostly focused on “restricting abortions later in pregnancy, establishing onerous requirements for abortion clinics, mandating parental involvement for minors, and allowing some institutional and individual providers” to opt out of providing services, according to Guttmacher. Later abortions and parental-involvement laws are still popular among anti-abortion lawmakers, but more than half of the 288 new laws since 2010 focus on other restrictions. They include limits on medication abortion, bans on private insurance coverage, and requirements for physician’s abortion counseling.
And experts expect that 2016 will likely be worse for abortion rights than 2015, during which states passed more than 50 new laws that limit reproductive rights.
“Last year’s big events, like the Planned Parenthood videos and the Supreme Court case, have actually ginned up even more interest in restricting abortion,” Elizabeth Nash, a senior state issues associate at Guttmacher, told Mother Jones earlier this month. “If it was possible, they’ve actually added more energy to decreasing abortion access.”As the son of a pastor growing up in Plainfield, Iowa, and Delavan, Wisconsin, I remember well learning about places like the Mount of Olives in Sunday School.
I remember reading about Jesus crying to His Father, “May this cup be taken from me,” and imagining His final ascension, as told in Acts.
But I never expected to have the opportunity to stand at the top of the Mount of Olives myself or to walk where Jesus walked in Jerusalem.
Earlier this month, I was blessed to have such an opportunity, to visit Israel and to marvel at the sites of the Holy Land — from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Via Dolorosa. The feeling you get, the sense of awe and the sense of peace, is indescribable. The experience is powerful, one Tonette and I will never forget. The history of these places did not just change Israel or the region. The history of these places changed the world.
Yet even as you stand there, reflecting on the consequential events of two millennia ago, you recognize Israel is not merely a place of shrines and holy sites. Israel is one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and one of America’s most important allies.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
So while we visited the Western Wall and the City of David, we also spent much of our time in Israel meeting with the country’s leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of the Knesset from many political parties. We discussed our shared hopes for stability in the region, and shared threats from those who seek to destroy Israel and the United States.
We met with entrepreneurs, listening to their visions of creating economic opportunities for their fellow citizens and neighbors and building an even brighter future for their country.
With members of the Israeli Defense Forces, we traveled to the border, where soldiers stand guard, prepared to sound the alarm and defend against incoming attacks. They live every day with the threat of imminent danger.
In other words, Israel is strong: a country with a thriving economy, a remarkable entrepreneurial spirit, and a resilient people. Despite this strength, Israel is a small country that faces enemies on all sides. The region is in chaos. Groups who believe in annihilating Israel are on the rise. We see it everyday on the news: extremists like ISIS are growing stronger by the day. The threat of a nuclear Iran and Iran’s military interventions throughout the region are of increasing concern.
I wish it were not the case, but this trip only confirmed my belief that the current administration is not giving Israel the support it needs. Instead of standing with our ally, the president is making bad deals with a country that wishes to wipe Israel off the map.
As the Israelis rightly recognize, such a bad deal would not only give Iran a pathway to a nuclear bomb, it would empower their broader, destructive agenda. We don’t have to guess that Iran might do with billions of dollars in sanctions relief to funnel to terrorist proxies and an intact nuclear infrastructure. They have said so themselves. They seek the destruction of Israel and — ultimately — of the United States.
My goal in visiting Israel was to listen to its leaders and its citizens in order to better understand their perspective. It is very clear to me that now is not the time to dismiss or downplay the threats to their country or ours. Nor is it a time to dismiss the rise of anti-Semitism around the world and an increasing effort in places like Western Europe to delegitimize Israel. Now is the time to work together and restore the ruptured bonds between our two countries.
Israel’s history has made it a place of tremendous significance to billions of people around the world. As we look to the future, Israel will remain a place of great importance and a major strategic partner in building a more peaceful, more free world. I am more convinced than ever that as Americans we must embrace and support our ally in Israel.But hundreds of voters who insist they switched parties on time, and brand new voters who had until March 25 to register, say in notarized affidavits accompanying the Election Justice USA lawsuit that their registration forms were either entered incorrectly or are missing. Other voters who said that they were previously registered as Democrats when they voted in past New York state elections allege that their registrations now mysteriously show them as Republicans or without any affiliation.
At issue, in part, is New York's closed primary system. Only registered Democrats and Republicans may vote in their respective party's presidential primary. Any independents or unaffiliated New Yorkers who wish to vote in the party's primary are out of luck; the deadline to change their party registration was back on October 9, the earliest such deadline in the country.
But more than 200 voters have signed onto an emergency lawsuit against the state — a majority of them Democrats — saying that their voter registration was inaccurately changed, never updated, or had disappeared altogether. Election Justice USA, a new voter suppression watchdog, filed the lawsuit on behalf of New York voters on Tuesday morning just before the polls opened.
Most of those grievances are coming from voters who have lost track of their registration details in the years since their party's last primary or who missed the deadline to have their affiliation changed, a Board of Elections spokesperson told Gothamist earlier this month. He said that his office has yet to find a single example of an "inappropriate change of a voter's record."
Voters have for weeks flooded the New York State Board of Elections with hundreds of complaints over their registration status, many of them charging at the state has wrongfully deprived them of the right to participate in Tuesday's presidential primary.
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Voters have for weeks flooded the New York State Board of Elections with hundreds of complaints over their registration status, many of them charging at the state has wrongfully deprived them of the right to participate in Tuesday's presidential primary.
Most of those grievances are coming from voters who have lost track of their registration details in the years since their party's last primary or who missed the deadline to have their affiliation changed, a Board of Elections spokesperson told Gothamist earlier this month. He said that his office has yet to find a single example of an "inappropriate change of a voter's record."
But more than 200 voters have signed onto an emergency lawsuit against the state — a majority of them Democrats — saying that their voter registration was inaccurately changed, never updated, or had disappeared altogether. Election Justice USA, a new voter suppression watchdog, filed the lawsuit on behalf of New York voters on Tuesday morning just before the polls opened.
At issue, in part, is New York's closed primary system. Only registered Democrats and Republicans may vote in their respective party's presidential primary. Any independents or unaffiliated New Yorkers who wish to vote in the party's primary are out of luck; the deadline to change their party registration was back on October 9, the earliest such deadline in the country.
But hundreds of voters who insist they switched parties on time, and brand new voters who had until March 25 to register, say in notarized affidavits accompanying the Election Justice USA lawsuit that their registration forms were either entered incorrectly or are missing. Other voters who said that they were previously registered as Democrats when they voted in past New York state elections allege that their registrations now mysteriously show them as Republicans or without any affiliation.
Related: Independent Voters Are Pissed They Can't Vote for Trump or Sanders in New York
Leonard Joseph Campanello, one of the complainants, said that he registered to vote as a Democrat in 2009, but recently learned from the Board of Elections that he is now registered as a Republican. The Suffolk County Board of Elections sent him a copy of a party registration change form that he says he did not fill out, but bears "an identical, pixel-by-pixel copy of the electronic signature" on his driver's license.
Lisa Beattie, another party to the lawsuit, said in a sworn affidavit that she registered to vote as a Democrat in New York in 1989 but discovered just last week that online records showed that she was no longer registered to vote. Beattie said that the Onondaga County Board of Elections told her that her registration had been inadvertently combined with the registration for a Lisa Davison who resides in the same county and shares her birth date. Although the Board of Elections was able to update her file, she will have to vote provisionally on Tuesday because the changes won't take effect in time.
The lawsuit also cites a WYNC report that found that more than 63,000 registered Democrats in Brooklyn, or 7 percent, were removed from the voter rolls since November of last year — the largest drop in any New York county. The public radio station updated that account on Tuesday after the lawsuit was filed, saying that the number is actually twice that.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called for an investigation into the Brooklyn voter purge on Tuesday.
Michael Ryan, executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, told WYNC and the mayor's office that what appeared to be a massive voter purge was actually "maintenance," saying that the Brooklyn voter rolls were long out of date and that the voters who were dropped had either moved, become inactive, or were inactive for so long that they were removed from the voter rolls entirely.
Related: Why Donald Trump's Kids Won't Be Voting for Him in New York's Primary
The New York State Board of Elections did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer later announced on Tuesday that his office will conduct an audit of the city Board of Elections in response to "widespread reports" of voter disenfranchisement, voters being purged from the rolls, polling locations that were not open during voting hours, and other alleged irregularities during the day's primaries.
"There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site," Stringer said in a statement. "The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient."
The New York State Attorney General's Office is operating a hotline for voters to report any irregularities or problems.
REMINDER: We have a — Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman)April 19, 2016
Election Justice USA is asking in its lawsuit that the state allow all voters who otherwise comply with New York election laws to cast their ballots on Tuesday. Rather than forcing the voters to prove their eligibility, the group argues, the courts should put the onus on state and county elections offices to contest those ballots after the fact.
A judge did not grant an emergency injunction in the case on Tuesday but will set a later hearing date, the group said on their Facebook page.
In the meantime, Election Justice USA is encouraging voters to cast provisional ballots before the polls close in New York at 9pm ET. Provisional ballots allow individuals to cast their votes, but they must be approved by elections workers before they can be counted.
That could be a major issue in the state's critical primaries. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both expected to win their home state on Tuesday, but Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich are looking to keep their margins of victory as low as possible in the delegate-rich state.
Election Justice USA was formed just the last month by activists infuriated by alleged voter suppression in Arizona. The campaigns for both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as the national Democratic party and other Democratic groups and candidates, have filed their own lawsuit to improve voting in Arizona before the November election.
Related: Clinton, Sanders and Democratic Party Will Sue Arizona Over Alleged Voter Suppression
Follow Sarah Mimms on Twitter: @SarahMMimms
Watch the VICE News documentary Barred from the Ballot Box:
Update: This story was updated at 8:55pm with the news that New York City Comptroller Stringer is launching an investigation into election irregularities in the city.Vivienne Harr says she is making a stand, both literally and figuratively, to end human trafficking. The 8-year-old California girl is using a homemade lemonade stand to raise $150,000 for the nonprofit group Not For Sale, which works to end slavery around the world.
"I will sit at my lemonade stand every day--rain or shine--until i raise $150,000 for: not for sale an organization that is "re-abolishing" slavery," Vivienne writes on her website. "When you buy #MAKEASTAND! lemonade, you aren't just buying a drink, you are MAKING A STAND! 100% of our profits go to not for sale."
But Vivienne could use some help. So far, she has raised about $1,000, with 19 day left toward her financial goal. So how can you help?
Back in April, we reported on the 6-year-old Texas boy whose lemonade stand raised more than $10,000 for his Dad's cancer treatment in a single day. Yahoo! Sideshow readers helped donate more than $20,000 after the story broke.
And in June, Yahoo! Sideshow readers stepped up again, making a major contribution to the recovery efforts of Miami "cannibal" victim Ronald Poppo.
These were opportunities for readers to contribute to and impact an unfolding story. When these opportunities arise, Sideshow likes to bring them to the attention of our readers, who seem interested in contributing to a worthwhile cause, whether through their pocketbooks or through spreading the word.
If you'd like to help, you can make a direct donation to Vivienne's cause by following the link at the top of this page to her website. Or if you're in the Fairfax, Calif., area in Marin County, you can stop by her lemonade stand.
Vivienne's direct-pitch video:The KKK's ringing endorsement of Donald Trump
Not all Donald Trump supporters are white supremacists, but all white supremacists appear to be Donald Trump supporters. The Ku Klux Klan gave their blessing, officially endorsing Donald Trump on the front page of their latest newspaper edition.
You must be so proud, Republicans. Just today, Congressman Paul Ryan admitted he already voted for Donald Trump in his home state of Wisconsin. That’s a racist, misogynistic stink that won’t wear off in 2020, Congressman. Even if you can’t bear to say his name out loud.
You can see the KKK’s ringing endorsement below.
Imagine waking up on November 9th and regretting you didn’t help defeat President Trump or a Republican Senate majority. Now, sign up with MoveOn to call swing state voters from home, and get out the vote no matter where you live!The youngest man in the Wimbledon draw, 18 year-old qualifier Bernard Tomic, is through to the fourth round after routing Swedish fifth seed Robin Soderling 6-1, 6-4, 7-5 in 112 minutes.
Despite having only won eight ATP Tour matches to the Swede's 304, the 18-year-old was in command from the opening game, closing out a double break lead to take the first set 6-1 in just 17 minutes, rounding it off with a forehand winner.
Playing in warm conditions on Court No.1, a slick Tomic landed 36 winners to his more accomplished opponent's 23, converted a break point for a 4-2 lead and held his cool to defend three break points on his own serve in the second set.
The Swede – whose best performance at Wimbledon was a quarter-final appearance last year – chose to play on after complaining of stomach trouble to the ATP Tour trainer during a medical time out, but doubled over in discomfort numerous times each set.An infant had cocaine and methadone in her system at the time of her April 27 death, becoming the youngest victim of a drug epidemic in Ohio's capital of Columbus, the Franklin County Coroner told WBNS-TV.
Loucia Kinsell died just 26 days after she was born.
According to WBNS, Kinsell's mother has been battling heroin addiction for nearly a year. Part of that treatment includes taking methadone.
“She followed through, she went to her meetings, she went to her appointments, she did it all,” Brittany Ward, Loucia aunt, told WBNS.
While it is unknown how the baby got the drugs into her system, according to Ward, the mother breastfed Loucia.
According to the coroner's report to WBNS, Kinsell was in bed with her parents, and when the parents woke up, they found her unresponsive. Ward said that the mother had just breastfed Loucia hours earlier.
No word on if anyone will be criminally charged in connection to Loucia's death.A reported abduction in South Philadelphia was actually part of a hip hop video that witnesses believed was actually real. Now the people behind the video are speaking out. (Published Thursday, March 31, 2016)
Police say what they initially believed was an abduction was actually part of a rap video that was being filmed in South Philadelphia.
Witnesses told police they spotted two men throw another man into the trunk of a car on Broad Street and Snyder Avenue around 7 p.m. Wednesday. The vehicle, described as a gold Chevy, possibly an Impala, then left the scene.
As police investigated the incident they soon learned the "abduction" was actually part of a hip-hop video being filmed at the location. Officials say the three men who witnesses saw showed up to the Special Victims Unit and explained the entire incident was staged for their music video.
"Temo," one of the creators of the video, spoke to NBC10 Thursday to explain what happened.
"We film clips here and there in Philly," he said. "My friend raps so we make footage to put in videos."
Temo told NBC10 they filmed the scene using an iPhone 6 camera. While they noticed people watching them as they staged the abduction, Temo says he assumed they knew it was fake because no one was doing anything to stop it. A few hours later Temo received a text from his brother.
"My brother texted me and he said, 'You know that rap video? It's on the news you idiot!'" Temo said. "Then he got mad at me. Then we immediately called 911."
Temo and his friends then spoke to police and explained the situation.
"They were kind of upset about it but then again they were understanding," he said. "They were just shocked."
No charges have been filed in relation to the incident.These are external links and will open in a new window
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Image copyright Reuters
A car has crashed into a police van before bursting into flames around the Champs Elysees area of central Paris, police officials say.
The driver, who was armed, was knocked unconscious and is seriously injured, French media report.
Police say the situation is now under control, and neither law enforcement nor civilians were injured.
France is currently in a state of emergency after being hit by a wave of deadly terror attacks in recent years.
A policeman was shot dead and two others were wounded in an attack on the Champs Elysees in April, just days before the presidential election.
The national police Twitter account had earlier said (in French) that there was an "ongoing police operation", warning people to respect the security cordon.
French media, quoting police sources, say the act was deliberate.Story highlights Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were tied at 26% in ruby-red Utah
Trump's path relies not only on keeping all the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012, but also Pennsylvania
(CNN) Donald Trump cast himself in almost messianic terms Thursday in Florida, describing the presidential race as "a struggle for the survival of our nation" and vowing to win the White House despite all the "slings and arrows" being hurled in his direction.
But 25 days before the election, Trump's path to the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency is looking more and more impossible by the day, as states he once said he'd flip from blue to red increasingly slip out of his reach. Meanwhile, reliably red states threaten to turn purple.
Trump's odds of a win were spiraling downward days before the 2005 "Access Hollywood" recording that surfaced last week and depicted him bragging about his ability to grope women as a perk of his celebrity. Since then, his support has collapsed -- particularly among women. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Clinton with a 9-point lead and a new national Fox poll released Thursday night that had Clinton at 45% and Trump at 38% in a four-way race.
In the most stunning development of the week, Trump and Clinton were tied at 26% in ruby-red Utah, with virtually unknown independent candidate Evan McMullin closing in on third place with 22%, according to a survey from Y2 Analytics.
"He's at a point where he's trying to draw an inside straight now by campaigning primarily in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina," said veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres. "He is well behind in Pennsylvania; he appears according to the latest polls to be effectively tied in North Carolina and Ohio; and he's behind in Florida."
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California’s other philosophical rap provocateur drops a game-changer
While it’s a touch reductive to lump them both together, parallels between the careers of Vince Staples and fellow Californian Kendrick Lamar are uncanny and numerous. Both have found success despite swimming against the musical flow, performing dense, politically charged lyrics in an era more enamoured with the simplistic sing-song decadence of Migos, Rae Sremmurd and Lil Yachty. Both have cultivated on-record personas that are part bolshy street kid, part world-weary philosopher. Both are astonishingly technically gifted, to the degree that they’re actively evolving the art of MCing. And both have an affinity for rapping over oddball, square-peg beats that sound like nothing else out there.
Staples has long operated in Lamar’s shadow. He more than does alright for himself – critical acclaim, decent sales, Gorillaz guest spots – but it’s King Kendrick who’s bagged the Obama endorsement, the album-of-the-year accolades and the reverent fanbase. On Staples’ second album, however, he comes close to drawing level with his West Coast rival. Because ‘Big Fish Theory’ is one of the most ambitious, dazzling hip-hop albums of 2017 so far – neck-and-neck with Kendrick’s ‘DAMN.’.
Right from fiery opener ‘Crabs In A Bucket’, Staples’ propulsive, hypnotic flow has never sounded stronger. His lyrics, meanwhile, are emotionally calibrated for 2017: antsy, alienated and occasionally overcome with nihilistic despair at the state of the world. And his bleak lyrical brilliance is perfectly matched by ‘Big Fish Theory’’s experimental production. He’s always had a taste for harsh electronic funk, and he embraces that creative urge more eagerly than ever. There’s slo-mo techno, dystopian G-funk, field recordings, growling industrialism; abstract, icy grooves more indebted to Berlin than Atlanta.
“We making future music,” announced Staples in the run-up to ‘Big Fish Theory’’s release. “This is my Afro-futurism.” Whatever this is, it’s jaw-dropping. Over to you, Kendrick.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 28, 2017, 9:35 AM GMT / Updated Sep. 28, 2017, 9:35 AM GMT By Alyssa Newcomb and Jo Ling Kent
The flood gates have opened in a Congressional probe into how suspected Russian entities used social media to spread misinformation designed to influence America's presidential election.
On Thursday, Twitter, which has kept relatively quiet about suspected use of the platform for election meddling, will appear before Senate and House Intelligence Committee members.
The move comes as Facebook begins to hand over 3,000 Russian-linked ads, including payment data and details on how Russian entities targeted voters through Facebook's system.
A Facebook representative told NBC News on Wednesday the company is in the process of providing information to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office. The House and Senate intelligence committees are also set to receive the advertisements as part of their ongoing probe into Russian interference in the election.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, right, and committee Vice Chairman Sen. Mark Warner Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
Facebook and Twitter representatives also confirmed to NBC News they received invitations to testify at an open hearing before Congress next month regarding the election probe.
It was unclear which executives might testify at the hearing.
"The question is, we’ve contacted the most senior officials (from Twitter, Facebook and Google), but we’ll be in conversations about who’s going to have the most relevant information," Sen. Mark Warner told reporters.
Related: Facebook Says It Will Hand Over Russia-Linked Ads to Congress
Earlier this month, Facebook revealed the results of an investigation, which found a suspected Russian operation spent $100,000 on issues-related advertisements from June 2015 to May 2017 with the intent to sway votes in the U.S. election.
On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a tweet from President Donald Trump, which claimed "Facebook was always anti-Trump. The Networks were always anti-Trump." He also mentioned The New York Times and The Washington Post and asked, "Collusion?"
"Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like. That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like," Zuckerberg said.
Twitter is rethinking its terms in the Trump era. NurPhoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the bipartisan team leading the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's investigation into Russian interference, issued a joint statement on Wednesday outlining the next big public step in the investigation - hearing from Facebook and other technology companies in an open hearing.
"In the coming month, we will hold an open hearing with representatives from tech companies in order to better understand how Russia used online tools and platforms to sow discord in and influence our election," they said.
It was not yet known whether Zuckerberg might testify at that open hearing. However, his lengthy response on Wednesday aimed to put Facebook's role in the election into perspective.
He said the facts suggest "the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying."
"Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found," he said.
With this being the first election where the internet truly played a starring role, candidates were able to directly communicate with tens of millions of followers through their Facebook pages. In addition, Zuckerberg said there were billions of interactions on Facebook discussing the issues, including well beyond what was covered in the media.
"After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it," he said.
"This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election."
It's not the first time Trump directly took aim at Facebook and the Russian advertisements. In a tweet earlier this month, he appeared to dismiss the scrutiny of ads on Facebook.Sweeping gun-control legislation promoted by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) once appeared on a fast track to clear the Maryland General Assembly. It passed the state Senate largely intact on Feb. 28 and moved to the House of Delegates, where lawmakers held a marathon hearing on the measure the next day.
A month later, however, the bill has languished without another vote as members of the House Judiciary Committee have wrestled privately with whether to weaken O’Malley’s proposed assault-weapons ban.
With little more than a week remaining in the session, and as the Newtown, Conn., tragedy made headlines again Thursday with President Obama meeting with victims’ family members, the bill appeared on the move.
On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee and the chamber’s Health and Government Operations Committee, or the HGO, are scheduled to meet for the first time since March 1. The two have joint jurisdiction and are expected to vote on proposed amendments to O’Malley’s bill.
It remains to be seen exactly what this rare joint committee will decide to do and what last-minute compromises will be worked out with the Senate. Here are five questions to keep in mind as the voting begins:
1Will the House committee vote to weaken O’Malley’s proposed assault-weapons ban? Will it even hold a public vote to do so?
Last week, key Democrats on the committee said they were reluctant to go along with O’Malley’s complete ban. They said the committee was weighing whether to keep semiautomatic rifles legal. The weapons were carried by shooters in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., but are popular with sportsmen and veterans. They also have been rarely used in Maryland killings.
In recent days, however, pressure on those Democrats from gun-control advocates and the governor’s office appears to have had an effect.
On Thursday, O’Malley sent a letter to supporters with the subject line “It’s time,” noting that it had been 100 days since Newtown. The message urged Marylanders to call delegates and urge passage of his bill.
If the votes aren’t there to weaken O’Malley’s assault-weapons ban, it is unlikely that leaders of the Judiciary Committee will risk a public vote, which could expose supportive Democrats to challenges on the left in next year’s primary.
Although that scenario seems most likely, there also remains a possibility of a public fight among Democrats over the ban. If that happens, it is also possible a majority of the Judiciary could vote to weaken the ban but still be outmaneuvered.
The decision by the speaker of the House of Delegates, Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel), to co-assign the governor’s bill to two committees means it could be advanced to the full House over the objections of a majority in either committee, as long as a majority of the two combined go along. Politically, that’s a strong-arm tactic that the House speaker’s office has seemed keen to avoid.
2How will the House and Senate compromise on mental health?
House lawmakers appear likely to agree with the Senate on a tough, new restriction similar to one in Virginia that bans gun purchases by residents who are committed against their will for psychiatric treatment for any length of time.
Unlike the Senate, however, members of the HGO appear unwilling to go in the same direction regarding patients who voluntarily seek inpatient treatment.
Last month, the Senate went even further than O’Malley’s measure when it recommended banning guns from those who end up in emergency rooms with mental problems and are then taken directly to mental-health facilities, regardless of whether they go voluntarily.
There appears to be little middle ground for compromise, so will the House or Senate version win out?
3Could an even tougher mental-health provision enter the fold?
Del. Peter A. Hammen (D-Baltimore), the HGO’s chairman, has been working with the state’s psychiatric association and Del. Luiz R.S. Simmons (D-Montgomery) to craft a compromise on a bill proposed by Simmons. That measure would make it mandatory for mental-health providers to report a patient to authorities if the patient makes an overt and imminent threat of harm.
Simmons’s bill is similar to the recommendation of a legislative task force that last year said psychologists, educators, social workers and addiction-treatment counselors in Maryland should be required to report such threats to local law enforcement.
It is currently optional under Maryland law. Simmons seeks to make the reporting mandatory.
4Could the joint committee make other changes to the bill?
Simmons is hoping Hammen will put the power of his chairmanship behind the mandatory reporting requirement. But if he doesn’t, Simmons is likely to go it alone and try to persuade members of the two committees to attach the provision to the governor’s bill. It could be one of dozens of such attempts by lawmakers when the two committees get together. Forty amendments were added to the governor’s bill in the Senate.
Simmons also plans to introduce a measure that would ban gun sales to defendants who succeed in having a violent criminal conviction expunged — a far more widespread practice in Maryland than in other states with strict gun-control legislation.
5What’s the wild card?
Does House Judiciary Chairman Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince George’s) have a trick up his sleeve? The powerful chairman is no friend of what he calls “knee jerk” legislation. The few gun bills that have passed his committee in recent years have often taken years of refinement before winning his approval.
Vallario’s power has seemingly been diluted under the joint-committee arrangement. Or has it?Getty Images
Vince Young got the start at quarterback for the Eagles on Thursday night and played very well — until leaving the game with a hamstring injury.
Young, the man who first used the words “dream team” to describe the Eagles, suffered the injury when rolling out on an incomplete pass. He fell to the ground and then limped off the field, along the sideline and into the locker room.
Young had completed 15 of 23 passes for 193 yards and a touchdown against the second-string Jets defense. Both the Eagles and the Jets — like most teams around the NFL in Week 4 of the preseason — are resting most of their top players.
In the second half, Mike Kafka replaced Young at quarterback for the Eagles.
Greg McElroy, who got the start at quarterback for the Jets, also left the game with |
carry. “The Archive is to be burned, razed totally…” Chamismaka stepped forward and whispered something intently. Frestetchnak got a pained expression on his face. “Fine,” he said, “Ground up and pounded to dust.”
He turned and indicated the Archive men with a grand gesture. “And these will be crucified, along this glorious path, where they can watch the Archive destroyed.”
Frestetchnak stood up straight, and faced his people once again. “And thus do we remind ourselves,” he said, “That people are the bedrock of Empire, and that Things exist only to serve the people who wield them.”Declassified Report Claims Putin ‘Ordered’ Campaign to Erode Faith in US Election — By Telling the Truth
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After months of hyperbolic assertions Russian State actors — and possibly even President Vladimir Putin, himself — undertook a coordinated campaign to meddle in the U.S. presidential election to throw the vote in favor of Donald Trump, three intelligence agencies have finally proffered alleged proof to back their claims.
However, the report — claiming Putin “ordered” this campaign — reads more like a hit piece than a studied and cautious analysis. Worse, the first media outlet to publish the report was none other than the Washington Post, whose ever-heightening McCarthyite articles — many since retracted — have parroted the government’s claims sans investigation or evidence.
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the report boldly states, citing Moscow’s “longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.”
Further, while the FBI and CIA claimed to have high confidence in the assessment, this murky report came only with moderate confidence of its accuracy from the one agency who would have the most comprehensive electronic records of such a campaign: the NSA.
“We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the report alarmingly continues. “When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign then focused on undermining her expected presidency.”
Additionally, the report continues, the three agencies “assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks. […]
“Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.”
Their reasoning and proof?
“A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015.”
In other words, an unnamed, alleged journalist ostensibly concluded that outlets who reported on Russia’s actions in Ukraine — a country whose coup was supported by the U.S. government — and appeared to support the candidacy of Trump are now thus tied to the Russian government.
And the NSA, CIA, and FBI expect the public to swallow that an unnamed journalist’s personal opinion drove a significant portion of their conclusion not only Russian actors, but Putin himself, successfully swayed the vote away from Hillary Clinton.
While RT might be a Russian state-run media organization, the outlet never came out in support of Trump or Clinton — in fact, RT did what a number of independent and alternative media outlets did — reported the factual evidence of rampant corruption in the Democratic establishment exposed in documents published by WikiLeaks.
Indeed, select members of the intelligence community have relentlessly conflated RT, WikiLeaks, and alternative media with a Russian propaganda machine — providing exactly zero evidence to prove the claim. Former intelligence officials came forward Thursday to denounce claims those documents had even resulted from a hack — as, again, the NSA would be instantly aware and eager to provide proof.
On top of simply relying on this seemingly magical journalist, the report claims RT’s coverage of third-party candidates was a deliberate attack on the very fabric of US democracy.
In an effort to highlight the alleged “lack of democracy” in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a “sham.”
As we’ve pointed out on numerous occasions — the two-party paradigm is a sham.
This new report — heralded as proof positive of Russian government election meddling — does little to bolster confidence from the public the claim isn’t just hot air.
Further, Hillary Clinton’s campaign notoriously spent over $1 million — on social media trolls.
As the report continues, Russian intelligence agencies “conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 US presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties” and “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.”
“Cyber operations against targets” is phenomenally broad and proves nothing — and fails to address that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta fecklessly used the word “password” for his password — something WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange notes a 14-year-old could discern.
Secondly, the claim Russia somehow hacked any U.S. electrical grid has proven preposterously untrue thus far — so much so, in fact, the Washington Post’s claim Vermont’s power grid was compromised has since been fully retracted for being literally the Fake News it rails against, and completely false.
This report — wholly lacking solid evidence of the vociferous, dangerous accusations it proclaims — portends a drawn-out, heavy-handed campaign by the government of the United States to censor dissenting thought, speech, and independent reporting unacceptable to the political establishment.
Without proof, the U.S. political establishment and outgoing Obama administration just pinned an accusation on Russia, an act that, according to an Executive Order, could result in military aggression.
And all of this because Clintonites refuse to accept the nastiness, corruption, and collusion exposed in authentic documents — and just eat crow.
Help Us Be The Change We Wish To See In The World.Schapelle Corby: AFP discontinues proceeds of crime investigation
Updated
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has dropped its Schapelle Corby proceeds of crime investigation.
The Sydney offices of Channel Seven were raided by the AFP last month as part of an investigation into whether Corby had sold her story of imprisonment to the network.
The AFP has now issued a statement saying that investigation has ended because the likelihood of Corby being paid for an interview has changed.
It says Indonesian authorities have stated publicly that any paid interview would be a serious breach of Corby's parole conditions and could land her back in jail.
"This decision does not mean that the original concerns that initiated the investigation were not well founded," the AFP said in a statement.
The statement says the AFP is returning all documents taken from Channel Seven.
Mercedes Corby and Channel Seven are suing the AFP over the raids last month, claiming it should never have been authorised.
Topics: crime, law-crime-and-justice, drug-offences, bali, australia, indonesia, qld
First posted- Stellar defense by Northwest Missouri State played a starring role in the Bearcats' 33straight victory on a brisk, windy Saturday afternoon at Cope Stadium.Led by the play of junior linebackerand senior defensive tackle, Northwest, ranked No. 1 in the AFCA top 25, beat Nebraska-Kearney 13-0 and improved to 3-0. Nebraska-Kearney dropped to 1-2."Right now, I think we are playing pretty well defensively," said Northwest coach. "I think that is something we can take away from this. Moving forward, we can be pretty good on defense."It was the second straight grind-it-out win for the Bearcats. Hess played a key role in the second half to keep Nebraska-Kearney off the scoreboard."It is unique right now how young we are," Hess said. "It is a different team than in the past. We have to figure out how to play close games and how to take advantage of opportunities we get. All of this is a good learning experience for us. Gritty games are what we needed."Midway through the third quarter with Northwest ahead 13-0, Nebraska-Kearney moved to near midfield thanks to a couple of penalties that gave the Lopers two first downs. But Nebraska-Kearney never crossed midfield because of a sack by Hess that went for minus 11 yards, which pushed the ball back to the 36.After an incomplete pass, the Lopers were forced to punt. Hess made his presence felt once again early in the fourth quarter when he had a sack for a minus 13 yards that put the Lopers at their 7."As a defense, we are a unit," Hess said. "Our defensive line got a great push. Our coaches got us ready for that. It was a cumulation of great practices and preparation for this game. It was fun to see it come to fruition."Once again, Nebraska-Kearney had to punt, but on this occasion, the Lopers had the wind at their backs. Still, Northwest got good field position. The Bearcats used a methodical offense and stingy defense to put the game away. It was the second shutout of the season.But Northwest managed only onefield goal in the second half. The Bearcats didn't score in the second and fourth quarters when they had the wind in their face.The best part about Saturday's game was Northwest with many first-year starters on both sides of the ball on a windy day found a way to win.The only negative was the three missed field goals, two coming in the second half that could have made it a three-score lead for the Bearcats. Wright, though, felt the special teams played well, improving from last week."Our special teams all the way around improved dramatically," he said. "The field goals we have to make in that area. You have to be able to convert those."Defensively, Northwest played well in all areas. Spaeth, who missed last week because of an injury, recovered a fumble in the first half. Senior safetyintercepted a pass in the first half. The defensive line stopped the run and the secondary prevented long passes.Spaeth also had a sack with under three minutes left in the game that ended the Lopers last scoring opportunity."It was pretty big," Spaeth said. "They forgot to block me I guess, and I got in there."It felt great to be back out there. It is always hard to be on the sideline, missing a game, but you get to see your teammates go out there and you know they are going to give a good effort."The offense didn't have the same kind of success, scoring just one touchdown. It was an afternoon when the defense had the offense's back. The defense knows there will be a game when the reverse is true.Senior wide receiver, who caught the only touchdown in the game, refused to use the wind as an excuse."We are used to it a lot," Williams said. "We play with it a lot in Maryville. We can always adjust to whatever comes at us."In the first half, Northwest held its opponent scoreless for the third straight week, and that allowed the Bearcats take a 10-0 lead into halftime."As a defense, we are still trying to find our identity, but through these first three games we are starting to click, and when that happens it is scary when our defense comes together," Hess said.Nebraska-Kearney's only scoring opportunity came with 4 seconds left in the second quarter after seniortossed his first interception of the season and it was returned to the Northwest 24. The Lopers only had time for a 41-yard field goal, and it hit off the left crossbar.Throughout the first half, Northwest defense completely dominated, limiting the Lopers to two first downs. The first one came on a pass interference call in the first quarter and the second one was on a 23-yard pass play in the second quarter.With the wind at their backs in the first quarter, the Bearcats played nearly the entire 15 minutes on Nebraska-Kearney's side of the field. The great field position allowed Northwest to score on its second drive of the game. A 46-yard field goal by juniorgave the Bearcats a 3-0 lead with 10:30 left in the opening quarter.Northwest stopped the Lopers on their next two drives. After a punt, Northwest got the ball at Nebraska-Kearney 46. Six plays later, Northwest was in the end zone on a 6-yard pass from Martin to Williams. The extra point increased Northwest's lead to 10-0 with 2:36 left in the first quarter."We were glad we could punch it in," Williams said. "We got close a lot. Zach did a great job of making a play. I was glad I came up with it."The Bearcats missed a golden opportunity to extend its lead early in the second quarter when Spaeth recovered a fumble at Nebraska-Kearney 19 with 10:54 left until halftime."The defense up front caused the ball to come loose, and I saw the ball on the ground and ran for it and grabbed it," Spaeth said.Northwest was unable to get a first down and settled for a 28-yard field goal attempt that missed. A gusty, swirling wind in the face of Garner made it a difficult field goal.The loss of senior running backto an injury in the first quarter hurt Northwest offense in the second quarter."We were behind the chains too much," Wright said. "We are in second down and long way too much. We are not there yet as an offense to get behind like that and still come out successful. We have to convert more."Despite the struggles on offense, Northwest still won the statistical battle in the first half, gaining 169 total yards compared to 53 for the Lopers."They were great again," Williams said of Northwest defense. "The way Kearney runs the offense, we had to be disciplined. Our offense is proud how the defense played for us."The Accidental Parent, What I learned from 37 Years of Mistakes, Part IV
Two things happen in this part of your child’s life: 1) You will honestly believe your kids will be elected president after winning Olympic Gold Medals and before bringing home the Nobel Prize for Physics — and so will every other parent; 2) You will establish your child’s interpersonal skills and academic career for a lifetime.
The University of Edinburgh (those crafty Scotts) studied 17,000 people over a 50 year span and proved that math and reading skills at age 7 were indicators of personal success later in life. For example, one reading level above average at age 7 was associated with a $7,750 higher income at age 42.
If you’re just joining us, read the opening post for background.
You’ve already picked your sperm/egg donor, the genes are set. Now you should maximize what the school system offers. When my first daughter was in third grade, a property tax revolt changed American education. We went from #1 to #16 among industrialized nations. In a democracy, you can’t say it was right or wrong, you just have to deal with what you happened. That is: bigger classes. Teachers can only teach to the kids who are listening. That means your involvement is more important than ever.
When my oldest daughter struggled in public school, I put her in a private school that had 12 kids per teacher. She flourished. I chose private school because, as a single parent, I didn’t have the time available to give her the help she needed. My sister kept her children in public school and spent many hours hovering over them. Either path will work.
Here are my pearls of wisdom, learned from doing the opposite, about what works in this age bracket:
1) Laughter is the greatest gift. Use it, breed it, multiply it, and above all: be the first to laugh at your mistakes. You are their model.
2) Edcation is meaningless without U. No school in the world is going to educate your child. They can only offer the material. You are the model for learning behavior.
3) Homework is not part of the humor campaign. No one in the house plays, watches TV, makes noise, etc until everyone is done with his/her homework. All homework is reviewed by Mom/Dad after dinner. (“You should recheck that one” is much better than correcting a wrong answer.)*
4) Positives are better than negatives—but let’s keep it real. Kicking your playmate is wrong. Helping a classmate is good. Don’t dwell on mistakes; learn, laugh, and move on.
5) Take time for your marriage. If you’re single, take time for someone special.
6) Perfectparentitis is the most common disease among elementary school parents. Get over it. You’re going to screw things up and your kids will end up in family therapy where you will fork over huge sums of money to be held personally responsible for every shortcoming your child experiences in life. My advice: Get your money’s worth.
7) Hold your kids. Hug your kids. Carry them around. Human contact makes a confident child.
8) Be honest. Carefully. Where do babies come from? Did you smoke pot? Why did you leave mom/dad?** What you say will haunt you. You don’t need to explain everything. Just make sure you tell the truth—it will come out.
9) Get your child involved in both team sports and music. Yes, you will end up with a lot on your plate, deal with it. Team sports will save your child’s life in middle school (more in Part V). Music will help your child in math. Both are important parts of humanity.
There is an internet meme going around that says, “I’m afraid of a world run by adults who were never spanked as a child and got trophies just for participating.” On one hand, science has proven that positive reinforcement is the best childhood environment. On the other, a Wall Street Journal survey of Fortune 500 executives found them nearly unanimous in describing the one personality trait that contributed the most to their success: having a firm grasp on reality.
The best parenting advice I’ve ever heard came to me from a janitor at my engagement party. He said, “Remember, if everything goes right, the kids will leave you and the wife won’t.”
Peace, Seeley
* This will work until they’re old enough to resent your oversight. Keep reviewing everything until they can’t stand it, then negotiate your retreat, “As long as you get A’s and B’s, I’ll let you take full responsibility for your homework. If you come home with a C, we’ll do it my way.”
** Note to divorced parents: Everything negative you say about your Ex, no matter how true, hurts your child. You chose to mingle your DNA with your ex, and now your child carries half of it. Whenever you say, “I hate him/her” or “he/she is a moron” your children are hearing “I hate half of you”. Respect your entire child. (By the way, I agree, you do deserve far better than a jerk like he/she was, but still… )One Liberal MP, who asked not to be named, said Mr MacFarlane was ''out on a limb'' and that he and Treasurer Joe Hockey had very different views on industry assistance. But Mr MacFarlane said: ''I'm as dry as any of them. The issue is not whether Toyota is viable but can we get them to the point where they can compete with [Toyota operations in] Kentucky and Thailand.''
He left open the possibility of more aid from the federal Automotive Transformation Scheme, which has an estimated $1.38 billion left in it until next year, but said he would wait for the Productivity Commission to hand down its final report on March 31 before making a decision on co-investment.
Mr MacFarlane said Toyota was doing everything it could to continue making cars in Australia but the biggest threat was a battle with unions over pay and conditions.
''All I can do is plead with employees on the shop floor to think about their futures and the need for competitive work practices. I'm not comparing them to an assembly line in Thailand. I'm talking about the Toyota plant in Kentucky.
''The unions need to show leadership. The priority should be preservation of jobs, not maintaining archaic conditions in the award.''Hair-stealing busker faces the music
Updated
A French busker accused of cutting a lock of hair from a spectator during his performance has been given a spent conviction in Fremantle Court, south of Perth.
Mime artist Rodolphe Couthouis was charged with assault following the incident during one of his routines at last weekend's Fremantle Street Arts Festival.
Police say he had not been given permission to cut the woman's hair and she had pressed charges.
Fremantle mayor Brad Pettitt has confirmed that the council, which organised the festival, has agreed to pay for a new haircut for the woman and has offered her a meal for two in the port city.
Dr Pettitt says the chunk of hair was believed to be about 10 centimetres long.
It is believed Mr Couthouis snipped the ringlet to put it on a balding man's head as part of his 'Blah, Blah, Blah' street theatre show.
Topics: antisocial-behaviour, theatre, fremantle-6160
First postedMs. Under Secretary General, Mr. Special Coordinator, Mr. Assistant Director General, Distinguished Delegates, ladies and gentlemen.
Two weeks ago, I made an urgent appeal to member states of the United Nations in New York for your help in stemming the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Many other organisations, such as the CDC, the WHO, and the UN, have also described the unfolding catastrophe.
Yet, since then, only a few countries have promised to deploy more hands-on capacity to the affected countries such as the United States of America, United Kingdom, China, France and Cuba, or the European Union. We understand President Obama will announce later today plans to deploy military and medical assistance to West Africa. If this is true – but we have no real details yet on what this deployment entails, and how fast it will be – then it shows that the US is willing to lead by example. Other countries need to follow.
Today, the response to Ebola continues to fall dangerously behind, and I am forced to reiterate the appeal I made two weeks ago:
We need you on the ground. The window of opportunity to contain this outbreak is closing. We need more countries to stand up, we need greater deployment, and we need it NOW. This robust response must be coordinated, organized and executed under clear chain of command.
Today, in Monrovia, sick people are banging on the doors of MSF Ebola care centres, because they do not want to infect their families and they are desperate for a safe place in which to be isolated.
Tragically, our teams must turn them away. We simply do not have enough capacity for them. Highly infectious people are forced to return home, only to infect others and continue the spread of this deadly virus. All for a lack of international response.
As of today, MSF has sent more than 420 tonnes of supplies to the affected countries. We have 2,000 staff on the ground. We manage more than 530 beds in five different Ebola care centres. Yet we are overwhelmed. We are honestly at a loss as to how a single, private NGO is providing the bulk of isolation units and beds.
We are unable to predict how the epidemic will spread. We are dealing largely with the unknown. But we do know that the number of recorded Ebola cases represents only a fraction of the real number of people infected. We do know that transmission rates are at unprecedented levels. We do know that communities are being decimated. And, with certainty, we know that the ground response remains totally, and lethally, inadequate.
With every passing week, the epidemic grows exponentially. With every passing week, the response becomes all the more complicated.
More countries must deploy their civil defence and military assets, and medical teams, to contain the epidemic. Large numbers of trained staff are needed to tend to patients in basic and efficient isolation wards and tent hospitals, which can be established quickly on open ground in a comparatively straight forward logistical operation.
The fight against this outbreak is more than just about controlling the virus. While thousands have died of Ebola, many more are dying from easily treatable conditions and diseases because health centres no longer function.Health structures need support to start working again and reduce death rates and suffering caused by other untreated ailments.
Meanwhile, efforts towards producing an effective vaccine must continue, in order to cut the chain of transmission. But it must be a vaccine of proven safety and efficiency and of wide availability. Until that day comes, we must act as if no vaccine exists.
How the world deals with this unprecedented epidemic will be recorded in history books. This is a regional crisis with economic, social and security implications that reach far beyond the borders of the affected countries.
States have a political and humanitarian responsibility to halt this mounting disaster
It can only be done by massively deploying assets to the field, and battling the epidemic at its roots.
The first pledges have been made, now more countries must urgently also mobilise. The clock is ticking.Name is pronounced yah-SEE-el PWEEG...was selected by fans to start the 2014 National League All-Star Game at Min's Target Field...participated in the Home Run Derby...following the 2013 season finished second in the Baseball Writers' Association of America's National League Rookie of the Year Award voting and 15th in the Most Valuable Player Award balloting...was named to Baseball America's All-Rookie team...following his 2014 All-Star season finished 19th in the BBWAA's National League MVP Award voting...was National League Rookie of the Month in June 2013...was National League Player of the Month in June 2013 and May 2014...3 times was named National League Player of the Week (6/4-6/10, 2013; 9/13-9/19, 2014; 9/10-9/16, 2018)...in 2017 was the Wilson Defensive Player of the Year as the Major Leagues' best defender in right field...among all players since his Major League debut on 6/3/13 ranks 22nd in slugging percentage (.478) and 32nd in on-base percentage (.353)...during his 6-year tenure with the Dodgers led the club in triples (19), HR (108) and extra-base hits (256)...his 58 career Postseason apps for the Dodgers are the most in that franchise's history (.280, 6 2b, 3 3b, 5hr, 23rbi, 2sb)...played in 6 Division Series, 4 League Championship Series and the 2017 & 2018 World Series...over the 2017 and 2018 Postseasons hit.292 (31g, 31-106, 5 2b, 1 3b, 5hr, 18rbi), the fourth-highest batting average among the 28 players who recorded at least 50 at-bats...his 18 RBI the past 2 Postseasons are tied for second-most...his 3 home runs in the World Series (2 in 2017, 1 in 2018) tie Jose Canseco and Hall of Famer Tony Perez for the most HR in World Series history by a player born in Cuba...played professionally for Cuba in his hometown of Cienfuegos during the 2008-2009 and 2010-2011 Cuban Series...did not play in 2009-2010 or in 2011-2012...in his first professional season hit.276 with 5 HR and 26 RBI...in 89 apps for Cienfuegos during the 2010-2011 campaign hit.330 with 19 doubles, 6 triples, 17 HR, 47 RBI and a.430 on-base percentage...that season ranked among the league leaders in OPS (1.011, 2nd), total bases (2nd), doubles (T1st) and home runs (T2nd)...is 1 of 5 players born in Cuba participating in the Reds' 2019 Major League spring training camp (RHP Raisel Iglesias, minor leaguers RHP Odrisamer Despaigne, RHP Vladimir Gutierrez, IF Alfredo Rodriguez).
Founded the Wild Horse Foundation, which aids economically disadvantaged children and families by focusing on helping the community prioritize health and education...in December 2015 traveled with Major League Baseball on its goodwill tour of his native Cuba.
2018
Was National League Player of the Week for 9/10-9/16 (7g,.429, 1 2b, 5hr, 9rbi,.500obp, 1.190slg), his third career weekly award...led National League right fielders in errors (8) and assists (10) and led all NL outfielders in double plays turned (4)...led Dodgers batters in stolen bases...was 1 of 7 Dodgers batters to produce at least 20 HR, the most ever for a National League team (Max Muncy 35, Joc Pederson 25, Cody Bellinger 25, Yasmani Grandal 24, Puig 23, Kiké Hernández 21, Matt Kemp 21)...the Dodgers led the NL with a team-record 235 HR, seventh-most in league history...on 8/11 at Col hit the 100th HR of his career (solo off Kyle Freeland)...as the Dodgers pushed for a playoff spot in September, that month ranked among the National League leaders in HR (8, T3rd) and OPS (1.074, 4th)...was named NL Player of the Week following performances at StL on 9/14 (2 solo HR) and 9/15 (3hr, 7rbi, both single-game career highs)...his 5 HR in 2 days tied a Dodgers record held by Shawn Green, who hit 5 HR on 5/23 & 5/24, 2002...became the ninth Dodgers batter with consecutive multi-homer games and the 24th to hit at least 3 homers in a game.
2017
Set career-marks in games played (152), home runs (28), RBI (74) and stolen bases (15), while posting a.263/.346/.487 slashline with 72 runs, 24 doubles and two triples...tied for the team lead with 42 multi-hit games, while ranking second in homers and stolen bases and third in RBI...Ranked among the Top-25 in the National League in home runs (T-23rd), stolen bases (T-19th) and slugging percentage (21st)...Hit.288 against right-handed pitchers, which ranked 19th best in the NL, compared to a.183 mark against southpaws...In 145 games (135 starts) at right field, he posted a.996 fielding percentage (1 E/1201.2 IP), which ranked fourth best among National League outfielders and second among Major League right fielders...also recorded four outfield assists...selected as Wilson Defensive Player of the Year as baseball's best defender in right field...Collected his fourth career multi-homer game of his career on July 14 at MIA, stroking a solo home run in the fifth inning and a three-run shot in the ninth inning, which were both go-ahead homers...it was the first time in his career he had hit two go-ahead homers in a game and according to Elias, became the only Dodger player to accomplish the feat since the team moved out west in 1958... Started in right field in all 15 postseason games for the Dodgers, posting a.286/.365/.518 slashline with eight runs, two doubles, one triple, three homers and 10 RBI.
2016
Hit.263 with 11 homers and 45 RBI in 104 games in his fourth big league season with the Dodgers...Batted.301 with RISP (25-for-83) and.314 with runners on base (50-for-159)...Optioned to Triple-A Oklahoma City from Aug. 4-Sept. 2, where he posted a.348/.400/.594 slashline with 12 runs, three doubles, a triple, four homers and 12 RBI in 19 games...Placed on the disabled list from June 3-21 with a strained left hamstring...Hit.211 (4-for-19) with a run scored in 10 postseason games (three starts).
2015
Limited to 79 games due to a pair of DL trips with a strained left hamstring (April 26-June 6) and a strained right hamstring (Aug. 28-Oct. 3), batting.255 with 11 homers and 38 RBI in his third big league season.... Posted a.279/.380/.544 slashline against left-handers, while slashing.248/.302/.402 against righties.... Had a strong finish to the season, hitting safely in his last 11 starts from Aug. 13-Oct. 3…batted.341 (14-for-41) with a double, two homers and four RBI during the season-long hitting streak.... Appeared exclusively in right field (78 games, 71 starts), committing just one error (.993 fielding percentage) and recording six outfield assists in 638.0 innings.... Drove in all five runs for the Dodgers on Aug. 11 against the Nationals, as he tied his career high in RBI, previously set in his second career game, June 4, 2013 vs. San Diego…according to Elias Sports Bureau, it marked the eighth time since 1920 that a Dodger player drove in at least five runs that accounted for all the team's scoring in a game (last: Eric Karros, 5 RBI in the Dodgers' 5-0 win on June 18, 1998 at Colorado).... Appeared in three games (one start) in the NLDS vs. New York and was held hitless in six at-bats.
2014
In his first full MLB season, earned his first All-Star selection and finished the season among the National League leaders in several categories, including batting average (.296, 8th), on-base percentage (.382, 6th), slugging percentage (.480, 11th) and triples (9, T-5th)...His 15 outfield assists led the National League and ranked second in the Majors…appeared in 91 games (89 starts) in right field and in 53 games (52 starts) in center field…was the Dodgers' primary center fielder after July 25, with the team going 33-19 in his 52 starts in center field...Collected 49 multi-hit games, tied for the sixth most in the NL...Made his first All-Star Game appearance in Minneapolis as a fan-elected starter and also participated in the Home Run Derby… at 23 years, 220 days, he became the Dodgers' fourth-youngest first-time All-Star position player, behind Pete Reiser (1941, 22 years, 113 days), Steve Sax (1982, 22 years, 165 days) and Tommy Davis (1962, 23 years, 111 days)...Won May Player of the Month honors in the National League, ranking among the Major League leaders in several offensive categories, including hits (43, 2nd), batting average (.398, 1st), on-base percentage (.492, 1st), slugging percentage (.731, 3rd) and RBI (25, T-4th)…his 43 May hits tied Willie Davis for the most in LA Dodger history...Was named the NL Co-Player of the Week for the period May 12-18…posted a.348 batting average (8-for-23) in six contests last week while collecting a league-leading 10 RBI and tying for the league lead with three home runs...Recorded the highest slugging percentage in the Majors (.688) in the month of July…batted.351 (27-for-77) with two homers and 10 RBI in 21 games in the month...Posted a career-long 16-game hitting streak from April 30-May 17, batting.409 (27-for-66) during the run...Reached base safely in 40 consecutive games (including reaching on an error) from April 25-June 10, the sixth-longest streak in Los Angeles Dodger history...Batted.310 with runners in scoring position (49-for-158) and hit.292 with runners on base (71-for-243)...On July 25 at San Francisco, became the first Dodger to record three triples in a game since Jimmy Sheckard on April 18, 1901, for the Brooklyn Superbas against the Phillies…went 4-for-5 with two runs scored, a double, three triples and two RBI…his four extra-base hits and 11 total bases that night, a team-high this season...Appeared in all four of the Dodgers' NLDS games vs. St. Louis, going 3-for-12 (.250) with four runs scored, a triple and an RBI
2013
Saw his first big league action and batted.319 with 19 home runs and 42 RBI in 104 games in his rookie campaign, providing a spark to the Dodgers, who went 66-38 (.635) in games that he appeared. Opened the season at Double-A Chattanooga and hit.313 with 13 steals, 12 doubles, three triples, eight homers and 37 RBI in 40 games with the Lookouts, leading the Southern League with in batting average and a.599 slugging percentage…also ranked among the league leaders in steals (T-10th), doubles (T-5th), triples (T-7th), home runs (T-4th) and total bases (88, 6th) … batted.373 (19-for-51) with runners in scoring position for Chattanooga. Recalled by the club on June 3 from Double-A Chattanooga and made his debut that night against San Diego, singling in his first at-bat and going 2-for-4 in the game … contributed in the field as well, ending the game in dramatic fashion, as he doubled Chris Denorfia off first base after catching a line drive in right field. From the time of his recall (June 3) through the conclusion of the season, |
considered the creator of trigonometry as a mathematical discipline in its own right.[14][15][16] He was a Twelver Shia Muslim.[17] The Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) considered Tusi to be the greatest of the later Persian scholars.[18]
Biography [ edit ]
Nasir al-Din Tusi was born in the city of Tus in medieval Khorasan (northeastern Iran) in the year 1201 and began his studies at an early age. In Hamadan and Tus he studied the Quran, hadith, Ja'fari jurisprudence, logic, philosophy, mathematics, medicine and astronomy.[19]
He was apparently born into a Shī‘ah family and lost his father at a young age. Fulfilling the wish of his father, the young Muhammad took learning and scholarship very seriously and traveled far and wide to attend the lectures of renowned scholars and acquire the knowledge, an exercise highly encouraged in his Islamic faith. At a young age, he moved to Nishapur to study philosophy under Farid al-Din Damad and mathematics under Muhammad Hasib.[20] He met also Attar of Nishapur, the legendary Sufi master who was later killed by the Mongols, and he attended the lectures of Qutb al-Din al-Misri.
In Mosul he studied mathematics and astronomy with Kamal al-Din Yunus (d. AH 639 / AD 1242), a pupil of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī.[1] Later on he corresponded with Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, the son-in-law of Ibn Arabi, and it seems that mysticism, as propagated by Sufi masters of his time, was not appealing to his mind and once the occasion was suitable, he composed his own manual of philosophical Sufism in the form of a small booklet entitled Awsaf al-Ashraf "The Attributes of the Illustrious".
As the armies of Genghis Khan swept his homeland, he was employed by the Nizari Ismaili state and made his most important contributions in science during this time when he was moving from one stronghold to another.[21] He was captured after the invasion of Alamut Castle by the Mongol forces.[22]
Works [ edit ]
Tusi has about 150 works, of which 25 are in Persian and the remaining are in Arabic,[23] and there is one treatise in Persian, Arabic and Turkish.[24]
A Treatise on the Astrolabe by Tusi, Isfahan 1505
Here are some of his major works:
An example from one of his poems:
Anyone who knows, and knows that he knows,
makes the steed of intelligence leap over the vault of heaven.
Anyone who does not know but knows that he does not know,
can bring his lame little donkey to the destination nonetheless.
Anyone who does not know, and does not know that he does not know,
is stuck forever in double ignorance.
Achievements [ edit ]
During his stay in Nishapur, Tusi established a reputation as an exceptional scholar. Tusi’s prose writing, which numbers over 150 works, represent one of the largest collections by a single Islamic author. Writing in both Arabic and Persian, Nasir al-Din Tusi dealt with both religious ("Islamic") topics and non-religious or secular subjects ("the ancient sciences").[23] His works include the definitive Arabic versions of the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Autolycus, and Theodosius of Bithynia.[23]
Astronomy [ edit ]
The Astronomical Observatory of Nasir al- Dīn Tusi.
Tusi convinced Hulegu Khan to construct an observatory for establishing accurate astronomical tables for better astrological predictions. Beginning in 1259, the Rasad Khaneh observatory was constructed in Azarbaijan, south of the river Aras, and to the west of Maragheh, the capital of the Ilkhanate Empire.[25]
Based on the observations in this for the time being most advanced observatory, Tusi made very accurate tables of planetary movements as depicted in his book Zij-i ilkhani (Ilkhanic Tables). This book contains astronomical tables for calculating the positions of the planets and the names of the stars. His model for the planetary system is believed to be the most advanced of his time, and was used extensively until the development of the heliocentric model in the time of Nicolaus Copernicus. Between Ptolemy and Copernicus, he is considered by many[who?] to be one of the most eminent astronomers of his time. His famous student Shams ad-Din Al-Bukhari [2] was the teacher of Byzantine scholar Gregory Chioniadis, [26] who had in turn trained astronomer Manuel Bryennios [27] about 1300 in Constantinople.
For his planetary models, he invented a geometrical technique called a Tusi-couple, which generates linear motion from the sum of two circular motions. He used this technique to replace Ptolemy's problematic equant[28] for many planets, but was unable to find a solution to Mercury, which was solved later by Ibn al-Shatir as well as Ali Qushji.[29] The Tusi couple was later employed in Ibn al-Shatir's geocentric model and Nicolaus Copernicus' heliocentric Copernican model.[30] He also calculated the value for the annual precession of the equinoxes and contributed to the construction and usage of some astronomical instruments including the astrolabe.
Ṭūsī criticized Ptolemy's use of observational evidence to show that the Earth was at rest, noting that such proofs were not decisive. Although it doesn't mean that he was a supporter of mobility of the earth, as he and his 16th-century commentator al-Bīrjandī, maintained that the earth's immobility could be demonstrated, only by physical principles found in natural philosophy.[31] Tusi's criticisms of Ptolemy were similar to the arguments later used by Copernicus in 1543 to defend the Earth's rotation.[32]
About the real essence of the Milky Way, Ṭūsī in his Tadhkira writes: "The Milky Way, i.e. the galaxy, is made up of a very large number of small, tightly-clustered stars, which, on account of their concentration and smallness, seem to be cloudy patches. because of this, it was likened to milk in color." [33] Three centuries later the proof of the Milky Way consisting of many stars came in 1610 when Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and discovered that it is really composed of a huge number of faint stars.[34]
Logic [ edit ]
Nasir al-Din Tusi was a supporter of Avicennian logic, and wrote the following commentary on Avicenna's theory of absolute propositions:
"What spurred him to this was that in the assertoric syllogistic Aristotle and others sometimes used contradictories of absolute propositions on the assumption that they are absolute; and that was why so many decided that absolutes did contradict absolutes. When Avicenna had shown this to be wrong, he wanted to develop a method of construing those examples from Aristotle."[35]
Mathematics [ edit ]
A stamp issued in the republic of Azerbaijan in 2009 honoring Tusi
Al-Tusi was the first to write a work on trigonometry independently of astronomy.[36] Al-Tusi, in his Treatise on the Quadrilateral, gave an extensive exposition of spherical trigonometry, distinct from astronomy.[37] It was in the works of Al-Tusi that trigonometry achieved the status of an independent branch of pure mathematics distinct from astronomy, to which it had been linked for so long.[38][39]
He was the first to list the six distinct cases of a right triangle in spherical trigonometry.[40]
This followed earlier work by Greek mathematicians such as Menelaus of Alexandria, who wrote a book on spherical trigonometry called Sphaerica, and the earlier Muslim mathematicians Abū al-Wafā' al-Būzjānī and Al-Jayyani.
In his On the Sector Figure, appears the famous law of sines for plane triangles.[41]
a sin A = b sin B = c sin C {\displaystyle {\frac {a}{\sin A}}={\frac {b}{\sin B}}={\frac {c}{\sin C}}}
He also stated the law of sines for spherical triangles,[42][43] discovered the law of tangents for spherical triangles, and provided proofs for these laws.[41]
Biology [ edit ]
In his Akhlaq-i Nasiri, Tusi wrote about several biological topics. He defended a version of Aristotle's scala naturae, in which he placed man above animals, plants, minerals, and the elements. He described "grasses which grow without sowing or cultivation, by the mere mingling of elements,"[44] as closest to minerals. Among plants, he considered the date-palm as the most highly developed, since "it only lacks one thing further to reach (the stage of) an animal: to tear itself loose from the soil and to move away in the quest for nourishment."[44]
The lowest animals "are adjacent to the region of plants: such are those animals which propagate like grass, being incapable of mating [...], e.g. earthworms, and certain insects".[45] The animals "which reach the stage of perfection [...] are distinguished by fully developed weapons", such as antlers, horns, teeth, and claws. Tusi described these organs as adaptations to each species's lifestyle, in a way anticipating natural theology. He continued:
"The noblest of the species is that one whose sagacity and perception is such that it accepts discipline and instruction: thus there accrues to it the perfection not originally created in it. Such are the schooled horse and the trained falcon. The greater this faculty grows in it, the more surpassing its rank, until a point is reached where the (mere) observation of action suffices as instruction: thus, when they see a thing, they perform the like of it by mimicry, without training [...]. This is the utmost of the animal degrees, and the first of the degrees of Man in contiguous therewith."[46]
Thus, in this paragraph, Tusi described different types of learning, recognising observational learning as the most advanced form, and correctly attributing it to certain animals.
Tusi seems to have perceived man as belonging to the animals, since he stated that "the Animal Soul [comprising the faculties of perception and movement...] is restricted to individuals of the animal species", and that, by possessing a "Human Soul, [...] mankind is distinguished and particularized among other animals."[47]
Some scholars have interpreted Tusi's biological writings as suggesting that he adhered to some kind of evolutionary theory.[48][49] However, Tusi did not state explicitly that he believed species to change over time.
Chemistry [ edit ]
Tusi contributed to the field of chemistry, stating an early law of conservation of mass.[50]
Influence and legacy [ edit ]
A 60-km diameter lunar crater located on the southern hemisphere of the moon is named after him as "Nasireddin". A minor planet 10269 Tusi discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979 is named after him.[51][52] The K. N. Toosi University of Technology in Iran and Observatory of Shamakhy in the Republic of Azerbaijan are also named after him. In February 2013, Google celebrated his 812th birthday with a doodle, which was accessible in its websites with Arabic language calling him al-farsi (the Persian).[53][54]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]These pictures surfaced just hours after Lucas Oil Stadium hosted last year's Super Bowl XLVI.
Unknown to fans watching the biggest sporting event of the year, there was also at least one well-equipped sniper in attendance.
The rifle is mounted on a tripod manufactured by Alamo Four Star, and they posted the pictures online never imagining they'd become as popular as they did.
We talked to Alamo and confirmed that's an Indianapolis SWAT team member manning a custom built Remington M700 in a XLR Industries chassis, sitting atop an Alamo Four Star DCLW shooting tripod.
Alamo received the photos from a ranking member of the SWAT team and said their tripod has a locking mechanism that grabs the rail of the rifle without scratching or damaging the surface.
No reason to think there's not another one just like it set up in New Orleans right now.
4Chan
4Chan
4ChanHakan Calhanoglu continued to show why he's thought of as one of Europe's best free-kick takers on Saturday afternoon, as his strike secured a 1-0 win for Bayer Leverkusen against Hannover 96.
Calhanoglu picks up where he left off last season
The game's opening exchanges were few and far between, with Benschop's long range effort the only one of note. That all changed just after the quarter-hour mark, however, as Hakan Calhanoglu gave Leverkusen the lead in spectacular fashion. The Turkish international whipped a 25 yard free-kick up and over the wall, leaving Ron-Robert Zieler powerless to stop it from finding the top corner.
Hannover nearly found a way back into the game after some poor goalkeeping by Bernd Leno. The visiting stopper spilled an Edgar Prib cross and punched it straight to the awaiting Oliver Sorg. Their new signing was denied a home debut goal by André Ramalho's clearance off the line, much to the dismay of the player and the home support.
The remainder of the half was a series of half chance for either team but neither could take advantage of them. Julian Brandt, Stefan Kießling and Benschop all had opportunities to add to the score-line before the break, though the crucial finish was just lacking.
Second half sees more chances wasted
Calhanoglu almost scored a carbon-copy free-kick in the opening minutes of the second-half, only to see yet another stunning dead-ball effort rattle the cross bar. Ramalho should have made two in the early stages from another set-piece but he somehow blazed over from four yards after evading the attentions of Marcelo.
It was proving to be a similar period to the first half, and one which was devoid of major chances. Calhanoglu was by far the best player on the pitch and his creativity almost unlocked the Hannover defence for a crucial second time. He stood up the ball for Roberto Hilbert who crashed a volley at goal, only to see Zieler equal to the shot.
Some late pressure from both sides couldn't score the vital second goal, mainly thanks to Leno's double save, but that was of no concern to the visitors as they ran out 1-0 winners. Hannover would have been disappointed to withstand so much in attack and not have many meaningful efforts on goal though they still showed a steely determination that wasn't there in the early part of last season.Tommy the Green Ranger's local MMA debut
Jason David Frank likes to refer to himself as "Fearless Frank," a name he coined years ago with his brother. Ring announcers for his amateur MMA fights often play up a different moniker: "Tommy the Green Ranger."
See, Frank spent much of his life starring in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, that slightly trippy live-action kids series whose popularity peaked sometime in the '90s. The show earned him a strange brand of world-wide fame, and legions of 20- and 30-something men still remember Frank as the original Green Ranger, wielding his Sword of Darkness. And so Frank - who will be fighting at Patriot Center in Saturday's Ultimate Warrior Challenge 8: "Judgement Day" card - has no problem if people show up this weekend not to see Fearless Frank, but instead a fictional hero from their youth.
"I have nothing really to hide about who I am, what I do," Frank told me this week. "Personally I'm so into the fight, I don't care how they announce me. You can announce me as Tommy the Green Ranger, I don't care, I'm still going to go in there and kick butt."
(To read about one of the pro fighters appearing on Saturday, see this nice piece by B.J. Koubaroulis.)
Frank began learning karate at the age of 4, and remembers immediately wanting to make it his life. He was a junior blackbelt by middle school, began teaching classes not long after, and bought his first karate school at the age of 18 in Covina, Calif. About a year later, he saw a casting call for a new children's action show and was given the role of the Green Ranger. He had a good feeling about how that would turn out.
"I know what sells," said Frank, now 36. "I thought it was gonna sell. Everyone's saying it's cheesy, but what do kids eat? Cheese sticks. Cheese sandwiches. Kids love cheese. I knew a cheesy show like that was definitely gonna sell."
What he didn't know was that little boys would soon swarm him for autographs, put his posters on their wall, request that he visit them in the hospital. He told me he was soon visiting children's wards to see dying cancer patients whose last wish was to meet Tommy the Green Ranger.
"And I'm 19 years old at the time, [thinking] how can that be your last wish, to meet a Power Ranger?" Frank said. "I mean, there were times when I was dressed in my costume, behind a wall, almost in tears."
Grown men still come up to him and tell him about how much the show meant to them during tough times when they were kids. Fans at his fights shake his hand and tell corny stories about the show. He recently started a Facebook Fan page and got 8,000 members since the new year.
"To some people it sounds strange, but when you're growing up and your life is a lonely life and you only have heroes on TV, that's what you grow up on," Frank said. "Now, if it was awesome to see me fight on Power Rangers when they were little, how great it is to see me in a cage? They got to watch their childhood hero not only battle monsters when they were little, but now we're fighting real people.... It's still the entertainment business. I'm still entertaining."
Frank still owns karate schools and started a Christian-themed MMA clothing line, Jesus Didn't Tap. He obviously had a certain level of stand-up fighting skills from a lifetime of karate, and three or four years ago he began learning wrestling and Jiu-Jitsu. He made his MMA debut in January and is 3-0 as an amateur, but has never fought outside Texas Houston before.
"I'm curious to see what he has live, but we should have very measured expectations about what we would see talent-wise. It's important that folks go to see a guy in an embryonic transition," said Luke Thomas, a color commentator for Saturday's card and the host of MMA Nation on 106.7 The Fan. "I just think folks have a childhood attachment to that show, and they want to see it played out in modern form."
Which is fine by Frank. He expects to have time to mingle with fans on Saturday, and even to talk Power Rangers. Of course, don't expect to see one of the jumping spinning crescent kicks that Tommy the Green Ranger used to employ.
"When I spar, I will pull off some flashy stuff, and I will land it, but only when I'm sparring," Frank said. "I don't try that in the octagon."Take the legal-immigration bill. What makes it a potent proposal is that it has substantial overlap between both the Trump wing of the party and the GOP ancien régime. Cotton, the ambitious young Arkansan, has aligned himself with Trump to an unusual degree, given his pedigree as a socially conservative, fiscally conservative national-security hawk. Perdue ran as a classic business Republican when he ran for Senate in Georgia in 2014. They are not alone in wishing to limit legal immigration. During the 2016 GOP primary, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum both came out in favor of restrictions, before Trump even entered the race. If the Cotton-Perdue proposal succeeds, it will be because it draws support both from Trump’s supporters and from many establishment Republicans.
Realistically, it faces long odds. Lots of other Republicans oppose limiting legal immigration, from Paul Ryan to Orrin Hatch to Lindsey Graham. But plenty of other policies that sit in the Venn diagram overlap of Trumpism and traditional Republicanism either stand a better chance or have already succeeded.
The most obvious example is also what is arguably Trump’s greatest achievement: his successful nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The Senate has confirmed four other federal judges, with 30 more nominated. These appointments are important because they place conservative, and often young, jurists into lifetime jobs where they can reshape the law for decades to come. Few of these judges qualify as particularly Trumpist; Gorsuch was a rising star in conservative jurisprudence well before the president’s arrival. Trump has long recognized how powerful the nominating power is as a tool to keep GOP officials from abandoning him. In August 2016, he warned Republicans, “Even if you can’t stand Donald Trump, you think Donald Trump is the worst, you’re going to vote for me. You know why? Justices of the Supreme Court.”
Trump has also seen some success on the southern border, where crossings have decreased since he took office. Interestingly, that has happened without any actual construction on Trump’s famous border wall. But while Trump’s rhetoric about illegal immigrants was far more inflammatory than what any other Republican presidential contender was willing to say, Republican voters and many officials (as well as many Democrats) have long supported better border security. In April 2016, nearly two-third of GOP voters wanted a wall along the entire border. However, Republican officeholders tend to be more skeptical of the necessity of building a 50-foot wall along the border, or of drastically expanding the Border Patrol—so it’s no surprise than neither of those proposals has moved very far.
The balance of Trump’s major accomplishments, as I laid them last week, fall under the umbrella of rolling back Obama-era regulations, particularly environmental and business regulations, as well tougher crime policies. What these things share is that they are long-standing priorities of big business and of pro-business Republicans. The GOP has been hostile to regulation in general, and to environmental regulation in particular, for years. And since these are changes that are being made by lifelong Republicans who control executive branch departments and can proceed without Congress, and don’t have to rely on Trump’s personal involvement, they’re the things that are getting done. They’re also the sorts of measures (and maybe even the specific measures) that any Republican administration would have pursued.It's one of the oldest immigration tricks in the book: get pregnant, fly to another country, have your baby, and voila - you've got immigrant ties to said country.
It even happens in Canada.
According to the Toronto Sun, Ottawa has discovered a number of unscrupulous immigration consultants in Hong Kong, who are coaching wealthy Chinese mainlanders about how to keep their pregnancies hidden while entering Canada on student or visitor visas.
"Avoid any baby or maternity items in luggage, wear dark clothing going through customs to look slimmer, and arrive in Canada no later than in the seventh month of pregnancy are among the tips given," notes the article.
Once here, the women go into hiding until they are due to give birth and then go to a hospital to deliver the baby. And, because all babies born in Canada are considered citizens, they could return later in life as a student, for example, and sponsor their parents under family reunification.
Immigration minister Jason Kenney admits his department isn't sure how widespread the problem is but is considering citizenship law changes to prevent so-called anchor babies from automatically becoming citizens.
"We don't want people to get the idea that citizenship is a way to get a passport of convenience, that Canada is a country to be exploited," he told the Sun.
Toronto based immigration attorney Michael Niren says he doesn't think anchor babies are a "growing problem" and that changing the citizenship rules would be like "throwing the baby out with the bath water."
"Kenney is on a mission to clean up the immigration system from Refugee cases to Citizenship claims. Yes there are many broken aspects of our immigration system but I think he is going way to far here," Niren told Yahoo! Canada News.
"The solution is not to terminate this method for citizenship all together. Free societies like Canada have always granted citizenship to those born on their soil. This, in my view, should be a right not a privilege.
"[Instead of changing the law,] I think more careful screening of applicants to Canada should be conducted. In some cases, medicals are required which would reveal pregnancies. Sometimes the government gets ahead of itself and forgets that we are still a democracy."The personality of veteran wide receiver Steve Smith is routinely on display, whether he's shoving cornerbacks around on the field or reacting to suggestions that he's past his prime.
The Ravens' new starting wide receiver celebrated his 35th birthday this month. After organized team activities Thursday, during which Smith made several acrobatic catches, he was asked whether his best days as a football player are behind him.
“The sense of urgency, I could really [not] care less about that,” Smith said. “The [defensive back] that's going to be sitting in front of me, he's going to find out how much I have left in the tank, and he'll find out real quick.”
The Ravens signed Smith to a three-year, $11 million contract in March, one day after the Carolina Panthers released the five-time Pro Bowl selection after 13 seasons. In his last year in Carolina, he had 64 catches for 745 yards and four touchdowns.
“I love competition,” Smith said. “Obviously, you [reporters] seem to always have something to say and have a comment, so I love to read those. And I'd like to serve a little humble pie to you and do a little better than what you think.”
Drafted in the third round by Carolina in 2001 out of Utah, Smith still holds on to a negative scouting report from Sporting News magazine after he was drafted, and uses it as motivation.
“When you're coming out as a rookie, you save that stuff because you can't get that back,” Smith said. “At the same time, it was said, and I just thought it was convenient 14 years later that people still have something to say. I find it interesting.”
The Ravens landed Smith over competing bids from the New England Patriots, San Diego Chargers and the Seattle Seahawks, among others.
“There aren't too many 35-year-olds that are getting recruited to play for five or six other teams,” Smith said. “I look at that and say: ‘I must be doing something right.'”
The Ravens acquired Smith with the hope that he'll inject toughness into an offense that wasn't nearly as physical outside last year after trading wide receiver Anquan Boldin to the San Francisco 49ers following a contract dispute.
“I think he fits in; he's our kind of guy, in a lot of ways,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. “I just like what he stands for. I like the competitor. I like the fire in him, the toughness. Watching him out at practice, he's still a really good player. There's no doubt. He's going to help us a lot. I'm excited about him."
Smith wrestled for contested catches and battled to prevent an errant pass from being intercepted.
“The guy is strong as an ox, and that helps me out to get prepared for the season,” cornerback Lardarius Webb said. “He runs great routes and he’s making me better, and I’m making him better, too, because I’m challenging him just like he’s challenging me. We just want to be great, us both.”
Smith said he's simply being himself, the same guy who built a reputation for his feisty nature with the Panthers.
"To be honest, on the football field I’m a different … it’s not like you’re out there sharing cookie recipes, it’s an aggressive game," Smith said. "Outside of the football field, I’m quiet, I’m minding my business, I’m low-key, I’m laidback. I enjoy family time and I enjoy hanging out. I enjoy pranks and having fun.
"But on the field, it’s business. That’s what I’m brought here for, is to play and to play well, and that’s what I expect. I expect that out of myself, and I know I’m new here, but I expect that out of the people that are around me.”
awilson@baltsun.com
twitter.com/RavensInsiderBALTIMORE -- When I covered an Orioles series back in May, I was struck by the shock from reporters who watched Jim Johnson blow a save, after converting 34 straight from the middle of 2012 into 2013. Fans gasped, the development was so unexpected. After all, Johnson saved 51 games for the playoff-bound Orioles last season, and pitched to a 2.49 ERA.
But when Johnson entered Wednesday night's game in a non-save situation, nobody was surprised when he allowed three straight hits and an inherited runner scored. Johnson had been automatic; now he's getting tagged with blame for an Orioles' season that has them four games out of the final wild card spot, while his season ERA is 3.51, more than a full run higher than last year.
Part of that blame is due to Johnson's position of closer, and the save stat that goes along with it. It's easy math to say that the O's are four back, Johnson's blown nine saves, therefore he's the reason they wouldn't be in the playoffs if the season ended today.
But the bigger picture, as it relates to Jim Johnson, is a lot more complicated than that. Johnson's xFIP is 3.82 in 2013, but last year it was 3.63, a negligible difference. His strikeouts are actually up significantly over 2012, 6.9 per nine innings, after checking in at 5.3 per nine in 2012. That's not only a jump, it's the best strikeout rate he's posted in any of his full major league seasons.
So what is Jim Johnson doing differently? What is he doing wrong? Or is he even doing anything different, and wrong, at all?
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What's The Difference? At age 29, Toronto starter Josh Johnson is agonizing over what is, by far, the worst season of his career. Yet his… More»
A Beautiful Swing Slows Down Todd Helton, the most iconic player in Rockies history, was a No. 1 draft pick who lived up to expectations. He… More» "Honestly, I don't pay attention," Johnson said about his 2013 numbers when we chatted at his locker prior to Thursday's game against the Rays. "I just know this year, I feel like I've had more baserunners due to walks than I've had in recent years. And that's -- if you give up a free pass, that's not what you want to do. You control 90-foot increments. If a guy earns it by getting a base hit, that's one thing."
Johnson's feeling is correct, with his walks up from 2.0 per nine last season to 2.7 this season. But even so, that's a total of about five walks all year separating this season from last season's pace. Still, unsurprisingly, over half of his 17 walks all this season have come in his nine blown saves, while he's walked just five in his 40 saves. So the walks are certainly a primary factor in his struggles. You'd think, though, that the elevated strikeout rate would help to cancel out the problem.
But according to Orioles pitching coach Bill Castro, there's more to it than just an elevated walk rate, something strikeouts can't fix.
"What I see is last year, he was getting a lot of early contact outs," Castro told me Thursday afternoon from the Orioles' dugout. "This year he's striking more people out, but he's also throwing more pitches per hitter. And he is a contact-type pitcher, a groundball-type pitcher."
Johnson echoed this sentiment, confirming that he hadn't set out to strike out more hitters: "Strikeouts aren't a strength of my game," Johnson put it simply. So this wasn't a conscious effort to change, and Johnson reiterated that he hadn't changed his process in any way.
Castro's theory is that Johnson may simply be trying too hard with his sinker.
"When you're a sinkerball pitcher, and you try to overthrow a little bit sometimes, the ball doesn't sink as much," Castro said. "So I've seen, at times, that he's overthrown a little bit. And other times, he's tried to make it sink. So instead of sinking naturally, the movement is running, instead of sinking. That's the difference between sinking late and a running fastball."
Castro also believes that could be the reason why hitters are swinging more at Johnson's pitches within the strike zone, while having greater success when they do. And his ground ball rate has gone down from 62 percent last season to 56 percent this season, while his fly balls, and home runs, are up.
"If the ball's on the ground, they're going to hit a little bit harder ground balls," Castro said. "More line drives, more fly balls that way, when the ball is running, instead of sinking late."
Interestingly, though, some other ways Castro identified for Johnson to get back to 2012 form, such as throwing more first pitch strikes, relying more on his sinker, and throwing fewer pitches per at-bat, aren't necessarily characteristic of his 2012 season. He's actually throwing his slider 85 percent of the time on the first pitch of at-bats this season, but threw it just 73 percent of the time, first pitch, in 2012. He threw his four-seamer more than ten percent of the time on first pitches last season, and hasn't thrown it once in that situation all season in 2013.
So when Castro says of Johnson, "In his mind it should be sinker first, and curve second, and changeup third," especially early on, it has been all season. Still, if anyone can help Johnson figure out how to succeed without strikeouts, it's Castro, who posted a 1.81 ERA in 1979 while striking out ten batters all season, thanks to a sinker/slider combo.
In the meantime, Johnson insists that little has changed from last season, other than the results.
"There were times last year, also, when I had terrible control," Johnson said. "But things just kind of worked out, so nobody noticed," he said, leaning forward conspiratorially.
Really, maybe that's just Johnson's way of saying what my colleague Jon Bernhardt did when I discussed Johnson with him last week. "Mostly the problem with Johnson though is that his performance last season wrote checks his true talent level can't cash," Bernhardt wrote.
Perhaps the Orioles should have known that, too, and had a plan for the end of games if Johnson regressed to what is still a perfectly usable reliever, just not the elite closer he was last year. There probably wasn't a way to replicate last season's 29-9 record in one-run games. But a better bullpen could well have slowed the descent all the way to 14-22.
Or as Buck Showalter put it on Wednesday night, after Johnson's latest struggle: "Every ground ball seems to find a hole, and every broken bat seems to find a spot in the outfield," Showalter said. "I don't like the word pressing, but I think Jimmy knows how much he's meant to our ball club, and how much we depend on him, and maybe that's more our fault than his."The first budget from Senate Democrats in four years includes nearly $1 trillion in new taxes but would not balance the budget.
The blueprint unveiled by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray Patricia (Patty) Lynn MurrayThis week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks Johnson & Johnson subpoenaed by DOJ and SEC, company says MORE (D-Wash.) on Tuesday to her Democratic colleagues would also turn off the next nine years of the sequester and replace those spending cuts with a 50-50 mix of tax increases and spending cuts.
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The budget would dedicate $100 billion to economic stimulus in the form of infrastructure spending and job training.
Murray argues that her budget cuts $1.85 trillion from deficits over 10 years. But once the sequester cuts are turned off, Murray’s budget appears to reduce deficits by about $800 billion, using the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline. The Murray budget does not contain net spending cuts with the sequester turned off.
The details of Murray’s budget came hours after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) released his budget, which reduces tax rates and slashes spending much more deeply that Murray’s budget.
The Ryan budget would balance in 10 years without raising taxes and by reducing spending over the next decade by $5.7 trillion compared to the CBO baseline.
More from The Hill:
• Pentagon in survival mode amid face budget uncertainty
• Rodman plans vacation with North Korean leader Kim
• GOP demands access to Americans wounded at Benghazi
• Website claims to have hacked first lady's financial records
• White House demands China stop hacking US companies
• GOP renews attack on Census survey
• McConnell: Obama delayed budget like dropping a 'bomb'
• Ryan budget would approve Keystone
While Ryan’s budget would reduce the highest tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, providing a significant tax cut to the wealthiest households, Murray’s budget would raise $975 billion in tax revenue by closing corporate and individual tax loopholes.
More details on the tax plan were expected Wednesday when the committee begins its formal markup of the budget.
Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beaure |
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Complete Results of both the Santelli and Cetrulo tournament can be found hereTomorrow, Microsoft will unveil a wide range of new hardware from phones to tablets and even a new Band; you can check out our pre-event coverage here that will help to set expectations.
For those of you who want to watch the event, Microsoft will be live-streaming the keynote and you can find the stream and everything else you need to know, here. If you are not able to watch the broadcast, both Paul (@thurrott) and I (@bdsams) will be posting pictures and commentary on Twitter that will likely be a few minutes faster than the live-stream.
I know that not everyone will be able to make it to the event and for those who are curious what the venue looks like, I took a quick trip over to the keynote location.
As you can see from the images, they are still constructing the entrance to the building but one thing I will say is this event, even from just the outside, looks more lavish than what I have seen in the past. At least, comparing to the keynote of the Surface Pro 3, which only had a small Surface sign above the door, Microsoft is making a grand entrance for the show.
Naturally, you cant’ see much from the outside but there are lots of trucks delivering crates likely are filled with fun toys that will be announced tomorrow. There are also security guards all around the building who tossed a few mean-mugs my way when I was snapping photos.
At the event, Microsoft will be setting the stage for its holiday offerings as all of the devices should be on store shelves before the crucial retail shopping season. The company is hoping that these new products will also drive significant foot traffic to its retail outlets and of course, drive more interest in Windows 10 too.
Tomorrow should be an exciting day for fans of Microsoft as the company has a lot of new hardware to show-off that will replace its aging fleet of devices. As always, Paul and I will make sure to keep you informed of all the announcements with the clarity and quality you have come to expect.
If you have any question that you want us to poke Microsoft about after the event, let us know in the comments below.
Tagged with HoloLens, Microsoft Band, Surface, Windows PhoneWith Maine looking like it will be the first state to shut down heading into the new fiscal year on Saturday morning and perhaps beating Illinois to the punch, moments ago Connecticut, as previewed last night, will also enter the new fiscal year without a budget, inviting rating agencies to downgrade it to Illinois' "barely junk" rating or perhaps making CT the first US junk-rated state.
Lawmakers and the governor had been unable to reach an agreement on a two-year budget that will cover a projected $5 billion deficit for months, and not even the threat of the new year prompted them to move as we expected.
Meanwhile, Governor Malloy signed an executive order taking over the state's spending authority which will cut most services but at least keeps the government open. From Reuters:
CONNECTICUT GOVERNOR SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER TO TAKE CONTROL OF STATE SPENDING AFTER FAILURE TO PASS FY 2018/19 BIENNIAL BUDGET
CONNECTICUT EMERGENCY SPENDING PLAN KEEPS STATE GOVERNMENT OPEN BUT CUTS SERVICES
As a result of the failure to pass a budget, AP reports that nonprofit social service agencies that rely on state funds are preparing for deep cuts. Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who wanted the General Assembly to at least pass a proposed three-month mini-budget, is expected to reluctantly sign an executive order that maintains only essential state services.
Connecticut’s General Assembly failed to pass a version of the state budget on Friday, forcing Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who wanted the General Assembly to at least pass a proposed three-month mini-budget, to sign an executive order to take control of state spending, according to the Associated Press.
.@GovMalloyOffice signed executive order today to keep government running pic.twitter.com/gE9onMJrKW — ctnewsjunkie (@ctnewsjunkie) June 30, 2017
Gian-Carl Casa, president and CEO of Connecticut Community Nonprofit Alliance, says agencies that help people struggling with mental illness to domestic violence are planning to lay-off staff and close programs.
The failure is the latest blemish on Malloy's record. The two-term governor has said he will not seek a third term when is current one is up at the end of 2018.Old English sæd "sated, full, having had one's fill (of food, drink, fighting, etc.), weary of," from Proto-Germanic *sathaz (cf. Old Norse saðr, Middle Dutch sat, Dutch zad, Old High German sat, German satt, Gothic saþs "satiated, sated, full"), from PIE *seto- (cf. Latin satis "enough, sufficient," Greek hadros "thick, bulky," Old Church Slavonic sytu, Lithuanian sotus "satiated," Old Irish saith "satiety," sathach "sated"), from root *sa- "to satisfy" (cf. Sanskrit a-sinvan "insatiable").
Sense development passed through the meaning "heavy, ponderous" (i.e. "full" mentally or physically), and "weary, tired of" before emerging c.1300 as "unhappy." An alternative course would be through the common Middle English sense of "steadfast, firmly established, fixed" (e.g. sad-ware "tough pewter vessels") and "serious" to "grave." In the main modern sense, it replaced Old English unrot, negative of rot "cheerful, glad."
Meaning "very bad" is from 1690s. Slang sense of "inferior, pathetic" is from 1899; sad sack is 1920s, popularized by World War II armed forces (specifically by cartoon character invented by Sgt. George Baker, 1942, and published in U.S. Armed Forces magazine "Yank"), probably a euphemistic shortening of common military slang phrase sad sack of shit.Canada's population growth is shifting westward, as the latest census results show the Prairie region and British Columbia leading the country in growth.
For the first time since Confederation the three Prairie provinces all rank at the top of provincial growth charts, nosing out a slowing Ontario. British Columbia, in fourth place, also grew at a rate higher than the national average. Nearly one in three residents now live in Western Canada, the highest share ever recorded.
Statistics Canada counted a total of 35,151,728 people living in Canada on the day of the census, May 10, 2016. Over the five years since the previous census the population grew at a rate of about one per cent a year, or 5 per cent overall since 2011, for a total of 1.7 million additional residents since 2011.
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Population change in Canada’s populated areas by census division, 2011 to 2016 Negative growth 0 to less than 5% 5 to less than 10% 10% or more growth Area of detail Population change in Canada’s populated areas by census division, 2011 to 2016 Negative growth 0 to less than 5% 5 to less than 10% 10% or more growth Area of detail Population change in Canada’s populated areas by census division, 2011 to 2016 Negative growth 0 to less than 5% 5 to less than 10% 10% or more growth Area of detail Population change in Canada’s populated areas by census division, 2011 to 2016 Negative growth 0 to less than 5% 5 to less than 10% 10% or more growth Area of detail
Global context
As it has been for the last 15 years, Canada remains the fastest-growing country in the G7 group of industrialized nations, with a growth rate which exceeds those of the United States and the United Kingdom. Canada ranked eighth among the G20 nations, behind countries such as Turkey, South Africa, Mexico and Australia.
Where population growth comes from
The main reason for Canada's steady growth is its commitment to relatively high levels of immigration. Roughly two-thirds of Canada's population increase is due to international migration, the amount by which the number of new immigrants exceeds the number of people who leave Canada, according to Laurent Martel of Statistics Canada. The other third stems from what's known as "natural growth," the difference between the rates of births and deaths. Some countries such as Germany, Italy and Japan have already seen the annual number of deaths exceed births, meaning all their growth now depends on migration.
For much of the census period Canada's annual intake of immigrants exceeded 250,000 per year. In 2017 the government has projected an immigration level of between 280,000 and 320,000, the highest it has been in some time. At a time when many countries are considering further restrictions on immigration, Canada, under both Liberal and Conservative governments, has chosen a different path. Projections show that Canada could reach the point at which migration accounts for nearly all population growth some time after 2050.
Average population growth rate, by natural and migratory increase Natural increase Migratory increase Addition of Newfoundland and Labrador 3.5% Proj. 3.0 2.5 By 2056, migration could be the sole driver of population growth 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0 -0.5 -1.0 1861 1901 1941 1981 2016 Average population growth rate, by natural and migratory increase Natural increase Migratory increase Addition of Newfoundland and Labrador 3.5% Projected 3.0 2.5 By 2056, migration could be the sole driver of population growth 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0 -0.5 -1.0 1861 1881 1901 1921 1941 1961 1981 2001 2016 2036 Average population growth rate, by natural and migratory increase Natural increase Migratory increase Addition of Newfoundland and Labrador 3.5% Projected 3.0 2.5 By 2056, migration could be the sole driver of population growth 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0 -0.5 -1.0 1861 1881 1901 1921 1941 1961 1981 2001 2016 2036 Average population growth rate, by natural and migratory increase Natural increase Migratory increase Addition of Newfoundland and Labrador 3.5% Projected 3.0 2.5 By 2056, migration could be the sole driver of population growth 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0 -0.5 -1.0 1861 1881 1901 1921 1941 1961 1981 2001 2016 2036
While population growth is fairly steady nationally, there are major differences at the regional level. As population booms in Western Canada, Central Canada has seen growth slide below the national average, and Atlantic Canada is barely growing at all.
Alberta was the fastest-growing province in Canada again during this period. Despite the downturn in the provincial economy in the past two years, Alberta grew by 11.6 per cent, an even faster rate of growth than from 2006 to 2011 and more than twice the national average. That growth slowed after 2014, following the drop in the price of oil, but not enough to change the broader trend, as people both within Canada and from abroad head west in search of economic opportunity. Since 1951 Alberta has grown by more than 330 per cent, by far the highest rate among provinces. Alberta also has the highest percentage of residents born in other Canadian provinces, a testament to its pull within the country.
Population growth since 1951, by province Alberta 332.9% 350% 300 British Columbia 298.9% 250 Ontario 192.5% 200 150 Quebec 101.3% 100 Other provinces 50 0 1951 1962 1973 1984 1995 2006 Population growth since 1951, by province Alberta 332.9% 350% 300 British Columbia 298.9% 250 Ontario 192.5% 200 150 Quebec 101.3% 100 Other provinces 50 0 1951 1962 1973 1984 1995 2006 Population growth since 1951, by province Alberta 332.9% 350% 300 British Columbia 298.9% 250 Ontario 192.5% 200 150 Quebec 101.3% 100 Other provinces 50 0 1951 1962 1973 1984 1995 2006 Population growth since 1951, by province Alberta 332.9% 350% 300 British Columbia 298.9% 250 Ontario 192.5% 200 150 Quebec 101.3% 100 Other provinces 50 0 1951 1962 1973 1984 1995 2006
Martha Hall Findlay, president of the Canada West Foundation, said the census numbers reflect the dynamism and openness of the region. A former Liberal MP from Ontario, she moved to Alberta a year ago and already considers herself a Calgarian. The place is full of people like her, she said – people who have moved from elsewhere and who have found an exciting, younger population, growing, affordable cities and plenty of opportunity.
"Attention needs to be paid to what's going on in the West," Ms. Hall Findlay said. "There's a sense here of 'What can we do?' Not what can we keep doing."
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The faces of Alberta’s influx of new residents Marty Klinkenberg looks behind the numbers and meets some of the people who have become part of the western population boom.
Saskatchewan, which was shrinking in the 1990s, grew at the second-fastest rate, just as it did in the previous census period. It has similarly benefited from a resource-intensive economy that attracted a lot of workers in the early part of this decade before the economy began to slow.
Manitoba jumped into third place among provinces with a 5.8-per-cent rate of growth. It's the first time in 80 years that Manitoba grew more quickly than the national average. Like the other Prairie provinces, Manitoba has a significant indigenous population, which is much younger than the population in general and has a higher birth rate. The province has succeeded in attracting a greater share of international migration in recent years. One of the areas that has grown most quickly is Steinbach, a community about 40 minutes east of Winnipeg. Steinbach, which has a population of 15,289, grew by 17 per cent in this census period, making it one of the 10 fastest-growing communities under 100,000 in the country.
Steinbach's mayor, Chris Goertzen, said the community decided 15 years ago to make itself a welcoming place to attract immigrants. Manitoba was the first province to take significant advantage of the provincial nominee immigration program, a program designed to get immigrants to places other than the big cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, and Steinbach became one of the places to benefit. People have arrived from dozens of countries, but Mr. Goertzen said the Philippines, Germany and Kazakhstan are among the most prominent.
British Columbia slipped to fourth place in its rate of growth at 5.6 per cent, although it was still the third-largest province.
Slower growth in Ontario
Ontario grew by 4.6 per cent, the second-consecutive census period in which it grew at a rate slower than the national average. It's the first time that's happened since the Second World War. Ontario still has by far the largest share of the national population, with more than 13 million people, or 38 per cent of Canada's population. The main reason for its slower growth is that it received proportionally fewer immigrants over the last five years.
Quebec's rate of growth was below the national average, a trend that's been in place since the end of the 1960s. Its share of the national population, which was nearly 29 per cent in 1966, fell to slightly more than 23 per cent in 2016. Quebec passed the eight-million mark in overall population, and the Montreal area surpassed four million for the first time, meaning half the provincial population is concentrated around its biggest city.
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Atlantic Canada
The Atlantic provinces had much lower rates of growth in this census period. New Brunswick's population declined over the past five years by 0.5 per cent. Prince Edward Island had the highest growth rate in the Atlantic at 1.9 per cent, followed by Newfoundland at 1.0 per cent. Nova Scotia barely grew, with an increase of just 0.2 per cent. The region is growing more slowly because it attracts few immigrants, and many people choose to move to other provinces, chiefly Alberta and Ontario. In 2014 the number of deaths exceeded the number of births in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and New Brunswick.
"It's staring us in the face again that immigration is a pretty fundamental component of maintaining positive population growth. It really comes home in the Atlantic region, where you have an aging population," said Finn Poschmann, president of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council.
"The other striking thing is the urban-rural split. That's a big deal across Canada but really powerfully so in the Atlantic provinces," he said. The Atlantic's four census metropolitan areas (CMAs) grew collectively by about 3 per cent, whereas the smaller centres were either just stable or lost people.
John Ibbitson: Immigration is the only way to reverse Atlantic Canada’s population decline Historically, Atlantic Canadians have looked askance at new arrivals from away, especially immigrants. But many people now agree that immigration numbers must increase.
Cities
Greater Toronto's population surpassed 5.9 million, but it grew at a slower rate in this census period, at about 6 per cent, compared with more than 9 per cent from 2006 to 2011. The Montreal area topped four million for the first time in 2011, and Greater Vancouver had nearly 2.5 million. The five fastest-growing cities were all in the Prairies, led by Calgary and Edmonton, which both surpassed 1.3 million residents, and Saskatoon and Regina (295,000 and 236,000, respectively). Just two of Canada's CMAs fell in this census period – Windsor and Thunder Bay.
The census counted more than 14 million private dwellings in 2016, an increase of 5.6 per cent over 2011, a slightly slower rate of increase than in the previous census period.
Big Canadian cities see faster suburban growth despite bid to boost density Canada’s urbanization trend continues but big cities are experiencing significant internal shifts as some suburbs boom and others wane, Bill Curry explains.
About the data
The census results released Wednesday were the first in a series scheduled to come out over the course of 2017. These results are taken from the short-form census questionnaire and not the long-form survey, which was reinstated for 2016 after being replaced by the voluntary National Household Survey.
Census 2016: Counting Canada’s population a daunting task Joe Friesen explains how this census was collected and what the return of the mandatory long-form questionnaire meant.
Follow Joe Friesen (@friesenjoe) and Tom Cardoso (@tom_cardoso) on Twitter
A CHANGING CANADA: MORE FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Census 2016: Canada’s population gains and losses 1:05
Why the act of census-taking is politically sensitive The seemingly innocuous action of recording population trends carries with it myriad opportunities to highlight division and offend, Joe Friesen explains.
Canada’s growing indigenous population reshaping cities across the country In the biggest cities on the Prairies, and in smaller northern centres close to First Nations reserves, an indigenous population is growing in size and political influence, Joe Friesen explains.But Schmidt-Salomon has made no secret about his hostility toward organized religion, and he seems to have a particular animosity toward Judaism. German authorities condemned his 2008 children's book, How Do I Get to God, Asked the Small Piglet, for its virulent depictions of a rabbi, an imam, and a priest. Several critics likened its portrait of the rabbi to caricatures of Jews in Nazi-era propaganda. And Jewish leaders say whatever its motivations, the campaign has exposed wellsprings of anti-Semitic feeling in the German public. "We've gotten thousands of emails, ninety-five percent against us," I was told by Kramer. "People are saying things like 'Jews are torturing their own children, living in caves, performing ancient rituals for nothing.' It has made us strangers in our country."
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Last summer and fall, my partner began to feel a bit alienated herself. Every day when she pushed Tom in a stroller around our neighborhood, she ran a gauntlet of posters pasted up by Schmidt-Salomon's organization. They showed a young boy with his hands shielding his groin, with a legend that has become the rallying cry of the so-called children's rights movement: MY BODY BELONGS TO ME. At her weekly baby class, she has become reluctant to change Tom's diaper in front of the other mothers, for fear of drawing unwanted attention and being dragged into a discussion about the circumcision issue. As for me, the ongoing circumcision debate has reminded me again of the intolerance and parochialism in German society, and it also has started me wondering: what if my partner's family is right? What if Tom is subjected to abuse in school over his circumcised penis? (My two older sons, 11 and 7, haven't experienced any, at least as far as I know.) My partner's family has been warm and accepting toward me and has never raised Tom's circumcision in conversation, but for me, it remains there, hovering in the background -- a reminder of my "difference."
Germans I've talked to have downplayed the anti-Semitic angle in all this. They say that the circumcision backlash simply reflects a German habit of telling people what to do and how to behave, a busybody quality that reached its apogee in the culture of informants that thrived under the East German Stasi, but seems to infuse western German society as well. On repeated occasions I've been yelled at on the street, and even called a "murderer," for crossing against the light; the argument is that I'm setting a bad example for children, who might plunge into traffic and injure or kill themselves. (The fact that several of my acts of jaywalking took place on a deserted street on Sunday morning seems to have made little difference.) My son's pediatrician considers the anti-circumcision drive "ridiculous and dangerous" and believes outlawing the procedure would ensure that it would be carried out in "backrooms" and increase its risk.
The German leadership, after a month-long silence, finally condemned the court ruling last summer. Prosecutors have promised not to arrest doctors or mohels, and the Jewish Hospital has resumed circumcisions. A bill legalizing ritual circumcision -- as long as it is performed using an anaesthetic by someone with "medical expertise" -- is working its way through the Bundestag. But about fifty Parliamentarians have proposed a countermeasure that would ban circumcisions on boys below age 14; the legislators insist that the child himself should have the right to allow or reject "such a serious interference with his bodily integrity."
Even if the anti-circumcision movement gets its way, my longtime acquaintance Joshua Spinner, a rabbi at Skoblo Synagogue in the Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, and head of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation here, vows that the ancient ritual will go on. "We have never stopped," he told me. "We said, 'If they want to haul us into court, they can do it. They can go to hell.'"
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.I enjoyed parts of this evening’s One Show on BBC One. I enjoyed the explanation of the magical thinking (like cures like) and diluting ‘active’ ingredients out of existence that form the basis for homeopathy. I especially enjoyed the Doctor pointing out – in response to Monty Don’s argument that ‘it doesn’t matter how homeopathy might work’ – that homeopathy simply doesn’t work. There was one thing that really bugged me though – an anecdote offered by one of the presenters, Alex Jones.
Apparently, her friend’s psoriasis cleared up following use of a homeopathic product. I wonder how much Alex Jones knows about the placebo effect. I’d also be interested to learn whether she is aware of the following:
Spontaneous improvement, fluctuation of symptoms, regression to the mean, additional treatment, conditional switching of placebo treatment, scaling bias, irrelevant response variables, answers of politeness, experimental subordination, conditioned answers, neurotic or psychotic misjudgment, psychosomatic phenomena, misquotation, etc. [Kienle and Kiene, 1997 – PDF]
Personally, I find it much more plausible that a perceived improvement might be due to the placebo effect or one of the factors mentioned by Kienle and Kiene than the idea that such an improvement can be put down to swallowing a magic sugar pill containing no active ingredient. I don’t consider “asking the patient” to be a good way of finding out whether a treatment works.
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Magical thinking: Hahnemann’s Law of Similars – “He believed that by using drugs to induce symptoms, the artificial symptoms would stimulate the vital force, causing it to neutralise and expel the original disease and that this artificial disturbance would naturally subside when the dosing ceased.” It’s like magic. Sympathetic magic. And let’s not forget, these are the same people who think writing the name of a remedy on a piece of paper can cure you – homeopathic paper remedies – and have produced ‘remedies’ made from Berlin Wall and a bit of wood taken from a shipwreck.
Dilution: Homeopathy – there’s nothing in it. 13C: “If pure water was used as the diluent, no molecules of the original solution remain in the water.” 30C: “Dilution advocated by Hahnemann for most purposes: on average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.”
Evidence: Some scientists are willing to spend their time trawling through all the research into homeopathy and producing a systematic review of the literature. One such paper (Shang et al) can be found here. There are several Cochrane reviews of homeopathy and there is actually a systematic review of systematic reviews of homeopathy:
…there was no condition which responds convincingly better to homeopathic treatment than to placebo or other control interventions. Similarly, there was no homeopathic remedy that was demonstrated to yield clinical effects that are convincingly different from placebo. It is concluded that the best clinical evidence for homeopathy available to date does not warrant positive recommendations for its use in clinical practice.
Other interesting links: with regard to my comments on whether ‘asking the patient’ is a good way to find out if a treatment works, readers might find the slides from page 11 onwards of this PDF relevant and of interest. They come from a talk Edzard Ernst once gave at Bradford University: Trick or Treatment.
A video of Ben Goldacre explaining homeopathy. And an article of the same. With regard to ethics and homeopathy, Gimpy has detailed examples of the issues.
ETA: you can catch the episode on iPlayer here – link (I think it will be up for the next week or so). Sceptical Banter has also blogged about the episode (there’s a couple of useful / interesting links in the update at the bottom of the post).Their jobs sound like an oxymoron in Canada’s present political climate; arts professionals earn about half the average national income per year, a large chunk of which comes from grants. That public funding is in danger since Stephen Harper made it perfectly clear he doesn’t consider the arts a priority. Given that the main agenda of his Conservative majority is to balance the budget, the Canada Council Canadian Conference of the Arts recently predicted cuts of “at least $175 million” to arts, culture and heritage. And two weeks ago, adding insult to the threat of injury, Sun TV attacked interpretive dancer Margie Gillis by distorting grant tallies in a ham-fisted effort to devalue the arts. In this state of worry and frustration, what can bring some sanity back to Canadian arts policy?
Jeff Melanson, currently co-CEO the National Ballet School, and soon to be president of The Banff Centre, made a provocative suggestion at a talk in late May hosted by the Literary Review of Canada: a new Massey Commission.
Canada’s “Magna Carta of arts and culture,” as the commission’s report was nicknamed, was released in 1951. The detailed document gave advice on the state of Canada’s arts, sciences, humanities, and media based on three premises:
Canadians should know as much as possible about their country’s culture, history and traditions We have a national interest to encourage institutions that add to the richness of Canadian life Federal agencies that promote these ends should be supported
With then University of Toronto Chancellor Vincent Massey at the reins, the commissioners were poised to spur government spending in the arts. But before I let you in on their recommendations, let’s set the stage with some juicy historical context.
History of the Massey Commission
Rewind 67 years. Canada was nearing the end of the Second World War, a key part of which was fought using propaganda. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia needed to keep their populations confused and complacent; the U.S. and Canada wanted their citizens to buy liberty bonds and join the army. Information and creative expression were deployed against the masses.
Before the war, Canada’s government had no real investment in the arts. The turning point came when arts groups began calling on their government to support culture as a way of protecting democracy.
As a negative argument, stifling creativity is censorship’s equal. As a positive argument, the arts play a role in driving democracy through freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. (Thank you section 2(b) of the Charter.) Citizens who think critically and express their ideas creatively are a basic part of any healthy democracy — they hold government accountable.
After the war was over, Canada’s government created the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts. Two years later, the commission produced a body of research and advice that blossomed into an independent institution by 1957. To this day, many artists still fiercely protect the Canada Council for the Arts as if their lives depended on it—which for some is pretty close to the truth.
The report’s key recommendation
Please direct your gaze to section 15 (XV) of the Massey report: “The Artist and The Writer.” Here you will find a time capsule detailing the state of such creative endeavors as music, theatre, ballet, painting, architecture, literature, and Aboriginal arts. It is, I think, a must-read for all artists — and any naysayers. It will remind them that Canada indeed has written policy that places high value in artistic work.
This section begins with the suggestion that the extent to which a nation supports its artists is a measure of how civilized it is. Just how civilized was Canada back then? The report quotes the Arts Council:
“No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-technical books can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his [or her] work in Canada. No composer of music can live at all on what Canada pays him[/her] for his[/her] compositions. Apart from radio drama, no playwright, and only a few actors and producers, can live by working in the theatre in Canada. Few painters and sculptors, outside the fields of commercial art and teaching, can live by sale of their work in Canada.”
This raised a vital question for the commissioners: if artists were so undervalued that they could barely sustain themselves, how could they gain funding? It only made sense for taxpayers to chip in — to protect Canada’s democracy and “civilize” our apparent philistinism.
The commission urged the resurrection of the Canada Council as an arms-length body. It would boost not-for-profits, promote artists abroad, and dish out scholarships. The independence of this body was key. As Margie Gillis calmly pointed out in the midst of Sun TV’s sensationalism, the government does not fund Canadian artists directly; instead it endows funds to the Canada Council. The Council consists of no more than 11 respected artists and educators who hold their positions for no more than four years each. Grant recipients are selected through a fair and open process.
A new commission on the arts
Today many of the report’s recommendations are dated. For example, Massey’s posse tagged radio as a “new technology.” While it remains an important medium, radio has been swallowed alive by the web and social media. Artists have harnessed these newer mediums for creative projects, including this fabulous example.
But technology is far from the report’s only concern. As Tom Perlmutter, chair of the National Film Board of Canada, told the Toronto Star:
“What we need now is not one particular policy patchwork fix but the new Massey-Levesque for the 21st century. We need to rethink the fundamental conceptual framework that can give rise to the cultural policies that will serve us for the next 60 years.”
Whether it is updated or started again from scratch, this not-yet-conceived report should be the brainchild of Canadian artists. They should review those ever-important premises about promoting the historical and cultural richness of our country. They should reassess how creative minds are using technology. They should research how Canada’s cultural policies compare to those abroad. And, most importantly, they must underline the fundamental reason that Canadians support the arts financially: the health and vibrancy of our democracy.The Yankees have re-signed first baseman/outfielder Garrett Jones, Jack Curry of the YES Network tweets. New York is expected to move a pitcher off the active roster to create space.
Jones was recently designated for assignment to clear roster space as part of the team’s acquisition of Dustin Ackley. As Curry explains, Jones elected free agency after being outrighted by the club. But with Ackley going on the DL, New York decided to bring back the veteran.
Playing in his eighth big league season at 34 years of age, Jones owns a.215/.257/.361 batting line. But he’s done much more in the past, and carries a.757 collective OPS in a career with over 3,000 trips to the plate. Jones has always maintained a sizable platoon split, and will presumably continue to see most of his action against right-handed pitching.Give the pie a gold medal: Waitress, the musical that marked the Broadway debut of singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, has recouped its $12 million capitalization after less than 10 months, producers Barry & Fran Weissler, with Norton and Elayne Herrick, said this morning.
Jessie Mueller Jeremy Gerard
Starring Tony Award winner Jessie Mueller in the title role, the show has broken several house records since opening in April at the Nederlander Organization’s 1,045-seat Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It earned four Tony nominations in a season overshadowed by Hamilton, and was included in Deadline’s list of the top shows of 2016.
Based on the 2007 film written by the late Adrienne Shelly, Waitress is the first Broadway musical ever to have women in the four top creative team spots: score by Bareilles, book by Jessie Nelson, direction by Diane Paulus and choreography by Lorin Latarro. The cast album is a Grammy nominee.
Waitress tells the story of Jenna, an expert pie maker in a small town, who dreams of a way out of her loveless marriage. A baking contest in a nearby county and the town’s new doctor may offer her a chance at a new life, while her fellow waitresses offer their own recipes to happiness. But Jenna must find the courage and strength within herself to rebuild her life.AutoGuide.com
It comes as no surprise that the 2016 Jeep Wrangler will be losing weight thanks to strict new government fuel economy regulations, but the exclusion of solid axles is now being reported as a possibility due to the weight savings.
Mike Manley, Jeep brand boss let slip to Automotive News that the deletion of the Jeep’s solid axles is a possibility due to the weight savings. An independent suspension system would be used in place of the current coil-link suspension setup.
That would be a major change in the eyes of Jeep fans and loyalists who love the current suspension setup thanks to its easy to customize nature and durability. Manley says that Jeep engineers are working rigorously to make sure that the Wrangler meets its new requirements, while also keeping its hardcore off-road roots intact.
SEE ALSO: Next-gen Jeep Wrangler to be Inspired by 2013 Moab Concepts
Other possibilities that may be implemented to help the Wrangler’s quest for improved fuel economy are improved aerodynamics and the further use of lightweight materials, both of which were seen on this year’s 2013 Jeep Moab Concepts (Wrangler Stitch Concept shown above). The introduction of a diesel engine for the Wrangler has also been hinted at by Manley, and could be borrowed from the Grand Cherokee diesel.
[Source: Automotive News]
Discuss this story on our Jeep ForumThe Justice Department investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys has been extended to encompass allegations that senior White House officials played a role in providing false and misleading information to Congress, according to numerous sources involved in the inquiry.
The widened scope raises the possibility that investigators will pursue criminal charges against some administration officials, and recommend appointment of a special prosecutor if there is evidence of criminal misconduct.
The investigators have been specifically probing the role of White House officials in the drafting and approval of a Feb. 23, 2007 letter sent to Congress by the Justice Department denying that Karl Rove (President Bush's chief political adviser at the time) had anything to do with the firing of Bud Cummins, a U.S. Attorney from Arkansas. Cummins was fired in Dec. 2006 to make room for Tim Griffin, a protégé and former |
resources, you will want to be able to link to them so you can perform operations on them, too.
Embedded resources are represented inside an _embedded object of the representation, and, as resources, contain their own _links object as well. Each resource you embed is assigned to a property of that object, and if multiple objects of the same type are returned, an array of resources is assigned. In fact, this latter is how you represent collections in HAL.
Let's consider a simple example first. In previous code samples, I have a "user" that's a string; let's make that an embedded resource instead.
{ "_links": { "self": {"href": "http://example.com/api/status/1347"} }, "id": "1347", "timestamp": "2013-02-11 23:33:47", "status": "This is my awesome status update!", "_embedded": { "user": { "_links": { "self": {"href": "http://example.com/api/user/mwop"} } "id": "mwop", "name": "Matthew Weier O'Phinney", "url": "http://mwop.net" } } }
I've moved the "user" out of the representation, and into the _embedded object — because this is where you define embedded resources. Note that the "user" is a standard HAL resource itself — containing hypermedia links.
Now let's look at a collection:
{ "_links": { "self": {"href": "http://example.com/api/status"}, "next": {"href": "http://example.com/api/status?page=2"}, "last": {"href": "http://example.com/api/status?page=100"} }, "count": 2973, "per_page": 30, "page": 1, "_embedded": { "status": [ { "_links": { "self": {"href": "http://example.com/api/status/1347"} }, "id": "1347", "timestamp": "2013-02-11 23:33:47", "status": "This is my awesome status update!", "_embedded": { "user": { "_links": { "self": {"href": "http://example.com/api/user/mwop"} } "id": "mwop", "name": "Matthew Weier O'Phinney", "url": "http://mwop.net" } } } /*... */ ] } }
Note that the "status" property is an array; semantically, all resources under this key are of the same type. Also note that the parent resource has some additional link relations — these are related to pagination, and allow a client to determine what the next and last pages are (and, if we were midway into the collection, previous and first pages). Since the collection is also a resource, it has some interesting metadata — how many resources are in the collection, how many we represent per page, and what the current page is.
Also note that you can nest resources — simply include an _embedded object inside an embedded resource, with additional resources, as I've done with the "user" resource inside the status resource shown here. It's turtles all the way down.
Next Time
The title of this post indicates I'll be talking about building RESTful APIs with ZF2 — but so far, I've not said anything about ZF2.
I'll get there. But there's another detour to take: reporting errors.
Updates
Note: I'll update this post with links to the other posts in the series as I publish them.Born in 1935, David Lodge is the author of 14 novels including Nice Work, Thinks... and Deaf Sentence. He is also Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught between 1960 and 1987. As well as his fiction, he has written numerous books of criticism. His new novel, A Man of Parts, is a fictionalised account of HG Wells's life and career. Reviewing it in the Guardian, Blake Morrison said it "bounds along terrifically and never tires" while showing "what made Wells, in his lifetime, so irresistible".
"HG Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. He is probably best known today as the author of classic works of science fiction, but he published well over 100 books in his lifetime, of many different kinds: novels and short stories that were realistic, fantastic, comic, tragic, and didactic, utopias and dystopias, social criticism, reportage, travel, autobiography and biography, world history … and also found time to edit collaborative encyclopaedic works on science and economics. I have selected 10 personal favourites from this abundance."
This was the book that made Wells instantly famous when it was first published, and it has never been out of print since. The machine itself quaintly resembles a bicycle, on which the time-traveller ventures further and further towards the death of the Earth as the sun cools. On the way he stops in the year 802,000 to discover a disturbing reversal of the Victorian class-system. Unforgettable.
The mother of all aliens-invade-the-earth novels. Monsters from Mars land in the south of England near Woking and cause devastation, death and mass panic with their sophisticated weaponry, until they are defeated in an unexpected but plausible way that owes more to Nature than humanity.
Arthur Kipps is a down-trodden apprentice in a drapery store (as Wells himself was) who unexpectedly inherits a fortune that enables him to live the life of a gentleman. But without education and the talents possessed by his creator he is exploited and humiliated by his new bourgeois associates. The novel combines rich comedy and biting social criticism with Dickensian verve.
Its rather off-putting title is the name of a worthless patent medicine which, through meretricious advertising and marketing, makes the narrator's pharmacist uncle, Edward Ponderovo, ridiculously rich until his bubble bursts. This, however, is only one thread in a wide-ranging Condition of England novel that contains some of Wells's most powerful writing, especially its descriptions of London.
The story of a young woman rebelling against her stuffy middle-class, suburban upbringing, seeking independence in every aspect of life, including sex. Set against the background of the suffragette movement, from which Ann Veronica eventually parts, the novel was banned from libraries and denounced from pulpits when it was first published. It remains a lively, engaging picture of a society in transition between traditional and progressive values.
Widely considered to be Wells's most perfectly-formed novel, this comic idyll is the story of a henpecked, unsuccessful, desperately frustrated small shopkeeper who bungles but survives a suicide-and-arson attempt, and becomes master of his fate under another identity.
"The War That Will End War", Wells called it when it broke out in August 1914, but as time passed and the casualties mounted he became disillusioned and renounced his early jingoistic fervour. Mr Brittling is a transparently autobiographical and amusingly critical self-portrait. His changing response to the tragic conflict struck a chord with people in many countries, and the novel was a bestseller.
Wells first visited Russia in January 1914. This is a vivid account of his return to post-revolutionary St Petersburg, now called Petrograd, a ruined city with a near-starving population. Wells was a first-class reporter, and he had the advantage of staying with his friend, Maxim Gorky, rather than the carefully-monitored hotel usually reserved for foreign visitors. He also had enough prestige to get an interview with Lenin in Moscow.
Although it drew on the same research as Wells's Outline of History, this book was a separate, original work. It is an amazing feat of lucid, economical exposition that tells the story of our planet from its very beginnings up to the first world war. It has been reissued by Penguin with an admiring introduction by the historian Norman Stone, who says: "Wells is the English writer of this century whom I should most like to raise from the dead."
10. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (1934)
The subtitle is of course to be taken with a pinch of salt, but this work is remarkable for its honesty and absence of vanity. Organised thematically rather than chronologically, it contains revealing memories of Wells's underprivileged family background and early struggles, and reflects the multiplicity of his later interests and achievements.For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they've come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation's two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.
Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn.
The seeds represent "probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years," said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.
But for farmers such as Lowe, prices of the Monsanto-patented seeds have steadily increased, roughly doubling during the past decade, to about $50 for a 50-pound bag of soybean seed, according to seed dealers.
The revolution, and Monsanto's dominant role in the nation's agriculture, has not unfolded without complaint. Farmers have decried the price increases, and competitors say the company has ruthlessly stifled competition.
Now Monsanto -- like IBM and Google -- has drawn scrutiny from U.S. antitrust investigators, who under the Obama administration have looked more skeptically at the actions of dominant firms.
During the Bush administration, the Justice Department did not file a single case under antimonopoly laws regulating a dominant firm. But that stretch seems unlikely to continue.
This year, the Obama Justice Department tossed out the antitrust guidelines of its predecessor because they advocated "extreme hesitancy in the face of potential abuses by monopoly firms."
"We must change course," Christine Varney, the Obama administration's chief antitrust enforcer, said at the time.
Of all the new scrutiny by Justice, the Monsanto investigation might have the highest stakes, dealing as it does with the food supply and one of the nation's largest agricultural firms. It could also force the Obama administration, already under fire for the government's expanded role in the economy, to explain how it distinguishes between normal rough-and-tumble competition and abusive monopolistic business practices.
Monsanto says it has done nothing wrong.
"Farmers choose these products because of the value they deliver on farm," Monsanto said in a statement. "Given the phenomenally broad adoption of these technologies by farmers, such questions are normal and to be expected."Gorillaz can’t be blamed for taking a long time to release a new record. Although it’s been seven years since 2010’s Plastic Beach — and that year’s followup iPad album, The Fall — it’s not like Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have been sitting around tinkering with the Gorillaz. In the years since, Albarn got weird with Flea on Rocket Juice and the Moon, composed an opera, reunited and recorded with Blur, and even put out a solo album for himself. Meanwhile, Hewett got married, returned to Tank Girl, and opened a new art exhibition in London. Both parties were so busy that they didn’t begin working on Humanz until 2014, which is quite a short time given that they had to design a new band, write new music, and sort out the next chapter for virtual members 2D, Murdoc Niccals, Russel Hobbs, and Noodle. Still, for a band that exists solely through technology, there’s perhaps no better time than now for Gorillaz, which is why it’s so confounding that they sound more disconnected than ever.
Humanz pushes the digital aberrancy of their gag without breaking barriers, though had this been five years ago, gimmicks like a live Q&A with 2D and Murdoc may have seemed revolutionary. Instead, its album cycle — and, in turn, the album itself — is cushioned by the band’s decision to go big. They created a reality app, built pop-up “Spirit Houses”, and organized a Demon Dayz festival. Plus, there’s still a 10-episode TV series in the works. In other words, technology has finally allowed them to manipulate a band of pixels without its presentation limiting the specific time or place in which they can exist. Yet Albarn and Hewlett’s efforts feel diminished. By now, most of the western world is used to seeing 3D displays in person. Technology has surpassed its ability to surprise with everything from Japanese pop stars to hologram airport assistants. It could be said that people’s lack of surprise illustrates the very starkness Gorillaz predicted would blur sodden reality with technologic fantasy. How fitting, then, that Humanz’s introductory track begins like a self-aware warning before imploding pre-conceived expectations: “I switched my robot off/ And I know more/ But I retain less.” Right from its start, Humanz presents itself as a record overwhelmed by possibilities but unable to deliver them. Maybe that disconnect is intentional after all.
(Guide: Gorillaz in 10 Songs)
Gorillaz learned a lot in the seven-year gap between records; they just struggle to use that knowledge. According to Albarn, Humanz is equal parts a club record and a political response to the 2016 US presidential election. “When you go out that night, how do you feel?” he said. “This record was anticipating that night but trying to make a party out of it.” To the album’s benefit, it does represent today’s fluctuating party scene somewhat well. Political rallies calling for resistance and equality often slip into clubs with darkly comedic scheduling — for instance, it’s not unheard of to hear a song like “Alright” followed by “Side to Side”. So, when Humanz does the same, partnering “Let Me Out” (“Tell me I won’t die at the hands of the police/ Promise me I won’t outlive my nephew and my niece,” raps Pusha T) with “Carnival” (“I wanna spend the time with you/ Doing nothing,” sings Anthony Hamilton.), they cheapen the other’s gleam in a familiar way. For those used to that inconsistency, the dichotomy won’t be too jarring, but those anticipating musical uniformity will likely feel nauseous. It’s like a strobe light of songs that flash too quickly, one colorful theme overlapping with the next right when one you enjoy starts to settle in.
What the album lacks in proper sequencing, Gorillaz tries to solve with 20-second-or-less interludes that section off songs. These snippets of dialogue often suggest that the listener is riding up an elevator, poking their head onto different floors of a hotel to see what the party is like the higher up they go. Always self-aware, they include a particularly tongue-in-cheek interlude about resisting the desire to conform… via a repeat-after-me oath. Once the top of the building is reached, a deadpan huzzah plays out: “Out of the elephant’s trunk: confetti.” Is it a bit hackneyed? Sure. Does it preserve the dark comedy of Gorillaz’s personality? Absolutely. However, this mix offers a chance to listen to Gorillaz without getting too caught up in the overstressed mythology of its virtual members’ lives. Where they once sat at the center of a song, Gorillaz’ members now narrate your experience from a distance.
Despite all of this, Humanz manages to wax its own brand of charm over the course of its 20-song tracklist. The magic is in the collaborations. When creating Plastic Beach, Gorillaz admitted they could only operate so far as a two piece masquerading as four members, roping a slew of vocalists onboard for various songs. It worked. On Humanz, they dive head-first into that pool once again, getting everyone from Mavis Staples to Popcaan to contribute, and the only way for it to play out smoothly with such variety is to work that club angle. In fact, Albarn had initially asked each of the artists to react to a world in which Trump won the election, though he’s since edited out every Trump reference contributors made, turning what could have been a knee-deep political retaliation into another chapter that upholds Gorillaz’s digital obscurities. Though, by creating an album that rapidly shifts between genre, tempo, and vocalists, Gorillaz push their digital pop act forward without leaning too heavily on their respective disguises.
(Vs: Blur vs. Gorillaz: Where Does Damon Albarn Truly Belong?)
Recently, Albarn revealed that the majority of the guests on Humanz were chosen to impress his daughter — not exactly a fault, but not exactly the best guiding light, either — which likely explains why tracks such as “Saturnz Barz” and “Sex Murder Party” sound like trite party filler. The rest are a welcome burst of energy and crunchy beats on par with Demon Days’ samples. Vince Staples sprints across “Ascension”, De La Soul throws back to old-school Gorillaz on “Momentz”, and D.R.A.M. somehow doesn’t offset Albarn’s ego on the steady build of “Andromeda”. Humanz lets itself spin in circles, dancing to each song without trying to force connections between them. Sure, Grace Jones’ insidious laughter on “Charger” while industrial beats scratch behind her may seem out of place, but it’s one of Gorillaz’s best songs to date, pushing the dance playlist setup of the album into a decidedly disordered flash of color and sound. Because Albarn and Hewlett embrace the scattered nature of the record, their original angle — that this is a party taking place when logic no longer exists — works just fine.
Humanz is less about the Gorillaz of the past than it is about the people of the future. It’s as if by placing 2D, Murdoc, Russel, and Noodle on the album art, Albarn and Hewlett are trying to preserve those characters on an album that feels free of them. Humanz deviates from the Gorillaz persona they worked so hard to build. They’re good at cleverly disguised melancholia and that exists here if you look for it — the most obvious case being “Busted and Blue”, a slow-burning number about separating ourselves from technology and, coincidentally, the only track that features Albarn by himself. But if we focus on the cartoon characters now, are we wrongly overlooking the music? Artists who’ve built themselves up to be cartoons themselves, intentionally or not, wouldn’t argue against that. In the case of Gorillaz circa 2017, that just so happens to be true. It’s what allows us to watch while artists like Danny Brown and Kelela team up to create a bizarre, delightful, unexpected harmony on the album’s best track, “Submission”.
In the end, Humanz structures itself like we’re watching Gorillaz host a party in a trendy club, all while the world burns. By positioning its four digital members just outside of the line of vision, though, it feels like an outlier in the band’s catalog — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With a bit more focus, Humanz could have been an essential part of Gorillaz’s narrative. Instead, it’s a scatterbrained frenzy of emotion — which is what’s to be expected of anything immersing itself in the chaotic, logic-free nonsense of the world post-election.
Essential Tracks: “Submission (feat. Danny Brown & Kelela)”, “Andromeda (feat. D.R.A.M.)”, and “Charger (feat. Grace Jones)”Pakistani Muslim men, in the UK, have accused me of being a hate preacher simply for highlighting the abuse and rape of Pakistani Muslim children. White men and women have accused me of being a racist and bigot for raising awareness about Pakistani Muslim children being raped and abused.
Surely if I was a hate preaching racist and bigot, then I would not care about Muslim children being raped or abused?
I grew up in the Pakistani Muslim community in Glasgow, Scotland and I know more about the community than the white man or woman who claim to have ‘Muslim friends’ and thus view themselves as a font of knowledge on a Muslim upbringing and what it is like to be a Muslim in the UK. Do they understand the shame culture? Do they know how men and women are treated differently? Do they know what Muslim families say about them behind closed doors?
Pakistani Muslims have their own agenda for silencing my voice and the voices of others who speak about the harmful practices that go on in the community. Shame, honour and saving face are more important than the rape of children. They have an image to uphold of the pious Muslim community that they portray to society. An image that shows Muslims to be kind, loving and peaceful people of which, yes of course, there are many but there is also a dark and evil side that is allowed to flourish.
In the UK we do not keep any statistics of Muslim children being abused or raped. Why? Who are we protecting? Because by keeping quiet it shows only the rapists are being protected.
In Pakistan, for the last 17 years, an organisation called ‘Sahil’ has been collecting data from cases publicised in online and printed newspaper articles, cases they have dealt with through their office by offering free legal aid and cases shared with them by other organisations of children who have been sexually abused and raped. They call these the ‘cruel numbers.’
In the UK in 2013, Muslim Women’s Network conducted a report called ‘Unheard Voices’ which researched the Sexual Exploitation of Asian Girls and Young Women Since then there has been nothing as they are looking for more funding to do more research. More funding? Why is there always more funding needed to protect children? Those of us who have grown up in the Pakistani community, both here in the UK and back in Pakistan, know that it is shame and honour that stops the families from taking action when their children are raped. So why do BME organisations need more funding? Demanding more funding while children continue to be raped? Stand up and be the voice in your communities and name the paedophiles, shame them and report their crimes to the police.
In the UK, we rarely read stories in the papers of Muslim children who have been raped or abused. Why? Is it the biraderi politics that stop the police from investigating? Is it that we have allowed this community to self govern and so the police look the other way while these men rape without any fear of the law? I volunteered for a charity, which raised awareness on child sexual abuse in the BME community, I spoke to many Pakistani people, men and women, boys and girls who all share their experiences of being abused or raped. The Pakistani community is not immune from paedophilia.
If in Pakistan children are being raped and sexually abused, being forced into child marriages then it really goes without saying that they will also be suffering here in the UK. The Pakistanis who are living in the UK are far from perfect and like others will have paedohilies in their communities. The difference is that British people report their paedophiles, are disgusted by them and hound them off their housing schemes and streets when it is known that they live there. Pakistani paedophiles are welcomed in the communities, invited to dinner, events and weddings. Rarely are they shunned as say someone who no longer believes in Islam is. Ex Muslims are despised and ostracised more than the paedophiles in the Pakistani communities.
Parents send their children to mosque trusting the Imams and teachers to teach their children to read the Koran. Do we honestly believe that the children are not being abused in mosques in the UK? Many of the Imams come over from Pakistan and if you think they leave their paedophilia at the airport then you are deluded.
A child who attends mosques and is not physically beaten or sexually abused is one of the lucky ones. I do believe that mosques are a breeding ground for perverts and paedophiles. Just like the Catholic Church scandal, the mosque, too, is a scandal waiting to be exposed.
The only way to stop Pakistani Muslim children being abused it to get rid of the shame and honour culture. The only person who should be shamed is the paedophile and not the child that is abused. No funding is needed for this, just the courage of high profile Muslim men and women to say enough, no more silence.
Shazia Hobbs grew up in Glasgow with her white Scottish mum, her Pakistani-born dad, his Pakistani-born first wife and eight of the 11 children the two women. Shazia Hobbs debut novel, The Gori’s Daughter, is available on Amazon now.
The Truth Must be Told Your contribution supports independent journalism Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more. Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible. Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too. Please contribute to our ground-breaking work here.
Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best. Contribute Monthly - Choose One Subscriber : $18.00 USD - monthly Contributor : $36.00 USD - monthly Patron : $50.00 USD - monthly Silver member : $100.00 USD - monthly Gold member : $250.00 USD - monthly Platinum member : $500.00 USD - monthlyLosing a loved one is never easy, and for Paul Walker’s longtime girlfriend, Jasmine Pilchard Gosnell, life has been incredibly hard since she said goodbye to the actor.
“I walk the streets of one,” the 23-year-old was quoted in a Facebook post recently, along with a photo of the somber young woman as she took her dog for a walk.
Now her father reveals in an exclusive interview she’s in therapy to cope with the 40-year-old’s tragic death.
“I have her in grief counseling,” said Casey Gosnell, 47. “You have to understand that she is still terribly wounded by Paul’s death and will be for a long time.”
The blonde has yet to publicly talk about Paul’s death from a car accident in Santa Clarita, Calif., last November.
On her Facebook page, it reads, “Every day, in some small way, memories of you come our way. Though absent, you are ever near, still missed, still I will always love you. Rest in peace love.”
Paul Walker’s Daughter, Meadow, Shares Touching Facebook Photo With Her Late Dad
“Maybe one day she’ll be ready to talk about Paul, but she’s not there yet,” her father added.
Jasmine remains close with Paul’s brothers, Cody and Caleb Walker [pictured below], who are currently filming the seventh installment of the Fast & Furious franchise. As reported, they have signed on to shoot the unfinished scenes featuring Paul’s character, Brian O’Connor.
Paul Walker’s Brothers to Imitate His Voice For Fast & Furious 7
“She’s trying to deal with her loss – it’s been very hard for her,” Casey tells the MailOnline. “But she has her family and we’re trying to help and support her as much as we can.”
Sources tell the outlet she’s been spending time with her mother, Julie Pilchard, in Santa Barbara, Calif., as she puts the pieces of her life back together.
Jasmine began dating Paul when she was just 16-years-old — he was 33 at the time. They had been living together at the time of his death, and Jasmine had been close with his 15-year-old teen daughter, Meadow.
Meadow recently posted a touching photo with her late father on her new Facebook account. The young girl also opened an Instagram and Twitter account in order to “combat the imposter profiles that are continually created.”
Meadow is set to inherit her father’s multimillion-dollar estate at the age of 18.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Police forced a group back from the fence by using tear gas
The UK and France have urged other EU nations to help address the root causes of the Calais migrant crisis.
In the Sunday Telegraph, Home Secretary Theresa May and her French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve said it was part of a "global migration crisis".
Migrants in Calais are making nightly bids to cross the Channel, leading to delays on cross-Channel services.
Meanwhile, the Home Office said support could end for failed asylum-seekers, to discourage illegal migration.
Bolstered security measures planned for around the French end of the Channel Tunnel, which include more CCTV surveillance, French police reinforcements and extra fencing, were agreed between Prime Minister David Cameron and President Francois Hollande on Friday.
There have been thousands of attempts by migrants to access the Eurotunnel terminal in the last week.
A man believed to be Sudanese was killed on Tuesday night while attempting to make the journey, the ninth person to die while trying to access the tunnel since the start of June.
Calais migrant crisis Impact on Kent council social services 629 the number of unaccompanied children seeking asylum that require care from Kent county council 220 the equivalent number in March 2014
£5.5m funding shortfall according to the council
Eurotunnel passenger services from the UK to France are currently delayed by about 30 minutes due to what Eurotunnel described as an "earlier incident" in the terminal. There is no delay to passenger services from the French side.
Freight journeys from France were earlier delayed but are now operating to schedule.
'Tougher action'
In their Telegraph piece, Mrs May and Mr Cazeneuve wrote: "This situation cannot be seen as an issue just for our two countries.
"It is a priority at both a European and international level."
They said many migrants in Calais had travelled through Italy, Greece and other countries, which was why they were pushing for other EU countries to "address this problem at root".
The "link between crossing the Mediterranean and achieving settlement in Europe for economic reasons" must be broken, they wrote.
They suggested that the long-term solution would be to persuade would-be migrants hoping for a better life in Europe that "our streets are not paved with gold".
A Downing Street spokesman said the prime minister wanted to see "more security and tougher action at the border".
Details of the security measures agreed between the two countries include:
Extra private security guards, funded by the UK, to boost an existing 200-strong team
An increased presence of French police on the borders throughout the summer
Additional fencing, funded by the UK, to be installed around the Eurotunnel perimeter as required, with higher boundaries and extra layers where necessary and a large metal barrier to protect Eurotunnel platforms
Extra CCTV, infra-red detectors and floodlighting to secure key segments of the perimeter fence
The No 10 spokesman added: "On top of that, we want to help those being affected by the disruption, including securing additional parking zones in Kent to reduce the impact on local residents and businesses."
Operation Stack - the police scheme of closing part of the M20 in Kent to park lorries - was in place for part of Saturday but has now been lifted.
Image copyright PA Image caption Migrants in Calais are making nightly bids to cross the Channel
Immigration minister James Brokenshire said rules could be changed to remove taxpayer support for more than 10,000 failed asylum-seekers living in the UK with their families.
In the UK, migrants can obtain accommodation and a support allowance worth £36 a week from the moment they claim asylum.
This is withdrawn from individuals whose application fails - but failed asylum-seekers with families continue to receive support.
Mr Brokenshire said: "I want to introduce new rules to support those who genuinely need it, but send out a very clear message to those who seek to exploit the system that Britain is not a soft touch on asylum."
Shadow immigration minister David Hanson said the government needed to put diplomatic pressure on the French government to assess migrants in Calais to determine if they had proper asylum seeker or refugee status or were in the country illegally.
He said: "If those people were in Dover do you think the UK authorities would allow illegal immigrants, or people not yet claiming asylum or refugee status, to be in Dover? They wouldn't."
The Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, urged the government to treat asylum seekers "humanely", adding that the situation in Calais was "the tip of a humanitarian crisis".Children can GROW OUT of autism: Controversial research suggests not all youngsters have the same fate
Autistic children who recovered appeared to have milder social difficulties but more repetitive behaviours
By studying children who appear to grow out of the disorder experts hope to create better therapies
Autism is a condition some children manage to grow out of, a study has shown.
Experts studied 34 school-age children and young adults who had been diagnosed with autism early in life but now appeared to be functioning normally.
Tests confirmed that the group, aged eight to 21, no longer suffered symptoms of the developmental condition that makes it difficult to communicate and socialise.
Autistic children who recovered appeared to have milder social difficulties but more repetitive behaviours
The results, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, provide no estimate of the proportion of children likely to recover from autism.
But the researchers say they offer hope that in at least some cases, the handicap of autism can be left behind.
Dr Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health which supported the study, said: 'Although the diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time, the findings suggest that there is a very wide range of possible outcomes.
'For an individual child, the outcome may be knowable only with time and after some years of intervention. Subsequent reports from this study should tell us more about the nature of autism and the role of therapy and other factors in the long term out come for these children.'
UNDERSTANDING AUTISM
Autism refers to a range of related developmental disorders that start in childhood and affect the person for their whole life.
Symptoms can be split into three broad groups:
1) Problems with social interaction
2) Impaired language and communication skills
3) Unusual patterns of thought and behaviour
People with autism may also be over or under-sensitive to sounds, touch, taste, smells, light or colour.
Symptoms can range from mild to severe but all can cause anxiety.
While some people with autism can live relatively independent lives, others may need a lifetime of specialist support.
There is no cure but there are a number of treatments to help autistic people better cope with the world around them.
Around one in 100 children in the UK have autism spectrum disorder. It is three times more common among boys than girls.
For more information visit www.autism.org.uk
Previous studies looking at the likelihood of autism recovery have proved inconclusive.
Questions remained over the accuracy of the original diagnosis, and whether children who appeared to grow up functioning normally started out with mild forms of the condition.
For the new study, early diagnostic reports by doctors were reviewed by a team of expert investigators.
The results suggested that recovering children tended to have relatively milder social difficulties early in life. But they were likely to suffer more severe symptoms relating to communication and repetitive behaviour.
The research team, led by Dr Deborah Fein, from the University of Connecticut, compared the 34 'optimal outcome' participants with the same number of normally functioning peers and 44 children and young adults affected by high-functioning autism. Each group was matched by age, sex, and non-verbal IQ.
Optimal outcome individuals showed no signs of problems with language, face recognition, communication or social interaction despite their previous diagnosis of autism.
The researchers are continuing to analyse data on changes in brain function in the children.
They are also reviewing records of the kinds of treatment the children received, and to what extent they may have contributed to their recovery, as well as the role played by IQ.
'All children with ASD (autism spectrum disorder) are capable of making progress with intensive therapy, but with our current state of knowledge most do not achieve the kind of optimal outcome that we are studying,' said Dr Fein.
'Our hope is that further research will help us better understand the mechanisms of change so that each child can have the best possible life.'
However, Dr Judith Gould, Director of the National Autistic Society’s Lorna Wing Centre for Autism, said: 'Autism is a lifelong disability affecting the way that people communicate and interact with others.
'This study is looking at a small sample of high functioning people with autism and we would urge people not to jump to conclusions about the nature and complexity of autism, as well its longevity.
'With intensive therapy and support, it’s possible for a small sub group of high functioning individuals with autism to learn coping behaviours and strategies which would ‘mask’ their underlying condition and change their scoring in the diagnostic tests used to determine their condition in this research.
'This research acknowledges that a diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time and it is important to recognise the support that people with autism need in order to live the lives of their choosing.Pebble recently shipped its new Pebble Time smartwatches to Kickstarter backers, but there was initially a big problem: its iOS app wasn't approved by Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) on time.
Pebble blamed "quirks in the App Store submission process and rules" for causing the delay. With customers left without a way to sync their watches to their iPhones, Pebble asked customers to voice their concerns on Twitter via the #FreeOurPebbleTime hashtag. After that nudge, Apple approved the app, and Pebble thanked its customers for carrying "the torch across the finish line."
Many media outlets speculated that Apple delayed the approval to shield the Apple Watch from competition. Back in April, Apple rejected navigation app SeaNav US for mentioning Pebble support in its App Store description, which violated a guideline that prevented developers from highlighting competing platforms. Although a David vs. Goliath showdown has been averted for now, could Apple eventually see the Pebble Time as a threat?
Why Pebble Time could threaten Apple Watch
Pebble entered the smartwatch market long before Apple, back in 2013, after raising over $10 million in a Kickstarter campaign.
By the end of 2014, Pebble sold its one millionth smartwatch, despite facing stiff competition from Samsung (NASDAQOTH:SSNLF) and Android Wear rivals. Research firm Smartwatch Group estimates that Pebble claimed 7% of the global smartwatch market in 2014, putting it in third place behind Samsung (26%) and Lenovo (NASDAQOTH:LNVGY)/Motorola (10%).
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of the Breaking. Any kind of sizable land collapse triggered by an earthquake or meteor strike along the narrow land bridge that was the Arm of Dorne would almost certainly have sent massive tidal waves racing up the newly created Narrow Sea, and I think this is the best candidate to explain the storms and floods of Durran’s tale. There’s an additional clue about this at the end of the story, after Durran builds his seventh castle, supposedly the current keep of Storm’s End:
No matter how the tale was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm after storm against it, the seventh castle stood defiant, and Durran Godsgrief and fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their days. Gods do not forget, and still the gales came raging up the Narrow Sea. Yet Storm’s End endured, through centuries and tens of centuries, a castle like no other.
In other words, the story is implying a permanent change in the weather pattern of the area. Ever since this one dramatic event, this combined flood and superstorm, ever since then, we have had gales and storms raging up the Narrow Sea. This new weather pattern is nicely explained by the hypothesis that the flood of the Durran Godsgrief story is in fact a mythicized account of the breaking of the arm of Dorne. Whenever and however it happened, the breaking of the arm and the joining of the Shivering Sea to the Summer Sea would have completely changed the ocean currents, which would in turn have had all kinds of affects on climate, both regionally and globally. The temperature of the seas themselves would change, and although I am not anything remotely close to a climatologist or meteorologist, I do know that ocean temperatures and air temperatures are primary factors in the precipitation of storms.
The breaking of the arm of Dorne, according to our research, was accomplished by greenseers pulling down the moon, and that’s essentially the story that the Durran and Elenei legend tells. Durran pulled down the moon maiden, and this pissed off the powers that be big time. This means that the Storm King who steals the moon goddess is yet another aspect of the Azor Ahai archetype, or of the Azor Ahai people as we have come to say. Once again, we find a horned lord playing the Azor Ahai role of moon-breaker and stealer of godly things. Once again, we find this overlap between Garth people – horned lords – and Azor Ahai people, who we think of as the first dragonlords. As we have seen, the Garth side of things tends to line up with the summer king / fertility god symbolism, while the Azor Ahai reborn side of things tends to line up with the winter king / death god symbolism, and it seems that this translates on the ground as horned green men undergoing some kind of fiery death transformation and emerging as Azor Ahai people. In turn, I do suspect the dragon bond and the blood of the dragon phenomena to be a mutation of greenseer abilities, but that is a subject for another day.
It should not be strange to think of Azor Ahai as a storm figure or storm king, because we’ve shown that the undead stag man figure is a very important aspect of Azor Ahai reborn, and the Storm Kings are definitely OG stag men. The Grey King possessed the Storm God’s thunderbolt, and this can be seen as endowing the Azor Ahai figure with that same power of thunder and lightning. You could also simply say that Azor Ahai called down the thunderbolt when he broke the moon, and that this makes him the master of the storm, the Storm King. His hand is the fiery hand that flings the meteors, and he’s the one that can call down the storm of swords. You may also remember all the way back to Bloodstone Compendium 2, where we talked about Bloodstone’s associations with lightning and thunder, and how Beric is an Azor Ahai character who is called “the lightning lord.” Thus, everything about the Storm King mythology fits in nicely with that of the Grey King and Azor Ahai.
Consider the two high-profile infusions of dragonblood into the line of Storm Kings: once at the inception of House Baratheon, and again two generations before the main story. We are told in AGOT that King Robert’s grandmother was a Targaryen – Rhaelle Targaryen, the daughter of Aegon the V (Egg from Dunk and Egg) and Black Betha Blackwood – making Robert a horned god with a bit of dragon blood. After Robert defeats Rhaegar, he does become more dragon-like, sitting on the throne of the dragon kings in the castle of the dragon kings and even wondering on his deathbed if he’s been as bad as Aerys. Ned puts a finger on this when he stands up to Robert’s order to kill Daenerys and asks why they deposed Aerys, if not to end the killing of children and innocents.
The line of Baratheon is actually founded by a bastard dragon, Orrys Baratheon, who was thought to be a bastard brother to Aegon the Conqueror. Orrys defeated the last Storm King Argilac the Arrogant during the Conquest, and afterward, he took Argilac’s daughter Lady Argella to wife and adopted the Storm Kings’ stag sigil and antlered crown and helm. His grandson Robar Baratheon married the dowager queen Alyssa Velaryon after Aenys Targaryen died, and their daughter married back into the Targaryen line. On a basic level, all this intermingling of stag man blood and dragon blood serves to reinforce my basic premise that Garth people and Azor Ahai people are related to one another, and more specifically, it’s showing us the cycle of one turning into the other.
Now think about the fact that wooden fish trap over a river can be called either a fishing weir or a fishgarth, and how that alludes to the weirwoods as a kind of “garth tree,” an idea reinforced by the fact that green man figures from world mythology can have either antlers or branches on their head. With that in mind, compare the Durran Durrandon myth to the scene at the Nightfort. The twisted, faceless Nightfort weirwood tree pulling down the moon seems to symbolize naughty sorcerers using greenseer magic to pull down the moon, and that is the same thing expressed by Durran the horned lord pulling down Elenei. We could say that the weirwood represents the greenseer himself, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say that the weirwood acting like a person is telling us about people using weirwoods to work sorcery.
Finally, take note of the detail in the legend of when the deadly storm and flood comes – it comes at Durran and Elenei’s wedding. This reminds us of the Alchemical Wedding of Daenerys Targaryen which symbolizes the birth of the dragons in a firestorm of destruction, and of the greater concept of the sun and moon as a husband and wife whose copulation produces the Lightbringer meteors. This is the crux of the Godsgrief myth – horned lords stole the moon. Greenseers brought down the hammer of the Waters on the Arm of Dorne, but they did so by pulling the moon down to earth.
And they may not have been children of the forest greenseers.
A Memory of Merlings
This section brought to you by the support of our new Zodiac patron, The Mystery Knight known only as Rusted Revolver, the Lilith-Walker, Great Dayne-friend and earthly avatar of Heavenly House Pisces
Now as it happens, there are a lot of direct comparisons to be drawn between the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief, and between the Ironborn and people of the Stormlands. Let’s compare the legendary monarchs first, and then the cultures they gave rise to.
First off, you’ll notice that like Durran Godsgrief, the Grey King is also said to have “taken” a mermaid to wife… ah ha. I didn’t dwell on the mermaid part of the Grey King story previously because I wanted to save it for when we talked about Elenei, and here we are. The Ironborn folklore seems to recall a moon meteor impact, imagined as a mighty thunderbolt or an island-drowning sea dragon or a Drowned God – and I somewhat jokingly said that we ought to consider the Drowned God a drowned goddess, because they are really just talking about the fallen moon goddess. The Grey King’s ‘taking a mermaid to wife’ communicates the same idea – an aquatic moon goddess wife, risen from the depths. Aeron calls the Drowned God “Lord God who drowned for us,” thus equating the drowned moon deity as a sacrifice, just as Nissa Nissa can be viewed as a sacrifice. The slain sea dragon Nagga – a female dragon, you’ll note – passed on her living fire to the Grey King, and this also implies a moon sacrifice to transmit the fire of the gods into the hands of the moon breaker.
That means that there are actually three Grey King myths which could refer to him pulling down the moon: slaying the sea dragon and stealing her fire, calling down the thunderbolt and possessing the fire of the burning tree, and now taking a mermaid to wife.
Next up in the Grey King / Storm King comparison, the spiky wooden crowns of the Ironborn, both driftwood and weirwood, vs. the stag crowns and antlered helms of the Storm Kings. We just mentioned the interchangeability of wearing horns or branches on your head in regards to green man folklore, and that means that the Grey King and Driftwood Kings of the Ironborn AND the antler-hat wearing folk of the Stormlands are both drawing from horned nature god mythology. This raises the obvious possibility that both are “Garth people,” of the same line of horned figures that gave rise to the legend of Garth and the green men, or perhaps we might say it strengthens our existing hypothesis about that being the case. I also highly recommend reading an essay on Westeros.org by my good friend Crowfood’s Daughter regarding the Grey King and Garth being brothers who represent the winter king / summer king cycle. She has some really great insight into the story of House Goodbrother, supposedly descended from the leal elder brother of the Grey King. Consider it required reading, in fact.
We have found both summer / oak king / life-associated symbolism and the opposite death / winter / holly king symbolism with the Baratheon brothers, and the same is also true to a lesser extent with the Grey King. That is because all of these horned figures are representing different parts the cycle, and the figures themselves are not static, but depict the transitions. Although the Ironborn primarily express the death / reaping / killing side of things, the Grey King is said to have left a hundred sons behind him (who, admittedly, did promptly engage in “an orgy of kinslaying” which left only 16 survivors), and as Crowfood’s Daughter points out in her essay, House Goodbrother shows a consistent expression of summer king and fertility ideas, punctuated by the occasional opposite kind of “BadBrother” figure. We aren’t told how many offspring Durran Godsgrief left, but we are told that everyone else in the immediate vicinity was killed during the great storm and flood at their wedding, with Durran and Elenei presumably repopulating the Stormlands with their progeny and establishing a line of kings that lasted eight thousand years.
To put it simply, we might say that both the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief were remembered as the originators a new and long-lasting culture, and in doing so are giving us the fertility ideas to go along with their antler hats and wooden hats. The Storm King kind of shows us the moment of transition between green summer king to a dead winter king (think of the black stag sigil’s implication of a dark stag figure). The Grey King primarily shows us the aftermath of the transition, where he has taken possession of the fire of the gods but has turned grey and corpse-like.
Third point of comparison: we have the fact that Durran Godsgrief is the only other man in Westeros besides the Grey King who was said to live for a thousand years – Durran is called “The King of a Thousand Years,” while the Grey King was said to rule for a thousand years and seven. This long life could be exaggeration, or it could be a clue about someone who has extended their lifespan through greenseer magic and / or undeath transformation.
Fourth, we have the floods, as I mentioned a moment ago – the Grey King fought against the island-drowning sea dragon, which sure sounds like a story about a flood, and Durran provoked the flood and storm by opposing the wind and sea gods. It is also said that the Storm God drowned Nagga’s fire after the Grey King died, which is another hint about a flood associated with the Grey King, and like the Godsgrief tale, tells the story of a man who battled against storms and floods sent by an angry god he had stolen from.
Finally, we have the idea of the fallen moon providing shelter – Elenei sheltered Durran from the storm and flood which killed everyone else, and the Grey King fashioned a longhall from the bones of Nagga the sea dragon. That reminds us of the Biblical leviathan, whose skin God will use to make a covering of light over the world in the end times, something we looked at while examining sea dragon and sea serpent myths.
The idea that the legends of the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief are referring to the same person or group of moon-antagonizing people is strengthened by the extensive correlations between the Ironborn and the people of the Stormlands, which many in the fandom have picked up on. Let’s broaden the comparison to the two cultures that the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief gave rise to and you’ll see what I mean. There is dorky stuff like the reversed sigils – a black stag on gold for Baratheon and Durrandon, and a golden kraken on black for the Greyjoys. Uber-nerds have spotted the Thor’s hammer connection – Thor is the Norse storm god, whose hammer shoots thunderbolts, and on one hand we have Robert the Storm Lord with a mighty hammer, and on the other have a Storm God shooting thunderbolts at the Grey King, and the Drowned God speaking in the language of leviathan, which turns out to be the “hammering” of the waves.
The most important and obvious parallel, however, is found in the pantheons of the two cultures. They both see two gods in the world – a sea god and a storm / wind / sky god. In the Stormlands mythology, they are simply called “the sea god and the goddess of the wind,” while the Ironborn famously have the Drowned God and the Storm God. That’s pretty darn similar.
It could be a case of mutual invention of people who live by the stormy sea, but we actually see a very similar set of beliefs elsewhere – most notably with the occasionally web-fingered folks on the Three Sisters, which in case you forgot are those three small islands north of the Vale of Arryn which Davos stops at on the way to White Harbor. They speak of the the Lady of the Waves of the Lord of the Skies – and sky gods, storm gods, and wind gods are all in the same general vein, so this is really another match for this sea / wind god dichotomy of the Stormlands and Iron Islands. When the Lady of the Waves and the Lord of the Skies mate, they give birth to storms, and this suggests Elenei, the child of wind and sea gods, may be seen as the storm herself, just as Daenerys is the Stormborn and just as the moon meteor children arrive in the form of a firestorm of steel rain or a mighty thunderbolt.
To this I will also add that the Tullys, a House descended from the First Men, speak of sending their dead to “the watery halls where the Tullys held eternal court, with schools of fish their last attendants.” Compare that to the “Drowned God’s watery halls,” where the dead of the Ironborn go to feast and be attended by mermaids, and consider the Tullys’ love of dressing up in fish-people armor… and the stuff from the Three Sisters… and you can start to see the remnants of a very old aquatic-based religion stretching across the middle of Westeros from the Iron Islands in the west to the Stormlands and Three Sisters in the east.
We might also think of the Velaryons on the nearby Isle of Driftmark, because the Velaryons are said to have a driftwood throne from the Merling King. The Merling King seems to have been regarded as a god, due to the presence of a Merling King statue in the House of Black and White, which is a home of all the various death gods in the world. This implies that the Merling King is a death god or underworld deity in addition to his obvious identity as an underwater deity. Merling King definitely sounds like a Poseidon figure, and Poseidon is also seen as an underworld figure in some instances, as the sea is often regarded as a kind of underworld, for obvious reasons. The Merling King is also the name of the boat that Petyr Baelish uses to snatch Sansa the moon maiden away from King’s Landing, which fits the pattern of death figures stealing moon maidens. But setting aside the symbolism, it’s simply another sign of an aquatic religion across the middle of Westeros – one that might have connected people on both coasts of ancient, pre-Long Night Westeros.
You know how we are told that the First Men adopted the religion of the children of the forest after they signed the Pact, which followed shortly after the Hammer of the Waters? This raises the interesting question of what religion the First Men might have followed before the Hammer fell and the Pact was signed. Well, we can probably answer that now – this aquatic based, sea and sky god religion was one, and the other major one would be the worship of Garth the Green. These two may have even overlapped, given what we have seen of horned people wrapped up in legends with sea and storm gods. These two ancient religions or belief sets linger on, underneath the heavy layer of thousand of years of First Men worshipping the Old Gods and thousands more worshipping the Seven.
In fact, let’s talk timeline for a quick second, because that is a very important component of the Hammer of the Waters event. By now we have laid out enough evidence to show that the Hammer of the Waters might have been a moon meteor that it’s appropriate to consider the major adjustment to the timeline of ancient Westeros it would necessitate, if true: namely, that the Hammer of the Waters fell at the time of the Long Night, with the famous Pact between First Men and children of the forest likely being signed during or after the Long Night. If this is the case, the mystery of why the First Men signed the Pact and switched religions when they were clearly winning the greater struggle for domination of Westeros is solved – the children helped to save mankind from the Long Night and the Others, as the story of the last hero suggests. The Long Night disaster provided the cultural reset button and clean slate that would certainly have helped to facilitate a group of people taking up the religion of their former enemy en masse, and the help the children provided supplies the motivation. As I speculated in the Green Zombies series, the forming of the Night’s Watch, who originally swore their Night’s Watch vows to the greenseers, would likely have been a part of this Pact, a debt of gratitude and honor paid to the greenseers who helped the last hero win the War for the Dawn.
According to this alternate timeline, most of the legendary conflicts between children and First Men would have probably occurred before the Long Night, with a period of cooperation coming after the Long Night. I don’t want to get too dogmatic about this, because we surely had some cooperation / interbreeding before the Long Night, and eventually some conflict afterward as humans began to forget or dishonor the Pact, but we do see this idea of fighting before the Long Night and cooperation afterward in the mythical early history of Durran Godsgrief, as it happens.
We see it in the Durran tale itself, where Durran breaks the moon and causes all hell to break loose, but then gets help from the children to rebuild. We also see it in the Father to son lineage of the the first Durrandon, as Durran Godsgrief, the moon breaker and naughty greenseer, is said to have taken the Rainwood from the children of the forest, but his son Durran the Devout returned it to them. If the first Durran lines up with the moon-breaker figure, he would have been the guy who took the greenseer magic of the children and did something extremely naughty with it, causing the Long Night, so it makes sense he might be seen as hostile to the children, perhaps even sacrificing them to work blood magic as some legends of the Hammer of the Waters suggest. Durran’s ‘devout’ son, meanwhile, would be the one to live immediately after the Long Night – and after the Pact, according to my timeline, when the First Men were newly devoted to the religion of the children. Accordingly, Durran the Devout, son of the Godsgrief, was remembered as being friendly with the children, returning to them the Rainwood which his father had taken.
The Starks show us the same thing – Bran the Builder was friendly with the children and even learned their language, but his father might have been…
Brandon of the Bloody Blade, who drove the giants from the Reach and warred against the children of the forest, slaying so many at Blue Lake that it has been known as Red Lake ever since.
..according to TWOIAF. Brandon’s father was… Garth the Green, a fertility god who planted the three weirwoods at Highgarden known as the Three Singers. It’s a cycle, like I said, from summer king to winter king to summer king again. Brandon of the Bloody Blade sounds like our naughty greenseer figure, the moon breaker, and slaying all those children might have been the same slaughter that was associated with calling down the Hammer of the Waters. Bran the Builder, if that’s his son, would correlate with the last hero, potentially, which makes a great deal of sense.
This alternate timeline means that Durran Godsgrief would have lived at the time of the Long Night, and he was the first Storm King anyone remembered. This makes sense to me, because I believe the Long Night should be viewed as a cultural bottleneck through which very little in the way of established order would have survived. Right after the Long Night is when mankind would have been establishing new centers of power and new royal lineages, and that’s what we see from Durran’s children. It’s the same story on the Iron Islands, where the moon breaker figure is the father of their nation and basically the oldest legendary character in their cultural memory.
That brings us right back to Brandon of the Bloody Blade and Bran the Builder. Bran the Builder is remembered as having founded House Stark, but if Brandon of the Bloody Blade lived earlier as the legends suggest, then we could see him as the first Stark, and thus again we see the moon breaker is the oldest remembered ancestor of the great house founded in the aftermath of the Long Night. The Durran tale actually has a connection to Bran the Builder, and to strange building techniques:
A seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder.
I’ve mentioned that shaping stone with magic is not something we’ve associated with the children, but it is the hallmark of dragonlord construction. Storm’s End isn’t made with fused stone – at least not on the outside – but it is still interesting that the folktale here mingles dragonlord building techniques with ideas about the children building with magic. Could the truth here have involved not children using dragonlord construction, but horned lords who are not quite human and not quite elf, people who have some sort of overlap with the fused stone builders? That is who I have pegged Durran Godsgrief as, and he is the one said to have built Storm’s End, so I am not proposing anything too crazy when I propose that horned lords or green men built Storm’s End. I also look at this idea of the children helping Durran (or perhaps his offspring) to rebuild after the great flood as a possible allusion to the idea of the children helping mankind after the Long Night, and that’s also the context in which I see Bran the Builder’s myth, which has the child-like Bran running around ancient Westeros helping great houses build their first castles and also learning the language of the children of the forest. The children pretty clearly helped mankind get up off their ass after the Long Night.
It’s also worth drawing a comparison between Storm’s End and Castle Pyke on the Iron Islands. As we discussed in our episodes with History of Westeros about the Great Empire of the Dawn, the maesters say that round towers were only built more recently, some time after the Andals came over to Westeros, and thus the older structures should not have round tower construction. For the most part this seems to be true, but the exceptions are notable. Storm’s End is one giant round tower, and the Towers of Castle Pyke, including the main keep, is a round tower design. Pyke is almost certain to date back to the remotest antiquity, eons before the arrival of the Andals, and Storm’s End may well be the same story, so what we have here are two round tower castles of impressive engineering existing when they shouldn’t, according to the maesters. The First Keep of Winterfell, the oldest part of the castle supposedly built by Bran the Builder, is also a round tower design, for what it’s worth.
I think it’s easy to see the hypothesis that is presenting itself: these horned Garth people seem to have been a builder culture. They are also the primary suspect for the creation of the Wall, in my opinion. Recall that the Wall is said to have been built perhaps by giants or with the help of the children of the forest – the truth may be these horned lords, who may be some sort of race of tall elvish people. Don’t forget that Bran is supposedly descended from Garth, and is said to have visited the reach to help Uthor Hightower, a man who married a daughter of Garth, with the construction of the final version of the Hightower at Oldtown. There is some sort of intersection between House Stark and Bran the Builder and the horned green men, and this surely goes right to the heart of the mystery of the origins of House Stark and the creation of the Wall.
I’ll finish this section by mentioning the symbolism of Storm’s End itself. Storm’s End is a place whose legend is all about the moon goddess falling to earth and the chaos it caused, as we have seen with the storm and flood sent by the angry gods. As a compliment to this, Storm’s End also gives us the rising fist symbolism of the smoke, ash and debris which would have risen in a huge column from the impact locations – the King’s Pyre symbol tower, if you will. We haven’t focused on the rising smoke and ash symbol as much as some others, but it is of course very important, because it is that actual thing that blotted out the sun. We saw it with the Mountain’s smoking fist, rising up to break the face of the sun figure, Oberyn Martell, and we’ve seen more straightforward columns of smoke rising from places where meteor impacts are symbolized. So here is the description of Storm’s End from the chapter where Cat inner monologues the story of Durran and Elenei:
Of towers, there was but one, a colossal drum tower, windowless where it faced the sea, so large that it was granary and barracks and feast hall and lord’s dwelling all in one, crowned by massive battlements that made it look from afar like a spiked fist atop an upthrust arm.
Later in ACOK, right before Renly is murdered, we see Renly’s soldiers described as dead trees and shadow knights, and check out the description of Storm’s End:
The long ranks of man and horse were armored in darkness, as black as if the Smith had hammered night itself into steel. There were banners to her right, banners to her left, and rank on rank of banners before her, but in the predawn gloom, neither colors nor sigils could be discerned. A grey army, Catelyn thought. Grey men on grey horses beneath grey banners. As they sat their horses waiting, Renly’s shadow knights pointed their lances upward, so she rode through a forest of tall naked trees, bereft of leaves and life. Where Storm’s End stood was only a deeper darkness, a wall of black through which no stars could shine…
These dead tree shadow knights armored in darkness used to be the knights of summer, but when their horned lord Renly dies, they transform with him it seems. After this, they are possessed by a dead horned lord figure, Stannis, as the troops go over to Stannis’s side in the aftermath of this event. Stannis’s new army is like night itself hammered into steel by a divine smith – this is Lightbringer, the black weapon of Azor Ahai that we are talking about. And right on cue, there’s Storm’s End, the rising fist of a castle now become a deeper darkness through which no stars could shine – it’s the cloud of darkness rising from the meteor impacts, the meteors which are like night itself hammered into steel. This is the place where Durran is remembered as having ‘pulled down the moon goddess,’ an event which caused not only storms and floods, but a deeper darkness through which no stars could shine, a.k.a. the Long Night.
The next morning, it says that:
The nightfires had burned low, and as the east began to lighten the immense mass of Storm’s End emerged like a dream of stone.
Referring to Storm’s End as a dream of stone may be a hint about it being built by dreamers, as in greenseers. That seems to be the case, as Durran’s horns and moon-goddess-theivery already identify him as a greenseer and a horned lord.
Alright, that will do it for our introduction to the Storm Kings and their horned lord symbolism, and for our introduction to moon maidens as mermaids, a topic we will return to when we focus on moon goddesses more specifically. You can see that the Storm King archetype is a part of the “naughty greenseer” archetype, and this is a subject we will return to when we discuss Mr. “I am the storm” Euron Crow’s Eye, whom I like to call “creepy pirate Odin on bad acid.” We are going to switch over to discussing Yggdrasil and Odin and their influence on the weirwoods and greenseers, but that trail will lead us back to the idea of Azor Ahai as a storm lord in a major way, and I needed to explain the Storm God mythology first to set that up. So now, without further ado, let’s go inside the magical white tree, Weir-drasil.
Bearer of Thunder
The section is sponsored by our newest Zodiac patron, Ser Cletus Yronwood reborn of the Never-Lazy Eye, wrestler of bulls and earthly avatar of Heavenly House Taurus
In Weirwood Compendium 2, A Burning Brandon, we popped the cork on the correlations between ASOIAF and Odin and his magical tree, Yggdrasil. I say pop the cork because we’ve only just begun sipping on this shamanic brew that is Mimir Brand sparkling well water. We’ll be going back to this well often throughout the weirwood compendium, because you really can’t understand the context of the weirwoods without talking about Yggdrasil and Odin.
We started with the Nightfort scene and the idea of the moon representing the eye of Odin, plucked out to gain cosmic wisdom and cast down into the well. Odin’s one-eyed status is his most recognizable trait, so it was a logical place to begin. It’s also a very easy symbol to spot, and Martin has hidden one-eyed people, horses, mules, wolves, dogs, and even a one-eyed dragon (bonus points if you know the dragon) scattered about the story. Bloodraven is of course the primary manifestation of this idea, and really, unravelling the importance of Odin to ASOIAF begins with the correlations between Bloodraven and Beric Dondarrion, which also happens to be one of the best symbolic pieces of evidence in support of my hypothesis that Azor Ahai was a greenseer, because Beric’s symbolism practically slaps us in the face with the idea of “Azor Ahai the fiery undead greenseer.”
We’ve talked about Beric a few times, so we are familiar with the basics – as an undead person resurrected through fire magic who lights a sword on fire with actual blood magic, Beric is a terrific Azor Ahai reborn echo. He’s from a black castle – Blackhaven – just as Azor Ahai was from Asshai a.k.a. the largest city in the history of the world which also happens to be built completely from light-drinking oily black stone, and just as other Azor Ahai characters like Jon and Stannis are the lords of black castles. Beric even has red, kissed-by-fire hair!
Now that we’ve put out the Great Empire of the Dawn episode, I can point to the fact that Beric set to marry a Dayne before he ‘died’ – Allyria – as another potential Azor Ahai parallel, as we have speculated that the Daynes may partially descend from the Great Empire of the Dawn people from which Azor Ahai probably comes. Allyria / Valyria? Hmm. Beric also has Edric Dayne, the young lord of Starfall, as his squire, making Beric something of a father figure for Edric, and this could be a potential echo of Azor Ahai or his son marrying a native Westerosi woman to found House Dayne. Oh and by the way “Eldric Shadowchaser” is supposedly another name for Azor Ahai, and a very Westerosi-sounding one at that, so… Eldric, Edric? I’ve always sort of thought about “Eldric Shadowchaser” as a good name for the last hero – shadowchaser and all – and I find it highly suspicious that the two houses most directly associated with the last hero, House Stark and House Dayne, have variants of the name Eldric. Yes, that’s right, there’s a “King Edric Snowbeard” Stark and an “Elric” Stark to go along with Edric Dayne, the Lord of Starfall and Ulrick Dayne, a previous Sword of the Morning. Highly suspicious, if you ask me.
George has also given the name ‘Edric’ Storm to one of Robert’s bastards, a boy who was nearly sacrificed for his ‘king’s blood’ in order to wake a dragon. In fact, all of Robert’s true children exemplify Azor Ahai reborn and horned lord ideas – Edric Storm, Mya Stone (who says her father must have been a goat, a.k.a. a horned person, and whose hair is as “black as a raven’s wing”) and most of all, Gendry. For this reason, I tend to think the names Edric Storm and Edric Dayne are clues about the offspring of Azor Ahai, and therefore when I see Edric Dayne squiring for resurrected Beric… well it looks like something of a family portrait to me.
Alright, now besides his excellent Azor Ahai impersonation, Beric also gives us a fairly strong whiff of greenseer, and of Bloodraven. The one-red-eye thing is kind of a red flag, if you know what I mean, and when we meet him, Beric is in a cavern not unlike Bloodraven’s, “seated amongst the weirwood roots halfway up the wall.” Both Beric and Bloodraven are compared to being talking corpses or corpse lords, and both are tied to the burning Night’s Watch scarecrow symbolism.
So, Beric is like Azor Ahai reborn, and Beric is like Bloodraven… and Bloodraven completes the triangle by sharing symbolism with Azor Ahai and the last hero. He’s a dragon-blooded greenseer, he commanded the Night’s Watch, he disappeared into the north to fight the Others (possibly/hopefully with a black sword, Dark Sister) and he loves to pull moon meteor symbols down into wells and privy shafts alike. We also saw all that copious sea dragon / weirwood serpent symbolism in Bloodraven’s cave, a great tie to Grey King and the idea of greenseer dragons.
Now if the Grey King overlaps with Azor Ahai in some sense as I propose, we should also see Grey King symbolism with Beric – and indeed we do, though it is not as obvious as the flaming sword-Azor Ahai thing. Beric is called the “Lightning Lord,” with the forked lightning sigil of House Dondarrion etched on his cloak. Calling an Azor Ahai reborn type the “lightning lord” makes perfect sense for all the same reasons it makes sense to call Azor Ahai reborn a Storm King: the thunderbolt was a moon meteor and Azor Ahai both called down and possessed the moon meteors.
The Grey King took possession of fire through the thunderbolt of the Storm God – in other words, the Grey King gained god-like or lord-like status through lightning, and this is paralleled again in the backstory of House Dondarrion. Their house was established when a messenger of the Storm King riding through the Dornish Marches was saved by a fortuitous forked lightning bolt that struck two Dornishman that were about to kill him, with the Storm King elevating him to a lordship for his service. A messenger of the Storm God is another way to describe lightning itself – it’s a message sent from the Storm God. Accordingly, the Dondarrion’s become the Lightning Lords, wearing the lightning on their sigil.
Even better, this first Dondarrion was in such dire straights because he fell from his horse and broke his sword, giving us the familiar broken sword motif shared |
heavy elements, such as iron and nickel, sink to the center of the planet.
Researchers believe this process also happened to Vesta.
The story begins about 4.57 billion years ago, when the planets of the Solar System started forming from the primordial solar nebula. As Jupiter gathered itself together, its powerful gravity stirred up the material in the asteroid belt so objects there could no longer coalesce. Vesta was in the process of growing into a full-fledged planet when Jupiter interrupted the process.
Like Earth and other terrestrial planets, Vesta is differentiated into layers.
Although Vesta’s growth was stunted, it is still differentiated like a true planet.
"We believe that the Solar System received an extra slug of radioactive aluminum and iron from a nearby supernova explosion at the time Vesta was forming," explains Russell. "These materials decay and give off heat. As the asteroid was gathering material up into a big ball of rock, it was also trapping the heat inside itself."
As Vesta’s core melted, lighter materials rose to the surface, forming volcanoes and mountains and lava flows.
"We think Vesta had volcanoes and flowing lava at one time, although we've not yet found any ancient volcanoes there," says Russell. "We're still looking. Vesta's plains seem similar to Hawaii's surface, which is basaltic lava solidified after flowing onto the surface.
Vesta has so much in common with the terrestrial planets, should it be formally reclassified from "asteroid" to "dwarf planet"?
"That's up to the International Astronomical Union, but at least on the inside, Vesta is doing all the things a planet does."
If anyone asks Russell, he knows how he would vote.
Author: Dauna Coulter | Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASAThis article is from the archive of our partner.
Glenn Ford needs an ironing board, some pajamas, and luggage. Ford, 64, has spent the past 30 years on death row for a crime he didn't commit. And now that he's out, he's trying to rebuild his life. His longtime legal team decided to help him do that by creating an Amazon wish list full of things he'll need to get going.
According to the Daily Dot, Ford's lawyer, Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana Director Gary Clements, drew up the list because ‟I was having complete strangers call me on the phone asking why they could do to help." The list has circulated on social media, and it looks like Clements et al. are adding items to the short wishlist as needs are fulfilled. Right now, the list includes:
"Monifah's album "Touch It" - used is fine."
Gift cards to Walgreens and a couple of other stores
A Kindle, and a case to keep it safe
Clothing essentials: a few pairs of shoes, t-shirts, pants, pajamas
a camera
an iPad
Luggage: "
Corrections officials gave him just $20 on a debit card as he left death row earlier this month. Ford was convicted in 1985 for the murder of Isadore Rozeman, but was released after new evidence supported what he'd been saying all along: that he wasn't even at the scene of the crime, and had only a tangential connection to the robbery that prompted it. Louisiana awards wrongly convicted people a yearly amount of compensation, but there's a cap on the total amount one person can get. At most, he'll get about $330,000 in compensation for the decades he spent locked up.OTTAWA—Canada’s electronic spies are concerned reporting too many details about serious privacy breaches could reveal too much about the agency’s highly secretive surveillance and cyber-defence activities, the Star has learned. The Communications Security Establishment has been in a yearlong spat with privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien’s office over reporting “material” privacy breaches.
Communications Security Establishment Commissioner Jean-Pierre Plouffe waits to appear before the Senate national security committee on the Anti-terrorism act, Bill C-51. A federal watchdog says Canada's electronic spy agency broke privacy laws by sharing information about Canadians with foreign partners. ( Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS ) Privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien waits to appear at the Commons human resources committee. ( Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
The spy agency’s reluctance comes despite government-wide regulations requiring all serious privacy breaches — those that potentially could cause serious harm to an individual, or involving a large number of Canadians — to be disclosed to the independent watchdog. “As with all (government) departments and agencies, CSE is required to report material privacy breaches to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner,” CSE spokesman Ryan Foreman wrote in a statement. “However, we do continue to discuss the most effective manner to report material privacy breaches when they occur in the operational space, in a matter that safeguards the sensitive nature of information related to CSE’s mandated activities.”
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Documents obtained by the Star show that “discussion” has been going on since at least January of last year. In a letter sent to a senior Treasury Board employee, released under access to information law, Therrien took aim at a proposal to provide only limited information to his office about privacy violations at CSE. “A report that does not state the number of breaches does not give the Office of the Privacy Commissioner enough information to have a clear discussion with the institution in question,” Therrien wrote. “The expertise of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner can not, therefore, be put to use.” A change in Treasury Board policy under the previous Conservative government requires all federal departments and agencies to report “material” privacy breaches to the commissioner and the Treasury Board. As the single largest repository of Canada’s top secret information, CSE certainly handles sensitive information. The agency is a member of the Five Eyes alliance, a group of closely aligned security and intelligence agencies in the U.K., U.S., Australia and New Zealand.
The alliance was shaken by revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, who pulled back the curtain on those countries’ mass surveillance capabilities and tools. In the wake of those disclosures, the normally press-adverse CSE has been more open about its mandate and the steps it takes to protect Canadians’ privacy. Since 2007, CSE has kept a single database for all privacy violations, from the mundane to the serious. Every year, a small team at the CSE commissioner’s office, an arm’s-length review body, reviews privacy violations self-reported by the agency.
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William Galbraith, a spokesman for CSE commissioner Jean-Pierre Plouffe, said that his office has been in discussions with Treasury Board and Therrien about CSE’s privacy breach reporting. Galbraith said the 12-person office already examines privacy infractions, and it’s important to avoid “duplication” in reviewing CSE’s activities. “The CSE commissioner has spoken with the privacy commissioner on this issue, recognizing that (Therrien’s) mandate covers all government departments and receives reports for breaches, and also noting that (Plouffe’s) mandate is specific to CSE and includes examination of compliance with the law including the Charter and the Privacy Act,” Galbraith wrote in a statement. But Therrien’s letter noted that while the CSE commissioner reviews the legality of CSE’s actions, the expertise to investigate privacy breaches is housed in the privacy commissioner’s office. Therrien is not an outsider on these questions, having served as a senior Department of Justice lawyer responsible for intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Plouffe reported earlier this year that CSE illegally, if inadvertently, transmitted Canadian metadata to a Five Eyes partner. The mistake, which CSE says did not identify any specific Canadians, was reported by the agency to the commissioner, not uncovered by Plouffe’s team themselves. Documents tabled in Parliament earlier this month show that reporting serious privacy breaches has varied widely between government departments. Treasury Board President Scott Brison, who is responsible for enforcing the government-wide reporting, vowed in an interview with iPolitics that Ottawa will do better on reporting the infractions. “It’s an area that we will work with the (privacy commissioner’s) office and with departments and agencies to understand fully what we can do to improve results and we’re seized with (the issue),” Brison told the outlet. The details about what each side is proposing in the debate between CSE and Therrien’s office remain secret. Details only emerged through multiple documents, obtained by the Star over the course of several months, from Treasury Board, CSE and the privacy commissioner’s office. In statements to the Star, all three organizations said they continue to discuss the matter and hope for a resolution in the near future.A group of Intel researchers has pioneered a messaging system that would allow multiple cores to communicate
An experimental Intel chip shows the feasibility of building processors with 1,000 cores, an Intel researcher has asserted.
The architecture for the Intel 48-core Single Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) processor is "arbitrarily scalable," said Intel researcher Timothy Mattson, during a talk at the Supercomputer 2010 conference being held this week in New Orleans.
"This is an architecture that could, in principle, scale to 1,000 cores," he said. " I can just keep adding, adding, adding cores."
Only after 1,000 cores or so, the diameter of the mesh, or the on-chip network connecting the many cores, will grow to such an extent that it would negatively impact performance, Mattson said.
Intel remains adamant that the future progress of microprocessors will depend on packing ever more cores onto a chip. As more cores are added, however, Intel designers must confront the problem of scalability.
Initial multicore chip architectures depended on a set of protocols that assures that each core has the same view of the system's memory, a technique called cache coherency.
As more cores are added to chips, this approach becomes problematic insofar that "the protocol overhead per core grows with the number of cores, leading to a 'coherency wall' beyond which the overhead exceeds the value of adding cores," the paper accompanying Mattson's talk noted.
Mattson has argued that a better approach would be to eliminate cache coherency and instead allow cores to pass messages among one another.
The recent work of the design team has centered on developing message-passing techniques for the chip that would scale as more cores are added.
Designed by Intel's TeraScale Research Program over the past several years, the chip itself is an experimental one and is not on the Intel product road map, Mattson said. A limited number of copies have been distributed to researchers and developers so they can build development tools for the design.
The chip, first fabricated with a 45-nanometer process at Intel facilities about a year ago, is actually a six-by-four array of tiles, each tile containing two cores. It has more than 1.3 billion transistors and consumes from 25 to 125 watts.
For simplicity's sake, the team used an off-the-shelf 1994-era Pentium processor design for the cores themselves. "Performance on this chip is not interesting," Mattson said. It uses a standard x86 instruction set.
The novelty of this processor is in its tiled architecture and the network and address infrastructure. Each core has a "mesh interface component" that packages data into packets and connects to an on-board router. Each tile also has a "message-passing buffer," with 16 kilobytes of random access memory.
The team has tried various approaches to streamline the ability of the processor to pass messages among the many cores.
By installing the TCP/IP protocol on the data link layer, the team was able to run a separate Linux-based operating system on each core. Mattson noted that while it would be possible to run a 48-node Linux cluster on the chip, it "would be boring."
"To make this interesting, I would have to ask, how would the programming models map onto the unique features of this chip," he said.
The team also developed a small API (application programming interface) library for message passing among the cores, called RCCE, and which Mattson pronounced as "Rocky."
In tests, the team showed that message passing among the cores could be just as speedy using RCCE as with TCP/IP-based Linux cluster. And both approaches bode well for the message-passing approach for inter-core communication.
"Our preliminary work has demonstrated that the SCC processor and its native message passing API provide an effective software development platform," the paper concludes. "The expected difficulties due to the lack of asynchronous message passing have so far not materialized."
In addition to talking about the chip's message-passing capabilities, Mattson also elaborated on SCC's power-saving capabilities. The frequency of each tile can be varied. Hooks are provided for programmers that would allow their programs to adjust the frequency speed and even the voltage of the cores they are running upon. This feature will, however, create a new challenge for programmers, he warned.
"It's a lot harder than you'd think to look at your program and think 'how many volts do I really need?'" he said.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.comHey all!
I’ve just posted the news on the KDevelop website: KDevelop 4.3.0 Beta 2 is released!
Please test it and report feedback as usual. I think it’s safe to assume that we will release 4.3.0 final in about 2-4 weeks from now.
Considering that my university semester is nearing its end, I will finally have more royal hacking time again! I’ll continue to squash bugs and improve the performance of KDevelop of course :) Most definitely I’ll try to further improve the C++11 support. But maybe I finally have some time again to work on “something bigger”, like helping Miha Čančula in writing a kick-ass unit-test integration for KDevelop (see unittest branches). Then I plan to finally release some more of our “playground” plugins, most notably CSS language support and QMake project management…
Stay tuned for a bright KDevelop future :]
PS: I’ll step up as a mentor for a KDevelop GSOC this year, yet I’m still wondering about a proper topic… Ideas?We’ve all know how much Philly loves its cheesesteaks. But you know what the data tells us? The most distinctive menu item in Pennsylvania restaurants isn’t the cheesesteak. It’s actually the hoagie.
Co.Design teamed up with food industry analytics firm Food Genius to mine its database of 88,000 menus and 59 million menu items and build this map of the each state’s true crown jewel food. What you’re looking at isn’t the most popular food by state. It’s the food that most distinguishes them from the rest of the pack.
Pennsylvania claims the hoagie because it’s on more than a third of menus across the state, while only 6% of menus nationwide have hoagies on them. Meanwhile, it’s actually New Jersey that claims the cheesesteak as its most distinctive dish, not because it’s on more menus than it is in Pennsylvania, but because, with all respect to New Jersey, the state has nothing more original on its menus.
But to really see how food trends play out, we’d recommend toggling through each of Food Genius’s five most distinctive regional food trends. Cheesesteaks are on the list, along with green chilis, green bell peppers, ranch dressing, and pecans.
What you’ll see is in many ways a better portrait of our weird eating habits. Cheesesteaks are an East Coast meal, green chilis quite literally blossom out of New Mexico, green bell peppers dominate the north, pecans are beloved in the South (and for some reason, South Dakota), and ranch dressing is slathered across the Northwest to the Southeast because ranch goes great on everything. Except New York.–Mark WilsonEverybody knows that being agile is THE way to go when building a software, and almost everybody nowadays wears the agile badge, hoping that it will solve all the world’s problems (aka missing deadlines, software not meeting requirements and so on). But since agility is just a characteristic, it is equally applicable to both developers and the software they develop.
Agile Developer
An agile developer is one who is open to change and understands that change in software and its requirements are imminent. To counter these changes, an agile developer uses certain concepts, such as –
Regular Interaction and Feedback from all the stakeholders.
Less Documentation and more focus on deliverables.
Short deadlines and milestones.
Test-driven Development.
Continuous Integration.
and so on…
And of course, we have certain methodologies and frameworks that are implementations of these concepts, like Scrum, XP, and others.
Agile Software
With all this focus on being an agile developer, one thing that quickly gets out of focus is the Agility in the software. We can consider an Agile software as a software that is Easy to change with changing requirements. And although the idea looks similar to concept of an agile developer, it is very different because even if you are an agile developer developing in a very agile way, that agility is not very useful if you have a codebase that is very hard to change, is too complex for even a smaller requirement change or is too rigid.
Another important aspect is that as a software grows, it becomes much more complex and has more and more code (modules that interact more with each other and often have more coupling with more requirements). This has a negative impact on the agility of both the software and its developers because adding and modifying features takes more time and gets more difficult. Rich Hickey rightly calls these complex rigid systems as The Elephant in the room.
Developing Agile software makes developers Agile, Not the other way round!
As developers, our focus should be on writing software that is easy to change and maintain, and although all the process and techniques that agile brings with itself are good and useful, they are useless if the software delivered is not good. Essentially, there should be more focus on things like-
Design of the software – Identifying right abstractions and components is key and should be stressed more throughout the system, Separation of software in physical and logical modules is the key in making software that can be changed easily and reliably.
– Identifying right abstractions and components is key and should be stressed more throughout the system, Separation of software in physical and logical modules is the key in making software that can be changed easily and reliably. The simplicity of the Software – Simple things is easy to understand and therefore easy to modify. Creating a simple Utility can be preferred over a plugin that brings three other dependencies with itself. Using native data structures of a language is always better than using custom data structures (Maps can be used in place of classes), polymorphism can be used in place of code branches. It’s important to weigh the benefits of using any tool or library with its complexity and cost of maintenance
– Simple things is easy to understand and therefore easy to modify. Creating a simple Utility can be preferred over a plugin that brings three other dependencies with itself. Using native data structures of a language is always better than using custom data structures (Maps can be used in place of classes), polymorphism can be used in place of code branches. It’s important to weigh the benefits of using any tool or library with its complexity and cost of maintenance TDD – TDD should be done to test behaviors and not just code. This verifies the software at the level of design and not implementation. Bugs in design are much more costly and much harder to fix than Bugs in implementation.
Always remember that the purpose of whole agile software development is to write better software, software that we can understand, change and make do more things as we need. And as such, we should have an eye on the agility of the software we are making as we try to be agile ourselves.The new GOP policy is not at all popular, and other than the industry’s corporate lobbyists, no one seemed to actually want this change. And yet, congressional Republicans and the Trump White House agreed to make this an early 2017 priority.As we discussed last week, none of this is good news for privacy advocates. The Washington Post reported that service providers, including online giants such Verizon and Comcast (MSNBC’s parent company), “will be able to monitor their customers’ behavior online and, without their permission, use their personal and financial information to sell highly targeted ads – making them rivals to Google and Facebook in the $83 billion online advertising market. The providers could also sell their users’ information directly to marketers, financial firms and other companies that mine personal data – all of whom could use the data without consumers’ consent.”Slate’s piece added that it’s not just privacy at stake: “Some proponents of the FCC regulation argued that allowing ISPs to keep track of and sell consumers’ data exposes their information to more security threats. The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that if internet providers want to sell customers’ data, they’ll have to collect it first, which makes for an appealing target for hackers.”If you’re looking for pictures of the president signing this measure into law, however, you won’t find any – which is itself a notable departure from Trump’s usual m.o.As a rule, Trump, obsessed with “optics” and the appearance of work, likes to put on a show when signing bills or executive orders. This White House takes stagecraft very seriously, and officials don’t like to pass up opportunities showing the president “getting things done.”That changes, however, when the president is getting unpopular things done.When Trump signed legislation expanding gun access for the mentally impaired, he did so behind closed doors. The same is true when Trump revoked federal guidelines “specifying that transgender students have the right to use public school restrooms that match their gender identity.”No cameras, no ceremony, no tweets, no carefully chosen Americans to stand by the president’s desk. It’s hard not to get the impression that Team Trump knows when the public won’t like what the president is up to.With thousands of charity and voluntary organisations to choose from all over the borough, working within the charity sector has never been easier or more attractive.
But with most of the satisfaction coming from seeing freedoms achieved or the setting up of new facilities and links unbolstered by profits or sparkling financial rewards charity work takes as much dedication and vision as ever.
That is why the Croydon Guardian has chosen to find a Champion of Charities someone you believe deserves to be thanked for their outstanding contribution to the sector as it continues to build on its indispensable position in the community.
We have already highlighted the successes of several young volunteers, in our involvement in helping to find a Millennium Volunteer in 2001.
Youngsters like 23-year-old Rosalba Olimpi, who started a support group for stammer sufferers after she was cured of her own life-disrupting stammer.
She said: "Up until March 2001 I had never been able to have a conversation on the telephone because my stammer was so bad."
And besides setting up the group she channelled her relief at being cured into volunteering with the Starfish Project, a charity teaching breathing techniques for controlling a stammer.
Wayne Skillern's colleagues at the High Trees Community Development Trust told us he was also worth his weight in gold.
The 19-year-old's hard work and commitment always went beyond the call of duty and he was rewarded with a job offer of project leader at the Trust, reducing the fear of crime and giving support to victims.
It's time to open up the opportunity to contributors and charity employees of all ages and levels of involvement do you know someone who fits the bill?When the Today show’s Matt Lauer asked Ellen DeGeneres in a new interview if she would like to have President Donald Trump appear on her daytime talk show, she barely hesitated before saying, “Um, no.”
That line got laughs and applause from her own studio audience, which stuck around to see Lauer interview DeGeneres after he served as her guest this week. “Why wouldn’t someone like you want to sit down opposite the president of the United States?” Lauer wanted to know.
“Because I’m not going to change his mind,” DeGeneres replied. “He’s against everything that I stand for.”
DeGeneres said that she did meet Trump once during the early days of The Apprentice, even riding in his helicopter for a comedic bit, but has not spoken to him since he started running for president nearly two years ago. “We need to look at someone else who looks different from us and believes in something that we don’t believe in and still accept them and let them have their rights,” she added.
The Today interview comes on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the historic sitcom episode in which DeGeneres’ alter ego came out. One week before that, DeGeneres herself appeared on the cover of Time magazine next to the words, “Yep, I’m Gay.”
“I wish I would have done it sooner, I wish I hadn’t waited so long,” DeGeneres told Lauer. In the immediate aftermath of the episode airing, she said she received letters from people who said they were going to take their own lives and decided not to because of what she did.
She also got “death threats” and essentially “lost her career” for the next several years. “For three years, I couldn’t work,” DeGeneres said. “I was not offered one thing and I was running out of money and didn’t know if I was going to work again.”
The experience taught her “compassion” and that she was “strong enough to start all over again.” As she told Lauer, “It was the greatest thing to ever happen to me.”Another Reviewer Weighs in on Hansen Paper July 27, 2015
James Hansen’s release last week of a landmark study on climate change and sea level rise continues to reverberate in the science and journalism community. The study, as yet unpublished in a peer reviewed journal, was deliberately released early, so as to become part of the public discussion prior to the important climate talks scheduled in Paris for the end of the year.
This approach has been criticized, and indeed, for a scientist of lower stature than Dr. Hansen, and his stellar group of co-authors, it might have been a major mistep. But the credibility of this team of authors is so high, that the paper will continue to command attention for some time, and may in fact go down as a landmark.
There’s already been some pushback on the paper’s main points, raised by highly respected scientists, (see Kevin Trenberth’s comments posted here last week) – but now, some of the formal editorial review responses are coming thru as well. The respected Oceanographer David Archer has released one such response, and it is much more supportive of the paper’s conclusions than Trenberth.
We’ve come to a watershed moment in the climate discussion, where the dialogue has turned from endlessly squashing denialist talking points, to a public debate more in line with where the science actually is.
In this case, the scientists are arguing, not, will sea level rise, but will it rise 3 feet by the end of the century? or 10 feet?
Washington Post:
Granted, the new Hansen study is simultaneously advancing a gigantic new synthesis of existing research and also pushing the envelope — it will need to be scientifically digested for some time, and has already drawn some critical comments from experts. However, the Hansen paper also just received its first official peer review by one of several reviewers designated by the journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions – the University of Chicago geoscientist David Archer. And it is a strong review – Archer says that the paper is a “masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications.”
From the review by David Archer:
This is another Hansen masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications. The main thrust of the paper, the part getting all the press, arises from the confluence of several recent developments in glaciology. First is the identification of a runaway condition in outflow glaciers of the West Antarctic ice sheet that makes the IPCC prediction for year-2100 sea level rise clearly obsolete. The other is the recognition that warming ocean temperatures at the grounding line for the glaciers is driving a really strong flow and thus melting response. Temperatures at this depth tend to have a paradoxical inverse relationship with surface temperatures, which can cool due to fresh meltwater input, trapping heat in the subsurface. This idea may also explain the mystery of why Heinrich events, collapses of the Laurentide ice sheet,always came at cold times in the D-O cycles. Analysis of sea level changes during Eemian time, the last interglacial, show changes of several meters in time scales of a century. If our ice sheets are going to change our sea level that much, from its current rate of melt, the melt rate would have to increase exponentially in the future. The way that could happen is if there is a positive feedback, such that melting begets faster melting, as opposed to a linear response where the melting rate is driven simply by temperature. The climate modeling results in this paper identify such a feedback. Release of freshwater around the margins of the ice sheets causes freshening at the ocean surface, stratification, and warming of subsurface waters. The melting water has a significant cooling impact on the planet, which I hadn’t expected, but I guess the difference here is the huge rate of freshwater addition; the authors argue that the responsiveness of the model is not much different from other climate models. The melting water actually results in an increase in heat uptake by the planet, with the increase going directly into the ocean, exacerbating the feedback. Antarctic cooling and increase in sea ice causes a warming-induced increase in precipitation in the Antarctic region to fall over the ocean rather than to Antarctica, another amplification of the freshwater forcing mechanism. This seems like a plausible interplay of mechanisms to me, given that it’s observed happening today, and that something like this is required to explain evidence from the past such as Heinrich events. The conclusions of this paper confirm what I had gloomily expected people would figure out, and they provide a mechanism by which the implications of the past can be explained and cast into a forecast for the future.
AdvertisementsScience reporting officially dead at CNN
Given a 50/50 random chance choice of flag-labeled food boxes, Paul the Octopus has "picked" winners in the six World Cup games played by the German national soccer team.
CNN reporter Paul Armstrong thinks this means Paul the Octopus is psychic.
To quote Dave Barry, "I am not making this up."
Can an octopus really be psychic? Michelle Childerley, who describes herself as an animal communications expert, told CNN that all animals -- as well as humans -- possess a psychic ability, with telepathy the main way of communicating among many species. She says dogs can often sense what an owner wants before they vocalize it. As for as Paul's ability to predict a football result, Childerley claims the octopus is perfectly aware of what he is being asked. "He's picking up on what everyone around him is thinking," she said. "He knows there are two boxes which represent two sides, so he's basically tuned in to the more positive team at the moment he makes his choice."
Seriously. A professional journalist at a publication that was not The Weekly World News wrote that. And professional editors published it. If you're in a Starbucks in Killeen, Texas today and your coffee drinking is interrupted by frantic sobbing and/or manic screaming...well, I apologize in advance.Marqise Lee (born November 25, 1991) is an American football wide receiver for the Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League (NFL). He was drafted by the Jaguars in the second round of the 2014 NFL Draft. He played college football at USC, where he was the 2012 Biletnikoff Award winner as the nation's top receiver and a unanimous All-American.
Early years [ edit ]
Both of Lee's parents, Elton Lee and Anfernee Williams, are deaf; he communicates with them via sign language.[1] Lee had a difficult childhood. His father was not regularly involved in his life. Lee spent the first twelve years of his life moving repeatedly between his mother and grandparents, both in low-income homes. The frequent moves forced him to repeat a grade early in elementary school. While Lee finished sixth grade, his grandfather died and his grandmother moved to the housing projects in Baldwin Village, Los Angeles; Lee and his younger sister chose not to move with her and instead became wards of the state. His two older brothers were involved in gangs: one, Terreal Reid, was murdered in a gang-related killing and the other, Donte Reid, was imprisoned in Arizona on a count of attempted murder. Lee previously tried to join the same gang, but his brothers prevented it. His sister still lives in the Los Angeles area.[2]
When Lee started high school at Morningside High School, in Inglewood, California, he was living in a foster home.[3] Lee played on an Amateur Athletic Union basketball team the summer after his freshman year of high school and became friends with Steven Hester Jr., a high school student from Inglewood attending the private Junípero Serra High School in Gardena, California. The Hester family liked Lee and, in September 2008, he moved in with them and began attending Serra. The family wanted to help Lee's younger sister, too, but were unable because of space and financial constraints. The Hesters became heavily involved in his life and continue to attend most of his games and practices at USC.[2]
At Serra High School, Lee was a year behind a stand-out wide receiver, Robert Woods, who also went to USC.[4] As a senior, Lee had had 57 receptions for 1,409 yards and 24 touchdowns as a wide receiver and 45 tackles and three interceptions as a defensive back. Lee was considered one of the top high school recruits in 2011.[5][6] A number of major NCAA Division I FBS college football programs offered him athletic scholarships and Lee made official visits to Florida, Miami, and Oregon before choosing to attend USC.[5]
Lee was also a sprinter and jumper for the Junípero Serra High School's track team. He set a personal-best leap of 13.59 meters in the triple jump at the 2010 CIF Division IV Meet. At the 2011 CIF Division IV Meet, he won the long jump with a leap of 7.52 meters, and recorded a career-best time of 10.74 seconds in the 100-meter dash, placing second.[7] His jump of 7.52 meters was ranked 2nd best among all the 2011 prep class.[8] He also ran the 200-meter dash in 22.11 seconds at the 2011 Del Rey League Championships, placing third in the finals.[9]
College career [ edit ]
While attending the University of Southern California, Lee played for the USC Trojans football team from 2011 to 2013.[10]
2011 season [ edit ]
As a true freshman at USC in 2011, he earned a starting job at wide receiver across from his former high school teammate Robert Woods.[11] He finished the season with 73 receptions for 1,143 yards and 11 touchdowns; due to sanctions, the 10-2 Trojans were prohibited from playing in either the inaugural Pac-12 Conference Championship game or a post-season bowl game.[12][13][14] The combined receptions by Lee and Woods (184) and receiving yards (2,435) in 2011 were the most by a pair of Trojans in a season; Lee was awarded the 2011 Pac-12 Freshman Offensive Co-Player of the Year and named to the All-Pac-12 second team.[15]
2012 season [ edit ]
Against Arizona in 2012, Lee set the Pac-12 Conference record for receiving yards in a game with 16 receptions for 345 yards and two touchdowns.[16] The following week, Lee had 251 return yards against Oregon, setting another conference record.[17] He finished the season with 118 catches for 1,721 yards and 14 touchdowns and was named the 2012 Pac-12 Conference offensive player of the year.[18][19] Lee won the 2012 Fred Biletnikoff Award as the top wide receiver in the nation, becoming the first Trojan to win the award.[20] He was also a unanimous All-American.[21][22]
2013 season [ edit ]
As a junior in 2013, Lee played in 11 games, recording 57 receptions for 791 yards and four touchdowns.[23] On January 3, 2014, Lee announced his decision to forgo his senior season and enter the 2014 NFL Draft.[24][25] During his three-year career with the Trojans, he had 248 receptions for 3,655 yards and 29 touchdowns.
Lee also competed on the USC track & field team in the spring, competing in the long jump and sprint relay.[26] He qualified for the NCAA championships in the long jump at the 2011 NCAA West preliminary rounds, setting a career-best leap of 7.76 meters.[27][28]
Professional career [ edit ]
Pre-draft measurables Ht Wt Arm length Hand size 40-yard dash 10-yd split 20-yd split 20-ss 3-cone Vert jump Broad BP 6 ft 0 in
(1.83 m) 192 lb
(87 kg) 31 1⁄ 4 in
(0.79 m) 9 1⁄ 2 in
(0.24 m) 4.52 s 1.57 s 2.50 s 4.01 s 6.96 s 38 in
(0.97 m) 10 ft 7 in
(3.23 m) 11 reps All values from NFL Combine[29]
2014 [ edit ]
The Jacksonville Jaguars selected Lee in the second round (39th overall) of the 2014 NFL Draft. He was one of three USC Trojans to be selected that year and was the first of two wide receivers the Jaguars selected, along with Allen Robinson (61st overall).[30]
External video Jacksonville Jaguars select Marqise Lee
On June 16, 2014, the Jacksonville Jaguars signed Lee to a four-year, $5.14 million contract that includes $3.18 million guaranteed and a signing bonus of $2.08 million.[31]
Throughout training camp, Lee competed against Ace Sanders and Allen Robinson for the vacant starting wide receiver position that was left open after the suspension of Justin Blackmon.[32] During camp, he sustained a wrist injury and then suffered a leg injury.[33] Head coach Gus Bradley named Lee the starting wide receiver to start the regular season, alongside veteran Cecil Shorts.[34]
He made his professional regular season debut and first career start during the Jacksonville Jaguars' season-opener at the Philadelphia Eagles and caught a season-high six passes for 62-yards in their 34–17 loss.[35] |
of warmth. What, one wonders, is he up to? To be reasonable about the other day, it was the middle of the week. To be more reasonable, he’s not Doc Rivers. To be most reasonable, he’s a coach in the modern NFL. What else would he wear?
The only reason to bring any of this up — and trust me, as the son of a coach, I have no trouble resisting the temptation — is that Rex Ryan doesn’t have to look this way. This summer, Ryan told Men’s Health that one consequence of having lost all of this weight is that he’s had to throw out his clothes. He missed some. The vest, the crew neck, the khakis with a thousand pleats: This would have been the moment to say good-bye to all that. This would have been the opportunity to rethink how he’d like to look as a coach. But in football now, there’s pretty much one way: like you don’t know or care, like the only thing that matters is the game.
With Ryan, you don’t quite believe that. Andy Reid is a coach who looks he just doesn’t care. Reid’s not as round as he once was, either, and some might speculate that diet and exercise have derailed his coaching. With Ryan, it’s as if he’s going for something and just doesn’t know what, that he might be open to other possibilities, which is a shame given the notorious leg tattoo and those unfortunate disclosures about his openness to some of life’s more libertine pursuits.
Anyway, you’re now free to notice, as you are with Reid and Reid’s rusty walrus mustache, that he isn’t bad-looking (just trust me about that, too). He’s 50 pounds away from a pre-retirement John Elway. Of course, as with baseball, dressing this way forges the impression of athletic solidarity with the players. These are clothes that bespeak a function (exercise, activity, fitness), and on some coaches that function appears to be vestigial. Losing weight, for Ryan, Reid, and Ryan’s brother Rob, would seem to be an acknowledgement of that contradiction.
No one’s asking for Monty Williams’s wool plaids and staggering grasp of suiting as a seasonal concept. That’s the NBA, where coaches continue to take pride in snazziness. The NFL is a league with different priorities. The owners sit way up in the stadiums. They could look snazzy — instead, they just look rich. It’s just a lot of power ties. And that’s part of the problem. Aggressively serious clothing risks making you look like Robert Kraft or Jerry Jones, like you embrace what looking like those two might signify: that you own a lot of very large people. In the NFL, coaches don’t look like they own anything, especially the number of a good tailor.
The changes in men’s attitudes toward clothes in the last two decades are evident in Ryan, Reid, Mike Tomlin, the Harbaugh brothers, Sean Payton (God rest his season), and most men paid to pace sidelines: Athleticwear promotes the impression of a blue-collar masculinity of looseness and relaxation. These clothes foster the sense that American males are more comfortable with being guys than being men. In the way some grown women refer to themselves as girls and have become culturally indistinct from their daughters, so, too, have modern fathers become culturally indistinguishable with their sons.
That generational dovetailing risks ceding the aura of authority. Clothes can no longer be relied upon to tell us who runs the show. There are weeks during Sunday games where I can’t see the head coach for the Gatorade squirter. We’re light years removed from the era in which a coach didn’t simply get dressed for game day. He got dressed up. Tom Landry wore ties, perfectly cut sport jackets, trench coats, and what we’d now laughingly call slacks. He wore fedoras. My friend Mark calls Landry’s style JCPenney on parade. He’s right. But JCPenney is only as bad as the man who doesn’t know what to do with it. Landry knew.
The bronze statue that stands outside Cowboys Stadium enshrines Landry in those clothes posing with his arms folded and one hand gripping a playbook. It’s an iconic image of masculine authority and confidence. He looks like a newsman, like a salesman, like everyman.
Until the late second half of the 20th century, no great confidence was needed to put on those clothes, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. If you were a man, that’s more or less what you wore. At the end of the ’60s, great political upheaval and conflict pitted one generation against the children it produced. For a long time, no child wanted to resemble a parent. Men stopped dressing like Landry and Vince Lombardi partially because that meant dressing like their fathers. (In the case of the Ryans, it’s a rejection of cultural coaching forefathers rather than their biological one. On the field, Buddy Ryan was never a paragon of style.)
Eventually, that anti-paternalism, the corporate domination of professional sports (most athleticwear is branded in some way), the influx of warmer synthetic fabrics, and the prevalence of class discomfort, particularly in a wintry, seemingly blue-collar sport like football, began to converge, making it easy for a new, relaxed dress code to flourish. Coaches were increasingly free to dress like fans.
With the unifying ubiquity of Internet culture and without the random obligation of a war draft or roiling, sweeping sociopolitical movements to put generations at odds, children who disdained their parents for reasons of politics and who were bound up in social concerns produced generations wary of their parents for reasons of vanity. They placed a premium on maintaining an air of adolescence. They didn’t want to resemble their parents even once they were parents. They wanted to resemble their children. A suit doesn’t make you look young, per se. Gym clothes do.
We might be more comfortable with that generational rejection, with that subsequent embrace of youth and the illusion of egalitarianism it fosters. But when no one wants to look like the grown-up, what’s chipped away at is a crucial air of respect.
That Sporting News poll of the most overrated coaches included 103 players from 27 teams, and it’s telling that the top three vote-getters — Ryan, Bill Belichick, and Reid — are the three most egregiously attired. The polls didn’t elaborate on what “overrated” entails, and there’s no obvious correlation between being overrated and underdressed. But if someone who knew nothing about football were to spend a whole game watching, say, Belichick, he might salute Patriots ownership for letting a homeless person coach the team.
Belichick is the apotheosis of head coach schlubbiness. He’s made it a notorious matter of grim professional style: Those hooded sweatshirts cut off at the elbow. They’re baggy enough to inspire wonder about who else is under there. When he began his coaching career, as a special-teams coach with the New York Giants in the 1980s, then as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s, Belichick was unafraid to adorn his rugged looks and strong build with brightly colored polos that fit perfectly. He even tucked them into a pair of high-waisted khakis that appeared to have been taken to the tailor. He looked casual yet like a man in charge. He also seemed to be fit then.
In a sense, some of this change is also a matter of weight and body image. Belichick is thicker now, and the trademark hoodie, which looks at least two sizes too big, seems like an attempt to compensate for his size. It is feared, loathed, and derided. But what you notice about him wearing it is his misery. He doesn’t look fired up, the way Ryan does, or utterly impassive, like Reid. Belichick looks like the saddest person alive, like he’s always coaching the Browns. On some Sundays, you want to hug him, but that would mean touching that hoodie, and that hoodie is too hideous to hug.
Looking at the attire of Belichick, Ryan, and their peers, it’s also hard not to think about the cocky daring of Mike Ditka, who coached in suits and a tie and chic sunglasses. He epitomized 1980s masculinity. He wore a trimmed mustache and kept his hair in a swept-back crew cut that made him look a brunette bald eagle. He was the coach who dressed like a detective. Sometimes he wore a Bears sweater or sweater vest beneath his blazer. That appeared to be his only concession to sport. It also gave him a squarely tacky flourish of fun.
If a coach sets the tone for a team, the clothes are a barometer of leadership. Would a coach in a suit be more successful than one in a dingy-looking hoodie? Is that a distinction that would amount to anything during a game? Should a football coach really be dressed like the world’s soccer coaches, like a businessman at a late dinner? I don’t know. He just shouldn’t be dressed like a slob.When Faceless Void won the Model Update vote in last year’s Compendium for The International, we admit we were a bit unsure about how to proceed. After exploring a number of different directions, we ultimately weren’t confident that the community would be happy with a significant redesign, since it seemed like a lot of people enjoyed the general idea of the existing model. When we turned to the community, we learned that for the most part people were not looking for drastic design changes.
So instead, we decided to give old Faceless a facelift. We rebuilt the hero from scratch, using largely the same design, but with better model execution and texture quality. We added more detail, adjusted the face design, and gave him a new set of legs (it turns out Time Walk is tough on the ankles).
However, some of the early redesign concepts were pretty interesting:
Faceless Elf
Pro: Attractive. Chiseled abs. Great-looking hair.
Attractive. Chiseled abs. Great-looking hair. Con: No one would want to play as any other hero
Faceless Rex
Pro: Would be popular with sought-after archeologist demographic
Would be popular with sought-after archeologist demographic Con: Is large purple dinosaur — too lovable?
Faceless Lobster
Pro: Adds exciting new Lobstoid race to Dota lore
Adds exciting new Lobstoid race to Dota lore Con: Looks too much like Dragon Knight
Awesome-to-11-year-olds-in-the-1980’s Void
Pro: Combines best parts of every animal
Combines best parts of every animal Con: Too subtle
Facefull Voidboltz to play for SK at EPL Season 6 Finals
Can SK and boltz continue their winning ways?
boltz and SK will look to score another win in Denmark
Ricardo "boltz" Prass will be eligible to play for SK Gaming at the ESL Pro League Season 6 Finals in Odense, Denmark, Dust2.us has learned. The event will run from December 5 to December 10, and feature twelve of the world's best teams vying to be crowned champions.
The news comes as somewhat of a surprise, given that boltz did not play a single match during the regular season with SK. However, the only requirement for a player to be eligible to play for a team is that they be on said team's roster.
According to the ESL Pro League Transfer Regulations:
No Players may be Transferred (whether or not such players are Free Agents) after the “Trade Deadline.” The “Trade Deadline” shall be 5pm EST on the date that is the calendar day prior to the last two scheduled match days of the pertinent regular Season for the League.
As such, it can be inferred that boltz was transferred from the Immortals roster to the SK roster somewhere between his last EPL match with his former team (October 19) and the Trade Deadline described above (November 9).
Being able to use boltz will certainly be a delight for SK, as their worst placing since he has begun playing with them was a 3/4 finish at IEM Oakland. The Brazilians placed first at EPICENTER 2017 and BLAST Pro Series on either side of that event.
ALSO READ zews to step in for Liquid at EPL Season 6 Finals
On the other hand, Team Liquid will likely be perturbed that they were unable to close a deal for Lucas "steel" Lopes before the EPL Trade Deadline, as they will be forced to field coach Wilton "zews" Prado as their fifth in Odense. Additionally, Astralis have threatened to pull out of the event all together if they are not permitted to field an emergency stand-in due to Nicolai "device" Reedtz's ongoing health issues.
Looking even further ahead, the move would seem to indicate progress in the matter of fully integrating boltz in SK — he would not be available to Immortals for their potential relegation bid.
As mentioned, the ESL Pro League Season 6 Finals will kick off on December 5. SK have been drawn into "Group Red" alongside NRG, Misfits, OpTic, NiP, and North." What is xdotool?
This tool lets you simulate keyboard input and mouse activity, move and resize windows, etc. It does this using X11's XTEST extension and other Xlib functions.
Additionally, you can search for windows and move, resize, hide, and modify window properties like the title. If your window manager supports it, you can use xdotool to switch desktops, move windows between desktops, and change the number of desktops. "
-http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/
#2-open terminal type "xdotool getmouselocation",this returns mouse location in x y coordinates.
#3-open terminal type "/usr/bin/gpointing-device-settings",this opens gpointing-device-settings
#4-now using step2 check the coordinates of touch-pad button in gpointing-device-settings[make sure to keep the cursor on the touch-pad button and if you cant keep the terminal window active,right click the window title bar and select Layer>keep alawys on top, then move the cursor to the according location]
#5 repeate step4 and location of the following part #step6-do the same to find xy coordinates of "ok"button
#step7-open texteditor and write the following
#!/bin/bash /usr/bin/gpointing-device-settings & sleep 1
WID=`xdotool search "GPointing Device Settings"` &&
sleep 1
xdotool windowactivate --sync $WID
sleep 1
xdotool mousemove 451 251 click 1
sleep 1
xdotool mousemove 567 213 click 1
sleep 1
xdotool mousemove 567 213 click 1
sleep 1
xdotool mousemove 912 589 click 1 #step8-save it as touchpadcancel.sh
#step8-save it as touchpadcancel.sh
#step9-Run it[change the files properties to change it to "make it executable",if it cant run by default]
#step10- DONE
Explanation of code
/usr/bin/gpointing-device-settings
>opens gpointing-device-settings
sleep>stop the code execution,so the following code is executed 1by1.
xdotool search "GPointing Device Settings"
> serach for window with tiltle GPointing Device Settings
xdotool windowactivate --sync $WID
> makes the window with title " GPointing Device Settings " active
xdotool mousemove 451 251 click 1
>move the cursor to x:451 and y:251 and click at the coordinate
used in Debian wheezy7,Lxde,openbox;tl;drxdotool helps you to automate mouse and keyboard events.Use casesExamplefor example i want to disable my touch-pad on my laptop when im using mouse,so i can write script to dot it,rather than going and selecting gpointing-device-settings then clicking disable touch-pad.Steps#1- download and install xdotool using synaptic package manager or which ever you use.[and gpointing-device-settings if dont have ]Today's religion reads:
-- "The Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester rescinded an invitation Wednesday to Robert Spencer, a Catholic whose work depicts Islam as an inherently violent religion, to speak at its annual Catholic Men's Conference in March." (Boston Globe)
-- Add one more Catholic-owned business to those that have been won a temporary injunction against Obamacare's contraception mandate (ReligionClause).
-- At the same time, a judge has dismissed the St. Louis Archdiocese's lawsuit challenging the contraception mandate (Post-Dispatch).
-- Today, HuffPost Live will tackle the recent controversy over Catholic teaching on the beginning of life, the hospital business and a medical malpractice lawsuit over dead fetuses.
-- A Mormon activist who calls himself "Martin Luther-day Saint" is trying to get Mormons to post "95 theses" to church doors overnight before services on Feb. 17. His site has gotten 12,000 hits over recent weeks. So far, he has a much smaller group of 112 people committed (via Facebook) to joining the action.Disneynature's "Chimpanzee" comes out in theaters today, and looks to be an incredible look at life for chimpanzees in the wild. But since there are still chimpanzees in U.S. laboratories, here's a little celebration of a project from Lori Gruen. She says that while doing research for her book on human relations to captive chimpanzees, she became interested in the genealogy of chimps in the U.S.
She became interested in a list that Robert Yerkes, whose studies of chimpanzees and other apes in the 1920s led to the first primate laboratory in the U.S., had created of the chimps he had worked with.
But the “complete list”, wasn’t exactly complete. The males in the colony are all listed with odd-numbers, the females with even numbers. (As an extra measure to maintain sex classifications, the female names all end in vowels, the male names all end in consonants). In 1941, there were more females in the colony than males, and thus while Flora completed the list at 100, 14 names were not yet on the list (they hadn’t been born) and 46 had not yet died. To commemorate the first 100 chimpanzees, Gruen sought to complete the list as best she could.
And so, if you visit first100chimps.wesleyan.edu, you can click on each name of the first 100 and find the details of these individuals' lives and deaths, "based on the best interpretation of the records that have been archived and also on published material that reference individual chimps," according to Gruen. It's a fantastic resource and these chimps deserve to be remembered.Shenzhou-11 manned spacecraft carrying astronauts Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong blasts off from the launchpad in Jiuquan, China. China Daily/via REUTERS
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s Shenzhou 11 manned spacecraft has successfully docked with China’s Tiangong 2 space lab, and two astronauts have entered the lab, China’s official news agency Xinhua said Wednesday.
China is the third country after the United States and Russia to complete space rendezvous and docking procedures, Xinhua said.
According to the mission schedule, the astronauts will remain in the space station for 30 days and spend a total of 33 days in space, making the mission the longest in space so far for China.
In a manned space mission in 2013, three Chinese astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with a space laboratory, the Tiangong 1.
Advancing China’s space program is a priority for Beijing, with President Xi Jinping calling for the country to establish itself as a space power.
China insists its space program is for peaceful purposes.
Shenzhou 11, whose name translates as “Divine Vessel”, will also carry three experiments designed by Hong Kong middle school students and selected in a science competition, including one that will take silk worms into space.
The U.S. Defense Department has highlighted China’s increasing space capabilities, saying it was pursuing activities aimed at preventing other nations using space-based assets in a crisis.
China has been working to develop its space program for military, commercial and scientific purposes, but is still playing catch-up to established space powers the United States and Russia.Given that most of us here at MMOs.com are big fans of Hearthstone we were delighted to get a chance to speak with the Hearthstone team about the upcoming Knights of the Frozen throne expansion. While most of our questions had to do with the upcoming expansion we snuck in some more general questions as well. Now on with the interview!
Responses were provided to us by Mike Donais, Lead Final Designer, and Matt Place, Sr. Game Designer on the Hearthstone team.
Q: Blizzard recently announced the latest Hearthstone expansion, Knights of the Frozen Throne. How did the Hearthstone team decide that it is time to head to Northrend?
A) Going to Northrend, and Icecrown Citadel, has been something we have been discussing for a long time on the team. The Lich King is one of the most iconic villains of the Warcraft universe, and something we wanted to make sure we do right. With the new way of having missions with expansions, we felt this timing was right for delving into this theme for an expansion. We can really tell the story of the Lich King not just through the cards, but also through the free missions.
Q: When you brought the power of the Deathknights to the existing characters of Hearthstone, what made you decide to add Hero cards, instead of adding a Deathknight class for people to play as?
A) When we first asked, “Hey, what if the nine Heroes give in to the Lich King’s dark bargain and THEY become Death Knights?” the team got super excited! We started brainstorming how this would effect each Hero’s class. Would the “evil” version of Malfurion abandon life and growth and instead focus on plague and death? The answer was yes, he would. And finding new designs and mechanics that fit with this evil vibe for each class was a ton of fun. We can’t wait for players to explore each class’s take on becoming a Death Knight.
Q: In the same vein as the previous question, who came to the decision to kill everyone? What was the dev team’s reactions upon first hearing “Hey, let’s kill off all 9 Hearthstone heroes and bring them back from the dead?”
A) This all stemmed from when we had the idea of the classes becoming powerful Death Knight versions of themselves. It’s similar to the lore of Sylvanas – she was killed by the Lich King and brought back to life as a banshee, because she was so powerful. So our heroes, they are also extremely powerful. They wouldn’t just be Undead, they would become powerful beings.
Q: What new and existing card mechanics will Knights of the Frozen Throne focus on? What is the internal process like when coming up with a new card mechanic?
A) Knights of the Frozen Throne introduces a brand new card type to Hearthstone, the Death Knight Hero Card. When played, your hero becomes a Death Knight, immediately giving you a powerful Battlecry effect and 5 addition Armor. But the real strength is in the new unique hero power. For example, Deathstalker Rexxar’s lets you combine two beasts into a single “Zombeast”. Adding together their Attack, Health and powers. And you can do this every turn!
Hero cards are a big focus for Knights of the Frozen Throne, and we want to ensure that everyone gets a chance to try them out. A free random Death Knight hero will be rewarded for completing the new prologue mission.
Knights of the Frozen throne is also introducing a new keyword, Lifesteal. Any damage a Lifesteal card deals will restore that much health to your hero. Not only will Lifesteal appear on several minions in Knights of the Frozen Throne, a few spells will have the keyword as well.
We also will see some additional Deathrattle cards in this set. It also fits well with the theme, and we’ve learned a lot as a team since the days of Naxxramas. We think Deathrattle will be a fun mechanic players will continue to utilize with this set.
Q: Prior to their removal, the League of Explorers, Blackrock Mountain, and the Curse of Naxxramas Solo Adventures required either money to play, or a massive amount of gold to unlock all of their wings. What was the motivation behind making the adventure leading up to the Lich King free to play in this latest expansion? Can we expect adventures to be free in future expansions?
A: We love the adventure content – it allowed us to tell a story around cards, and was something we know players really enjoyed. But as we kept making content, we realized that these stories were something we wanted everyone to experience, but we also wanted to have more content in a year. So when we decided to have three expansions in a year, we didn’t want to lose the story-telling we had with adventures. We decided that we wanted to pair up the content – so a lot of cards, but also alongside that missions players could access. And we wanted to make them free because playing the missions wasn’t the only way to get the cards. This also allowed us to be able to do more creative challenges with the missions, and really stretch our imagination with how we take the raid content of Icecrown Citadel to Hearthstone.
This is our plan moving forward – we want to continue to have missions tied to our expansion content.
Q: With every expansion, players expect new and exciting cards with unique abilities. But in making interesting and unique cards the issue of powercreep comes up. While powercreep can sometimes remedied through updates and balance changes, how do you try to actively avoid powercreep during the initial card concept and design process?
Like you said, we want expansions to be exciting and new and give you inspiration to create new decks. We want the meta to change with each expansion, so some of the new decks that emerge need to be as powerful or more powerful than previously existing decks. We have a few techniques for this but my favorite one is creating new deck themes using what I call 'build-around-cards'. Reno Jackson is a good example of a build around card because he created a whole new deck type without just inflating the power level of existing decks. People experimented with him and loved playing him, but he wasn't tier 1. That means we can release another card like Kazakus in that space and people have fun experimenting with the deck again. We like to look back at old cards that are tier 3 or lower and give them new cards to make the deck type fresh.
You can see this clearly in the priest class. People experiment with - Silence Priest, Elemental Priest, Dragon Priest, Kazakus Priest, Spell Priest and occasionally N'Zoth Priest.
Having 6 different deck types to play around with means that new sets can push the weaker archetypes while providing nothing new for the Tier 1 decks. This causes a fresh meta without having to make cards a lot stronger each expansion.
Q: In your video “Hearthstone: Announcing the Knights of the Frozen Throne,” you showed off the Year of the Mammoth roadmap. The roadmap shows a third expansion coming out in Q4 of 2017. With KotFT coming out in August, that only leaves three full months for people to enjoy playing and tinkering with these new cards prior to the next expansion. Are you concerned with players being overwhelmed with new cards? Are the two expansion card sets designed to complement each other?
A) This will be our first year having three expansions, instead of any adventures, so we are really excited to see what happens to the meta. With Journey to Un’Goro, even as we announced Knights of the Frozen Throne the meta was still shifting, and we think that’s great. We would prefer that things are always exciting in Hearthstone, and that content is released just as players have figured things out and start to be in need of more cards to try new strategies out with.
Q: Are you worried that new expansions increase the barrier to entry for new players? Are there plans to overhaul the new player/tutorial experience or to offer new players more options such as the $4.99 Welcome Bundle?
A) We introduced the concept of yearly rotations in order to help new players with this exact situation. Players who start now can focus on the cards that are in the Year of the Mammoth until they feel comfortable enough to branch out into Wild, or other game modes. We are always evaluating the new player experience in order to make sure it’s as welcoming as possible.
And as we mentioned before, we are giving away a free random Legendary Hero Card to everyone for playing the Prologue. And we’ve made all of the Knights of the Frozen thrones missions completely free as well.
Q: Finally, are you happy with the current mix of platforms Hearthstone supports? Are there plans to bring the game to other systems? For example, the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or Desktop Browsers? Any thought of a physical Hearthstone card game or board game spinoff?
A: We are! We have no plans right now to move Hearthstone onto consoles, and having a physical card game isn’t something we intend to do, either. We love the design space of being a digital card game and what that allows us to create. There are so many interactions we wouldn’t be able to easily do otherwise.
--
While I'm personally a bit disappointed Blizzard has no intention on releasing a physical card game based on Hearthstone, I'm still excited to try out the new expansion. Despite enjoying Shadowverse quite a bit, Hearthstone remains my favorite online card game.
All of the currently revealed expansion cards can be found here.A top ally of Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg is urging supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders to “take over” the state Democratic Party and unseat sitting legislators, a rare break in State House decorum that deepens the growing rift within the party.
“There are plenty of conservative Democrats who have been elected, unchallenged, for years if not decades, including at the local and legislative level,” wrote state Senator Jamie Eldridge, a liberal stalwart whom Rosenberg appointed Senate chairman of the financial services committee.
E-mailing a group of Sanders supporters, the Acton Democrat also contemplated the creation of a third, progressive party. But he focused on a reform-from-within approach to push the party to the left.
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“I personally think the time is ripe … for Sanders supporters/progressives to ‘take over’ the Massachusetts Democratic Party, and have a serious influence on its platform, candidates, and policies,” he wrote.
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The friction within the state Democratic Party reflects a national split that emerged during the party’s presidential primary, when Sanders’ populist message tested former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for months, before she ultimately prevailed and secured the nomination. Clinton eked out a win over Sanders in the state’s March primary.
Eldridge said in an interview Wednesday that he did not have specific legislators in mind when he called for primary challenges. He said his comments were aimed at Democrats frustrated that the Legislature is not as liberal as they’d like — despite the state’s left-leaning national reputation.
“If activists are unhappy with how they’re being represented … then, yeah, they should consider running for office,” he said. “I think it’s good in a democracy for there to be more competition.”
Eldridge’s e-mail drew a stern rebuke from state party officials. “Jamie’s divisive rhetoric in calling for a third party, or to ‘take over’ the party we all work hard for, is an insult to every elected Democrat and to the hundreds of activists and volunteers who have worked to promote our shared values,” executive director Jason Cincotti said in a statement.
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Eldridge’s push also marks the latest wedge in a deepening schism between the state Senate, which has swung to the left since Rosenberg took the reins last year, and the House, a more deliberate, ideologically conservative chamber.
Last month’s end of the two-year legislative cycle produced unusually acidic recriminations between top House and Senate members — all Democrats. The party has an overwhelming majority in both chambers.
In the days after the session expired, two senators ripped House leaders, including Speaker Robert DeLeo, characterizing them as puppets of big-business groups. Top House members responded that Senate efforts, led by Rosenberg, to assert additional control over the parliamentary process smacked of political naivete.
And Democrats in both chambers raised eyebrows last week when Rosenberg’s communications director Mara Dolan tweeted an unusually pointed critique of other Democrats after a state party committee voted to condemn a charter school expansion. “This just in: Democrats in Massachusetts turn out to be real Democrats after all, vote to oppose increasing charter schools,” she said.
But urging candidates to challenge legislative colleagues in one’s own party is widely considered a serious breach of intraparty politesse. In the past, lawmakers have even protested when Republican governors, such as Mitt Romney, sought to field GOP challengers to incumbent Democrats.
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“As a member of House leadership, I would never seek an opponent for a Democratic colleague in either branch,” said state Representative Michael J. Moran, a Brighton Democrat who serves on DeLeo’s leadership team. “It’s just something that isn’t good for the inner workings of the Legislature, long-term.”
Moran, who supported Sanders and was one of several lawmakers to receive the e-mail, added, “I know that Bob DeLeo would never condone or sanction one of his members of leadership seeking an opponent for another Democrat in the Senate or the House.”
Eldridge, who served three terms in the House before winning election to the Senate, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2007. He is facing a challenge this fall from Republican Ted Busiek, whom GOP strategists consider an underdog.
Eldridge’s Aug. 8 e-mail — whose recipients included several legislators, State House staffers, and a former state party chairman — was penned in response to a thread in which activists pondered the consequences of either joining or starting a third party. Several respondents indicated that they prefer to reform the Democratic Party from the inside.
In his note, Eldridge wrote of “a hybrid approach,” pointing to the Working Families Party operating in New York and Connecticut, where the WFP runs its own candidates but also backs candidates from other parties who back its agenda.
Eldridge called it “an effective way to move especially Democrats to the left,” citing the party’s role in electing Bill de Blasio mayor of New York in 2013.
Eldridge — whose Senate colleague, Thomas McGee of Lynn, chairs the state party — added, “There is absolutely plenty of room to move Democratic politicians to the left, or run for yourselves.”
Philip W. Johnston, a former state Democratic Party chairman who endorsed Sanders during the primary, said he “love[s] Jamie,” but disagreed with his suggestions.
“I don’t think we need another party,” Johnston said Wednesday. “I think we need to do everything we can to make sure Democrats are acting like Democrats, but I don’t think we should be running against other Democrats.”
“I think that progressives should focus on working within the Democratic Party,” Johnston said. “That’s where the action is. Clearly, the fact that Bernie Sanders attracted 46 percent of the vote during the primary season demonstrates that there’s a split within the Democratic Party, and that means that progressives have a chance to have an influence in the coming years.”
The House-Senate acrimony comes as Democrats, who run the Legislature with vast majorities, are still learning to deal with Governor Charlie Baker, the Republican who ended eight years of Democratic hegemony with his 2014 victory. Over the past two years, Baker has lined up more frequently with DeLeo than Rosenberg on policy issues.
A Rosenberg spokeswoman said Wednesday that he was unavailable for comment.
Jim O’Sullivan can be reached at jim.osullivan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JOSreportsWhile you weren’t looking, CNN has been busy demolishing the once-invincible ratings gap between themselves and Fox News. CNN beat Fox News decisively for their prime time lineup in April, and especially in the coveted age gap of 25-54. In fact, the only demographic in which Fox News beat CNN was the over 54 demographic, which is one of the least valuable to advertisers.
Neither was April a fluke. CNN has now beaten Fox News in prime time ratings for five out of the last 8 months. They have also scored wins in weekend ratings and are closing the gap in daytime ratings as well. Overall, where CNN used to have less than half of Fox News’ overall viewership, they now are behind Fox News by a measly 9%, and they continue to dominate MSNBC.
From CNN’s release:
CNN ranked #1 in cable news in prime time in April. CNN beat Fox News for the fifth time in the last eight months in M-Su prime time (four of the past eight in M-F prime) among adults 25-54. The last time CNN had this many prime time wins in an eight-month period versus Fox News was over 14 years ago (Nov. 2001). CNN also handily topped MSNBC this month in all dayparts, with CNN besting MSNBC for the 22nd straight month in Total Day (among both total viewers and among adults 25-54) and in prime time (among 25-54). In total viewers, CNN has now beaten MSNBC for the fifth straight month (or seven out of eight months) in prime time. CNN continued to top MSNBC by wide margins during the day (9am-4pm) – posting a +36% advantage in total viewers (630k vs. MSNBC’s 464k) and +58% more among adults 25-54 (161k vs. 102k). In April, CNN had the most growth of any television network (cable or broadcast) among both total viewers and adults 25-54, increasing triple digits in prime time. Among ALL cable networks in April, CNN ranked #7 in total viewers in M-F prime time. In Total Day, CNN was also up vs. last year, increasing +59% in total viewers and +48% among adults 25-54. Of particular note, CNN has narrowed the gap with Fox News (196k vs. Fox News’ 215k) to its smallest level (-9%) in over seven years (since October, 2008) in Today Day among adults |
should be noted that the New Testament never projects "the last days" into the distant future. For the writers of the New Testament, "these last days" began with the first coming of Christ (Heb. 1:2, NIV).
Nevertheless, Paul's well-known description of immorality "in the last days" is often cited as proof that the final immoral generation is finally upon us (2 Tim. 3:1-5). However, Paul wrote of those immoral people in the present tense (vv. 6-9), and warned Timothy to "have nothing to do with them" (v. 5, NIV).
We have been in "the last days," i.e., the final age of human history, ever since the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To apply the term only to the final generation of human history is without Scriptural foundation. The last days have already come. Antichrists and false prophets have been with us from the beginning; we don't need to wait for one really big Antichrist.
Rereading Revelation
Though I remain a premillennialist who eagerly anticipates the soon return of Christ, I no longer believe that there are additional signs or predicted events which need to happen before Christ returns. We are closer to the consummation of all things than we once were simply by virtue of the passage of time. I do hope for the Lord's return in my lifetime as did all previous generations of Christians, but I cannot assume that my generation is the last. Christ may return in the near future, but he may not.
This does not seem to be the majority view among premillennialists. Specific signposts identified today include natural catastrophes, widespread immorality, and rapidly changing technology. Some of these signposts are open to interpretation; others aren't necessarily relevant, but are assumed to be. Other signposts involve conspiracy theories, often relating to globalization and the existence of the United Nations.
For the record, I don't believe that there will ever be a united one-world government on the earth. Even if there will be, it will look far different than the dictatorial government described by conspiracy theorists. Our global crises today, if anything, don't stem from unification but from fragmentation, from racial tensions, from economic inequities. International cooperation, not isolation, is what we need today.
But if the Bible predicts a one-world evil government, then my evaluation is grossly wrong. In fact many Christians oppose such institutions as the United Nations solely because they believe it to be the prophesied "beast" of Revelation. Enter the critical need for discernment: Should our evaluation of social conditions be rooted in observation, experience, and testing against the ethical mandates of the New Testament (such as good works, helping the oppressed, making peace)? Or rather in an interpretation of Bible prophecy?
One problem with the latter view is that the task of interpretation is not as straightforward as many prophecy teachers claim. In fact, there are many different ways of interpreting Revelation.
One is the "historicist" view. This view, which was the dominant one a hundred years ago, holds that Revelation predicts key events throughout all of church history, including the rise of Islam, the Protestant Reformation, Napoleon's battles, and various other events. The "beast" is then interpreted as the Roman Catholic Church.
The problem with this view is not only that it scandalizes other Christians (like Catholics); it also makes it very difficult to imagine how the early Christians could possibly have understood such a book. In addition, the wide variety of historicist interpretations demonstrates how unsound and ambiguous such interpretations are.
Another is the "futurist" view. The dominant view among evangelicals today, it holds that Revelation may or may not have had some meaning to the Christians of John's day, but its real focus is the current day. Of course, Christians have applied Revelation's prophecies to their own times throughout history. Nevertheless, our generation is said to be the last, and Revelation's prophecies are said to be predictions about specific governments, people, and events in our day.
This view is problematic in that it implies Revelation had little to say to previous generations. Furthermore, it too has produced a wide variety of ambiguous interpretations over the last century. Mussolini, Gorbachev, Saddam Hussein, and myriad other persons have been identified as the "Antichrist" in this view. Others are still holding out for a leader of the United Nations.
A third view is the "preterist" view. According to this interpretation, the persons and events prophesied in Revelation were all fulfilled prior to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The beast is identified as Nero, and the tribulation period confined to the first century. This view is common among postmillennialists and Reconstructionists, who like to put the church's time of tribulation in the distant past so that the future remains open to the church's triumph or conquest on the earth prior to Jesus' return.
This view is problematic, not only in that it requires a pre-A.D. 70 date for Revelation (which most scholars would reject), but also in that it implies the book has little continuing relevance to other Christians.
A fourth view is the "idealistic" view. The strength of this view is that it presupposes that Revelation's prophecies can apply equally to each generation without exhausting the meaning of its symbols or canceling out its meaning for other generations. Revelation had great meaning for the people of the first century, who understood its prophecies and applied it to themselves; but it also has great meaning for all Christians in all times and in all places.
In this view, the symbols of Revelation describe political realities in the first century, but they're described in a timeless, allegorical way that lend themselves to application in a variety of settings. This view is well articulated by Vernard Eller in his 1974 book, The Most Revealing Book of the Bible: Making Sense out of Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Pub. Co.). A couple of the following examples are from Eller's book.
Revelation's Symbols
A key passage in Revelation, chapter 12, provides a broad sketch of Revelation's outline. The scene opens with a celestial woman with twelve stars on her head, undoubtedly representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Israel is about to give birth to "a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter" (v. 5, NIV); the reference is undoubtedly to Christ (cp. 2:26,27). However, there is an adversary; the devil, represented by the symbol of a dragon (v. 9), plans to devour the male child. But the devil's plan is foiled; Christ is caught up into heaven (v. 5). The woman then flees into the wilderness to be protected "for 1,260 days" (v. 6, NIV), or three and-a-half years (cp. v. 14).
This provides us with a starting-point for the symbolic three and-a-half year period. As half of seven, the perfect number, three and-a-half describes the present age, which began with the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. At that time "there was war in heaven" (v. 7, NIV) and the devil was cast out (cp. John 12:31). The death blow had been dealt; the war was won at the cross. Nevertheless, minor skirmishes remain to play out. Knowing that the war is lost and his time is short, the devil sets out to do as much damage as he can, particularly to God's covenant people, now redefined as the church (vv. 13-17). Yet God has not abandoned his people during this period (vv. 6, 14-16).
Chapter 11 corroborates this church-age interpretation. The key figures there are two witnesses who prophesy for that same symbolic three and-a-half year period (vv. 2,3). Verse 4 symbolically describes them as "the two olive trees and two lampstands that stand before the Lord" (NIV), a reference to Zechariah 2-4 (Revelation uses more Old Testament imagery than any other New Testament book). As Eller points out, trees provide fruit and lamps produce light; both fitting symbols for the church. Why there are two witnesses is not as clear; it may just be that John is staying close to his source in Zechariah. It may also be that he intends to portray the church as Gentile and Jew together.
But there is more. Their activities - preventing rain, turning water to blood, striking the earth with plagues (v. 6) - are obvious references to both Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the Prophets as the precursor of the church. The deadly fire from their mouths (v. 5) is not a literal weapon, but an image meaning that their (our) testimony will not be silenced. Though we may be martyred for our testimony as was Jesus, we will rise again as did Jesus (vv. 7-12).
Symbolic imagery representing the church crops up all through the book. Another key example is the description of the New Jerusalem in chapter 21. John's angelic "tour guide" says "Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the lamb" (v. 9, NIV). But what he actually shows John is something called "the Holy City, Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God" (v. 11, NIV). The identification is clear, somewhat like the allegorical Jerusalem from "above" in Galatians 4:26 and the spiritual Mount Zion described in Hebrews 12:22-24.
Now it is commonplace for Bible interpreters to take all this quite literally, to measure out how many miles across this heavenly city is going to be ("12,000 stadia" is about 1,400 miles - a little wide for the country of Israel). But that is to miss John's point. Twelve thousand is a symbolic number (12 times 1,000), as is the 144 cubits of the walls' thickness (12 times 12). Each of the twelve gates is identified as one of the twelve tribes of Israel (v. 12). The twelve foundations are identified as the twelve apostles (v. 14). The building is the church, the type of spiritual building described in Ephesians 2:19-22 and 1 Peter 2:5. The precious stones making up the heavenly city reflect the twelve stones of the priestly ephod (vv. 19-21), and the city has no temple (v. 22). The picture is of the perfected church in the age to come; the guiding principle is the priesthood of all believers.
Now that we have demonstrated how this way of interpreting Revelation works, we can say a few words about how "the beast" and "the mark of the beast" may be interpreted. First, that "all inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast" (v. 8, NIV) does not necessarily imply a one-world government. It is not as if this prophecy could never have been fulfilled before the globalization of the twentieth century. John's readers would likely not have taken it that literally. Using hyperbole, Luke described Rome as being a worldwide empire (Luke 2:1); not literally covering the whole earth, but as being a mighty empire. Similarly, Daniel's prophecies describe Babylon and Greece as covering the whole earth (Dan. 2:38,39), though they did not do so literally. That John's readers would have regarded the language as universal is clear, but its meaning could apply to the earth as they knew it at the time. John's readers would not have required further geopolitical development to apply the language to their own situation, and we should not assume that it applies to our day more than it applied to theirs.
That their "beast" was Rome is difficult to deny. It was Rome that oppressed the church; it was "Mystery Babylon" which sat upon the seven hills of Rome (17:9), "drunk with the blood of the saints" (v. 6, NIV), the economic oppressor enslaving the lower classes (18:11-13).
It would be missing the point, however, to apply the bestial images strictly to Rome, perhaps first in John's day and then maybe a "revived Rome" or united Europe in our day. Though these images represented Roman oppression to the early Christians, the images are timeless in nature. The prostitute is blamed for the deaths "of all who have been killed on the earth" (18:24); she is the archetypal oppressor, whatever worldly power or force that has created oppression.
Similarly, the mark of the beast described in 13:16-18 is not a literal mark, like a UPC code, a debit card, a computer chip, or a rubber ink stamp. It is in fact something far more sinister than that.
That the mark isn't literal should be apparent from the way it mirrors God's mark. In the very next verse, 14:1, John describes God's people "who had his [the Lamb's] name and his Father's name written on their foreheads" (NIV). This mark can also be found in 9:4 ("the seal of God on their foreheads," NIV). It is not a literal mark, but a symbol representing God's ownership of us, the presence of His Spirit (cp. Eph. 1:13). In the same way, the world would like to dictate the way we think (hence the mark on the forehead) and what we do (hence the mark on the hand). It is difficult to get very far in this world without "selling out."
This makes more sense to me than microchips. After all, my spiritual commitments are not reflected in whether I use a debit card instead of checks or cash to make my purchases. Granted, what I do with my resources reflects my spirituality; but the technology relative to how economic transactions are made has no spiritual bearing. Hence we are going to miss the point entirely if we wait around for microchip-in-the-hand technology, and may actually accept the mark of the beast unwittingly by allowing worldliness, greed, and sin to dictate our lives. This interpretation makes the prophecy much more relevant to our own lives.
Conclusion
This approach to Bible prophecy prevents us from getting too specific in identifying "the beast." In fact it is noteworthy that more literal interpretations are often combined with survivalist ideals; one has only to take a look about on the world wide web to see Christians talking about stocking up on food and guns to wait out a coming tribulation period. By contrast, however, Revelation depicts the saints nonviolently overcoming the world "by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony" (12:11, NIV).
These two ways of approaching Revelation could not be more at odds. How we interpret Bible prophecy has a great deal to say about how we live our Christian lives. Do we live in fear of global conspiracies, or in anticipation of glory?Artists Pablo Belmonte and Paco Martínez released this video in 2012 of the opening Majora's Mask remade in high-definition, but it looks the project was never meant to end at just that video. A new video, which you can see below, shows the pair's progress on rebuilding more of the game's assets and characters. the video also shows their attempts at translating their work into stereoscopic 3D, and you can even see some work being done with a 3DS.
It's unclear exactly what the end goal is here with Belmonte and Martínez's project. It's not being called a remake, but rather a project. Nintendo generally frowns upon these sorts of projects, so there is a good chance it may get shut down.
I reached out to Belmonte and Martínez to find out more and will update when I hear more information. For now, check out the video below.
[Source: MajorasMaskZelda on YouTube, via NeoGAF]The US Air Force’s fleet of E-3 Sentry radar plans, spanning 32 E-3s around the world that possess powerful radar and communication systems are due to get an upgrade from their decades-old computer systems. However, the update with modern computers leaves them vulnerable to hacking.
The E-3 Sentry airborne early warning and control aircraft (AWACS) can comb over large areas of territory looking for aerial and maritime enemies while forwarding scout data for friendly forces. The fleet of planes, however, are running 1970s and 80s-era hardware, with outdated computers and electronics. The US Air Force is understandably working on a sweeping upgrade and has already refitted nine E-3s with new modern computers, according to a report by Motherboard.
The computers will be replaced with a Red Hat Linux-based system for the main inflight computer. For workstations, Windows-based systems will be put to use over a local are network. Altogether, 15 crewmembers will be provided with a new user interface and application. These open-architecture computing systems will be easily updateable, with “spare computing power for future capabilities”.
However, the report points to several ‘deficiencies’ during testing of the systems, including overheating. Most notably, however, a report assessing the E-3G’s system that involved how easily hackable the system and its ground support system was in a real operational simulation, revealed that they “are highly vulnerable to cyber threats and not survivable.” This report led to the Air Force certifying the E-3G as ready for additional operational testing, bringing its trials to a temporary halt.
The ground systems (Block 40/45) upgrade has a simple and vital objective – to enable the Sentry with networking computing capabilities commonly seen in modern home computers and laptops on a network. The downside is that networked computers in an aircraft would leave it vulnerable to hacking.
Quite damningly, the report states:
E-3G version 3.0 and supporting Block 40/45 ground systems are highly vulnerable to cyber threats and not survivable.
A 2014 report estimating R&D along with procurement expenditures on the E-3G program amounted to over $2.6 billion by 2016. These costs could escalate after the upgraded retrofit is temporarily halted, leaving the majority of the Air Force’s E-3 planes and its crews to continue running decades-old computing systems.
Image credit: Wikimedia.Foreign Policy: Bahrain Spells Trouble For US Policy
Enlarge this image toggle caption John Moore/Getty Images John Moore/Getty Images
Jean-Francois Seznec is a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
The crackdown was brutal.
At 3 a.m. on Feb. 17, hundreds of Bahraini riot police surrounded the protesters sleeping in a makeshift tent camp in Manama's Pearl Square. The security forces then stormed the camp, launching an attack that killed at least five protesters, some of whom were reportedly shot in their sleep with shotgun rounds. Thousands of Bahraini citizens gathered in the square on Feb. 15, in conscious emulation of the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, to push their demands for a more representative political system and an end to official corruption.
The tanks and armored personnel carriers of Bahrain's military subsequently rolled into the square, and a military spokesman announced that the army had taken important areas of the Bahraini capital "under control."
Perhaps alarmed at the recent revolutions that toppled the regimes of Egypt and Tunisia, the Sunni ruling family in Bahrain has been taking no chances against its young and mostly Shiite protest movement. Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has been able to overcome past troubles by posing as an enlightened autocrat, willing to show leniency. But divisions within the monarch's family, which he relies on to maintain his authority, may be forcing the king into a harsher position. And that spells trouble for Bahrain's stability, as well as the country's halting reform efforts.
The United States has a considerable national security stake in what goes on in this tiny island kingdom. Bahrain is home of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, which protects the vital oil supply lines that pass through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz — an important asset for the United States in the event of a conflict with Iran. Bahrain is also a key logistical hub and command center for U.S naval operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Indian Ocean.
For the past few years, quasi-Salafist and arch-conservative elements of the Khalifa family have been gaining power over more liberal members of the family, who advocate widening the economic and political involvement to all spheres of Bahraini society.
Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, the oldest and richest member of main ruling clan, has emerged as the leader of these conservatives, who seek to ensure the Khalifa family's continued stranglehold over the politics and economy of the country. His resignation has become one of the protesters' primary demands.
While the successful mass protests in Egypt and Tunisia clearly inspired the protesters in Manama, trouble has been brewing in Bahrain — which is divided between a Sunni ruling family and a majority Shiite population — for years. Skirmishes broke out between young Shia Bahrainis and police forces last March, and political dissidents were arrested in the run-up to the Oct. 30 parliamentary elections.
The growing influence of the more extreme Khalifas was on full display during the Feb. 17 police crackdown. The police force that raided the camp is legally under the control of the prime minister. The brutality with which the raid was conducted may have been a bid to create a state of emergency on the island, forcing the more liberal members of the family to side with them against the protesters.
It is not only the Sunni ruling family that is divided — the Shiite opposition parties are also split. The al-Wefaq party is the largest opposition party in Parliament, but its support among Shiites has declined due to its failure to win any concessions from the leadership on the issues of increased political power and representation or economic opportunities. As a result, the more confrontational al-Haq movement has been taking to the streets to wrest leadership away from al-Wefaq.
In the past year, reports that al-Haq members were arrested and tortured by the security forces only bolstered its popularity among the Shiite youth and unemployed. According to some Shiite leaders, al-Haq now is seen by a majority of Shiite as the leading group of the community. The efforts of the demonstrators to reject violence — noble aspirations supported by the majority of Bahrainis — may represent an attempt by al-Wefaq to take back leadership of the opposition from the more confrontational al-Haq.
The October 2010 elections to the Majlis al-Nawaf — the lower house of Parliament — were expected to bring some stability to the country. Al-Wefaq won 18 out of 40 total seats, and the election was relatively free and fair (though some constituencies were gerrymandered to ensure that al-Wefaq did not gain a majority). What's more, the influence of some of the more extremist Sunni groups was undermined by centrist Sunni-Shiite alliances.
However, these hopes were dashed by Parliament's inability to affect real change in the country. All its decisions can be negated by the Majlis as-Shura, whose members are nominated by King Hamad. And the king can also veto any parliamentary decision. The sectarian divide that has emerged in parliament over the past three elections has also meant that most issues, such as the public availability of alcohol, the segregation of sexes in schools, are framed in purely religious terms. This has led the public to see parliamentary action as mostly irrelevant to their lives, increasing the pressure for citizens to take to the streets.
These particularities of Bahraini politics aside, it is clear that the present mass demonstrations are trying to follow the nonviolent example set by their counterparts in Egypt. The current wave of protests originated from 14,000 young people on Facebook. They represent a new generation, fed up with the impasse between the al-Khalifa clan and the older Shia leadership. The chant today on the street is: "No Sunni, No Shia, just Bahraini!"
This is a message that the Khalifa family, and the U.S. government, would do well to take to heart. Anyone who has traveled to or lived in Bahrain knows that Bahrainis — both Sunnis and Shiite — see themselves as Bahraini first, not stooges of Iran or Saudi Arabia. Some, of course, are influenced by Tehran or Riyadh — but by and large citizens are influenced by what happens in Manama.
The Khalifa family has skillfully drawn on Western fears of the Shiite as tools of Iran, which has so far obtained unquestioned U.S. support for their continued rule. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's mealy-mouthed statement today, in which she called for the government to show "restraint," is further evidence of this fact. Her remarks will not sway the prime minister and his cohorts, nor will they convince the demonstrators that the United States is a defender of their rights.
In the absence of real reform, the Iran threat could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the Khalifas are not able to open up the state to their own citizens, the more extreme Shiite leaders could start to see Iran as a protector, and a curb to U.S. and Saudi influence. And a turn towards Iran would likely bring Saudi intervention in support of the monarchy. The Khalifa leadership is faced with the choice of truly liberalizing or risking outside intervention — which would mean a grave loss of their position, and a potential catastrophe for the United States as well.This afternoon, Donald Trump reminded the nation why he’s a dangerous surrogate for any political candidate.
Hours before hosting former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for a Las Vegas fundraiser, Trump appeared on CNN and repeatedly raised questions about President Obama’s place of birth.
Obama’s campaign has been making hay out of Romney’s appearance with Trump, and the celebrity mogul only gave Democrats more fodder in the contentious interview. After criticizing CNN for focusing on the “birther” issue, Trump repeatedly argued that Obama’s origins are unclear.
Video via BuzzFeed:
“Obama does not like the issue of where he was born,” Trump said. “He does not like that issue because it’s hitting very close to home. You know it, and he knows it.” He claimed Obama’s campaign was using “reverse psychology” to make reporters think that birtherism was bad for Republicans.
When host Wolf Blitzer pointed out that, in part thanks to Trump himself, Obama released his long-form birth certificate in 2011, the mogul replied, “A lot of people don’t agree with this birth certificate, a lot of people don’t think it’s authentic.”
Blitzer suggested that Trump was “beginning to sound a little ridiculous.” Trump shot back, “I think you sound ridiculous.”
For good measure, Trump also continued his insults of Washington Post conservative columnist George Will, who on Sunday called the mogul a “bloviating ignoramus.”
Will, Trump said, “is not somebody that I’ve respected. I don’t think he’s a very smart person.” He added, for good measure, “He was at Mar-a-Lago years ago and totally bombed.”
This kind of bomb-throwing is why Trump gets headlines — and why he endeared himself to many conservatives in his flirtation with a presidential run. But right now, Romney doesn’t need to be associated with this kind of sideshow.The Codex form The Borgia - Princess Twilight Sparkle.
보지아 고사본 10 쪽에서 영감을 얻어 그렸습니다.
Inspired by page 10 of 'The Codex Borgia'.
머리장식과 귀걸이는 보지아 고사본 16 쪽에서 영감을 얻어 그렸습니다.
Headdress and earrring i nspired by page 16 of 'The Codex Borgia'.
날개는 보지아 고사본 23 쪽에서 영감을 얻어 그렸습니다.
Wing inspired by page 23 of 'The Codex Borgia'.
트와일라잇 스파클 공주님은 틀라히츠칼판테쿠흐틀리의 귀걸이와 머리 장식을 착용하고 있습니다.
틀라히츠칼판테쿠흐틀리는 세벽과 금성의 신 입니다. - 마치 그녀의 이름'트와일라잇 스파클'처럼요.
Princess Twilight Sparkle wear earring and headdress of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli,
The god of The Dawn and The Planet Venus - like her name'Twilight Sparkle '.
스파이크는 사실 날짜를 나타내는 기호였습니다.
And actually, Spike was a day-sign.
스페인이 들어오기 이전의 중앙아메리카에는 말이 없었습니다.
There are no horse in the pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
트와일라잇 스파클은 중앙아메리카 원주민들의 머리 모양을 하고 있습니다.
Twilight Sparkle has perfect Mixtec mane-style.
어쨌던 마이리틀포니 : 우정은 마법 만세!
Anyway, My Little P ony : Friendship is Magic Forever!Image copyright BT
BT Group has outlined plans to invest £6bn over the next three years in faster broadband and mobile services.
It plans to offer what it describes as "ultra-fast" broadband to 12 million premises by 2020, as well as improving coverage of faster 4G mobile services.
However, Sky said the plan had "limited ambition" and called for BT to invest in the UK's broadband fibre network.
Sky repeated its call for Openreach, which operates the broadband and phone network, to be split from BT.
Faster broadband
Under BT's investment plan, a minimum of 10 million homes and businesses will receive access to BT's ultrafast broadband service by 2020, and the company has an "ambition" to reach 12 million.
Most will receive that via BT's G.fast technology, which is currently capable of speeds of 300Mbps (megabits-per-second), but will be capable of speeds of up to 500Mbps, BT says.
On average UK households received speeds of 29Mbps last year, according to regulator Ofcom.
That would make the new service more than enough for households who want fast broadband to stream movies and play online games.
Image copyright EE
"Customers want their broadband to be affordable as well as fast and we will be able to do that using G.fast," said BT chief executive Gavin Patterson.
BT also plans to invest in its mobile phone network EE, so it can offer fast 4G coverage to 95% of the country by 2020.
'Limited ambition'
BT's rivals were not impressed by the investment plan.
Sky complained that the G.fast technology used old copper wires and said BT should be investing in the faster fibre network.
"Despite BT's claims, it is clearer than ever that their plans for fibre to the premise (FTTP) broadband will bypass almost every existing UK home," said Andrew Griffith, chief financial officer at Sky.
"This limited ambition has been dragged out of BT by the threat of regulatory action, demonstrating once again why an independent Openreach, free to raise its own long-term capital, is the best way for the UK to get the fibre network it needs."
TalkTalk said the investment plan was an effort "to buy protection against competition" and said BT "has shown itself perfectly willing to use national infrastructure as a cash cow for its other corporate activities, whilst the experience customers receive gets worse and worse".
Analysis: Simon Jack, BBC business editor
Image copyright BT
The eyecatching part of these results are the investment plans and the intended audience is Ofcom - in fact BT said that its £6bn investment plan is "subject to regulatory certainty".
BT is indicating that it can only make big investments in infrastructure if it knows that its business can operate without major interference from its regulator Ofcom.
That includes remaining in charge of Openreach, which operates the fibres, wires and cables that connect the country.
Sky and TalkTalk complain that BT has underinvested in the Openreach network, which has held back the rollout of superfast broadband while making excessive profits.
In a recent review, Ofcom had some sympathy with this position and put BT on warning that unless it improves investment and service, it could force BT to hive off Openreach - currently BT's biggest source of cash flow.
Today's announcement is the response. Ofcom has ordered BT to make its ducts and pole accessible to rivals to lay competing fibre - but so far Sky and
TalkTalk seem reluctant and are certainly not mollified by today's gesture.
Satisfying them will be less important to BT than getting the Ofcom seal of approval.
What future for BT and broadband?
BT told to open cable network to rivals
Football focus
BT reported a 15% rise in annual profits to £3.03bn, helped by stronger demand for broadband and TV services.
Total sales rose 6% to almost £19bn, which included a £1.06bn contribution from mobile operator EE.
BT's results were boosted by a strong year for BT Consumer, which supplies broadband, telephone and TV services. Sales were up 7% to £4.6bn for the year.
The number of customers for its TV service jumped by 28% to 1.5 million.
BT said audiences for its sports coverage - where it has made massive investment - were up 45%, which it attributed to its live coverage of Champions League and UEFA Europa League matches.
The first leg match between Liverpool and Manchester United in the last 16 of the Europa League was watched by a peak of 2 million viewers, BT said.
BT also shares coverage of the FA Cup with the BBC and has a package of Premier League matches.
Image copyright AP Image caption 2 million watched the first leg of the Europa League match between Liverpool and Manchester United
BT's football splurge
While BT is unlikely to recoup the investment in football simply in terms of subscriptions to its TV service and through advertising, analysts say that by offering live sport BT can make its broadband and phone services more attractive in a competitive market place.
"If TV enables BT to achieve a market share in telecoms services significantly higher than it would otherwise have been, the high cost of its TV investments may well prove justified," said Ian Watt, principal consultant at Ovum.
EE deal
The deal to buy the EE mobile network was cleared in January and BT said the integration of EE was "going well".
"We now see the opportunity to deliver more synergies than we originally expected, and at a lower cost," said Mr Patterson.
Analysts said the deal could boost sales, as BT will be able to target EE's 30 million customers with broadband and TV offers.
BT plans to hire 1,000 new engineers this year as part of an effort to improve customer service.
It will continue to return customer services to the UK and by March 2017 says it will handle 90% of calls by UK-based staff.Google is enhancing the previously announced app content indexing in mobile search results. This feature was previously only available with a few apps and in limited regions, but now it's going worldwide (for English language content) and includes a bunch of new apps.
This is tied into Google Play app links in search, but it's a distinct feature. The idea here is that when you search for certain content, Google Search can check the web, but also what's listed inside apps. For example, if you search for a movie, Google might offer to open the IMDB app to the listing for that movie. Looking up a recipe? Google can queue up the matching entry in Allthecooks instantly. Google is essentially correlating a web link with a location inside an app.
Google already had support for deep links in apps like IMDB, Flixter, and Etsy, but now there are 24 new apps. Here's the list Google provided.
500px, AOL, BigOven, Bleacher Report, Booking.com, Eventbrite, Glassdoor, Goodreads, Huffington Post, Merriam-Webster, Pinterest, Realtor.com, Seeking Alpha, TalkAndroid, TheFreeDictionary, The Journal, TripAdvisor, Tumblr, Urbanspoon, Wattpad, Yellow Pages, Zagat, Zappos, and Zillow
Developers have to get on board with support for so-called "deep links," but the documentation is ready to guide them through the process. Those links are then shared with Google so they can be exposed in search results. You should start seeing a lot more of these links when performing mobile searches.
[Google Blog 1, 2; Google Developers]Image copyright AP Image caption Antonio Ledezma has railed against government corruption
The mayor of Venezuela's capital, Antonio Ledezma, has been arrested amid accusations of a coup attempt.
President Nicolas Maduro said the opposition leader must answer "for all the crimes committed against the country's peace and security".
Camouflaged police smashed into the mayor's office and carried him away.
The arrest comes on the anniversary of the start of months of protests against Mr Maduro's rule that left dozens of people dead.
The Human Rights Watch group has called for Mr Ledezma's immediate release.
Hundreds of people gathered at the intelligence agency's HQ in Caracas to protest at the arrest.
Mr Maduro said: "Mr Ledezma, who today by order of the prosecution was captured, must be processed by Venezuelan justice to answer for all the crimes committed against the country's peace, security, constitution."
'Like a dog'
Mr Ledezma was on a list of people and foreign powers named by Mr Maduro last week as attempting to bring down his administration.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mr Maduro has insisted there is a coup attempt against him
Mr Ledezma, Caracas mayor since 2008, replied that it was government corruption that was bringing down Venezuela.
He was taken on Thursday from his office in the banking district.
Opposition legislator Ismael Garcia wrote on Twitter: "I just saw how they took Ledezma out of his office as if he were a dog. They broke down the doors without an arrest warrant."
A member of Mr Ledezma's security detail said about 10 men with guns and a hatchet came for the mayor, bundling him out of the building.
Last year, weeks of anti-government protests led to more than 40 deaths.
Venezuela's economy has been heavily affected by the drop in oil prices and in late January, thousands of Venezuelans joined an opposition march in Caracas.
They voiced dissatisfaction with high inflation, crime and the shortage of many staple goods in the shops.The Sprint, Dish, Clearwire, and SoftBank acquisition saga may be close to over. Dish has withdrawn its offer to purchase Clearwire, according to a press release pushed across the wire this afternoon. The satellite television company last bid $4.40 per share, but Sprint's latest offer of $5 per share — enough to earn the backing of Clearwire's board — has apparently convinced Dish to give up on this particular |
did this piece, based on a scene from the second episode, which I found marvelous.This took about five days, around six hours total, I would guess. Only used HB and 2B, as my other pencils were too little and haven't got chance to buy some new ones. Max and Chloe turned out great, but the background... ah damn the background ruined everything. But oh well. All input are welcome.Anyway, I straight up used my camera to take a picture, edit the contrast and touch up stuff. Seems quicker than scanning, and seems that it could produce about the same result.___Life is Strange (C) Square Enix and Dontnod Entertainment.HAB (High Altitude Ballooning) is a growing hobby where enthusiasts use standard weather balloons to put small payloads typically 100g-1kg into “near space” at altitudes of around 30km or so, carrying a tracking device (so the balloon position is known throughout the flight) and usually some sensors (temperature, pressure etc) and often a video or stills camera storing to an SD card for later retrieval. The job of the tracker is to read the location from the GPS receiver, possibly also read some sensors, and then format and send a telemetry sentence to the ground over a low power radio link. Flights only happen once the predicted path is known to be safe (avoiding airports and densely populated areas for example) and permission has been gained from (in the UK) the CAA. Here the tracking system uses the 70cm radio band (around 434MHz) using RTTY to send the telemetry down to a number of ground stations run by other enthusiasts. Telemetry from all receivers is sent to a central server that then drives a live map which can be viewed by anyone with an internet connection. The system works extremely well and has been used to track payloads at distances of 800km and more even though the transmitter is limited by UK law to 10mW ERP.
In early May I received my first Raspberry Pi computer, and having flown several high altitude balloons before I thought about using one as a flight computer. In almost all of my previous flights I used Arduino Mini Pro boards, and these are ideal – tiny, weigh almost nothing, simple and need very little power. I looked at the Pi and saw none of these desirable features! What I did see though was a USB port offering quick, easy and inexpensive access to a webcam, meaning that for the first time I could have live images (SSDV) sent down by my payload – something that hasn’t been done very often.
“Near Space” is a fairly hostile environment – less than 1% atmosphere, temperatures down to -50C or so – and if anything goes wrong it’s likely to stay wrong. The radio link is one-way so there’s no chance of remotely doing a “sudo reboot” let alone powering off then on again! Descent can be violent, as can the landing, so even things like SD card sockets can represent a potential failure mode. The Pi is a step up in complexity from the usual boards we use, that have no SD cards, or USB, or even an operating system, so the extra power and capability does come at a price, and the first one is an increase in the power requirement from around 60mA to over 500mA, and that of course means much higher power dissipation. People often worry about the low temperatures in near space, but when your payload is generating a few watts of power that is not likely to be a problem! I was much more concerned with how hot it was going to get inside the payload, so I added some heatsinks to the Pi:
I used special thermal adhesive to glue heatsinks to the USB/ETH chip and to the 3.3V regulator. Both get warm but not hot normally, and I feared that at 1% atmosphere (so less convection) they’d possibly get too hot. You can also see 2 wires carrying 5V directly to the Pi – soldered joints are more reliable than using a connector. Another modification was to remove the S2 video connector to make space for components on my expansion board. The final modification was to short out the USB fuses since my webcam’s current requirement exceeds their rating. I then added a small piece of stripboard carrying a Radiometrix NTX2 radio transmitter to send the telemetry and images down to the ground, and connected that to a simple GPS receiver on a wire tail so it can be kept away from the transmitting devices.
The final item for a basic tracker is a suitable power supply. Energizer Lithium AA cells are the obvious choice since they are specified to work down to -40 degrees C, and are very good at high currents (we need over 500mA for the Pi plus webcam). On the way to 30km the outside will get down to -50C, and even with minimal insulation the batteries will self-heat to stay within their operating range. The Pi needs 5V supplied to it, so I used an external LDO (Low DropOut) linear regulator fed from 6 AAs which will supply enough voltage to the regulator until they are pretty much flat. With the regulator dissipating up to 3 watts it needed and got a heatsink. This is a lot of heat to get rid of a payload (which is insulated because you don’t want it to get too cold either because that can affect other parts). I had some switched mode regulators ordered but they didn’t arrive in time for my flight, so it went up with the linear regulator.
The usual technique with the NTX2 is to send the ‘1’ and ‘0’ values in RTTY by waggling a general purpose I/O pin up and down at the correct rate. e.g. every 20ms for the common 50 baud data rate. This is easy when you’re programming a bare-metal AVR or PIC – just use a delay routine or, as in my trackers, a timer interrupt. However the Pi runs a non-real-time operating system, so I could not rely on accurate timing especially if the operating system is busy taking a photo from the webcam. There are other options but I opted for the simplest one – connect the NTX2 to the serial port. RTTY is just normal RS232-style serial marks and spaces and stop bits etc., so why not let the hardware UART do the timing for me? It didn’t take long to write a small ‘C’ program that opened the serial port at 4800 baud, read enough GPS strings to find the longitude, latitude and altitude, then close the port and re-open at 300 baud (I found that switching baud rates without closing and opening wasn’t always reliable) to send out a formatted telemetry string. Of course to do this I had to disable the login prompt on the serial port, and stop the kernel debug messages being sent to it, but all in all it was simple. All of this was done using the standard Debian image on a 4GB SD card.
Now for the live images. I had to apply a patch to Debian after which it happily recognised the webcam as /dev/video0. I tried a few webcams and settled on the Logitech C270 which is reasonable quality, light and cheap (in case the payload goes missing!). I tried several webcam imaging programs and found fswebcam to be the best (worked without fiddling, yet had enough options to tailor the picture taking). Remember that the radio system has low bandwidth and with a typical flight lasting 2 hours or so we don’t have time to send large images, so there’s no point using the very best webcam and the highest resolution. I settled on 432 x 240 pixels with 50% compression as a good compromise between quality and download speed. I measured the webcam current and it went from 50mA at idle to 250mA peak when taking a picture, hence the need to short out the USB fuse (140mA max). A simple shell script took a photo every 30 seconds, saving them on the SD card so that the tracker program could choose the “best” image (largest jpeg!) for transmission. Each chosen image is then converted to the form for download (split into blocks each with FEC) before being sent 1 block at a time. I interspersed the image data with telemetry – 4 image packets for each telemetry packet). Here’s the Pi making a self-portrait:
With the completed tracker tried and tested, and permission for the flight gained from the CAA, I built a container for the Pi, webcam, GPS, aerials, batteries and regulator. I didn’t want to use too much insulation as the package needed to not get too hot with 3 – 5 watts being generated inside, so I used 10mm thick EPX material. Any thinner would be too fragile.
As the launch day approached the wind predictions consistently showed an S-shaped flight path from the launch site near my home in West Berkshire, initially flying south, then east, then briefly north before turning west at higher altitudes. Then during descent it would go through those directions in the opposite sequence, finally landing somewhere in the Chilterns. With the weather (i.e. rain, as it’s summer now) looking OK if not ideal, I ordered and collected the gas for the balloon. I obtained permission for 2 flights, so a friend and fellow enthusiast Anthony Stirk could come down and fly two new trackers that he’d built. With 3 trackers and 2 flights we opted to fly a large balloon with a small light tracker, and then fly a second balloon with Anthony’s larger tracker and a GoPro HD video camera, then attach the Pi to that. After a bit more thought we decided to add a third tracker as a backup to make sure we got that GoPro back!
The flight day came, and so did the rain, but that was predicted to pass so we waited and then went to the launch site as it eased to a light drizzle. First was the larger balloon with the small payload, so Anthony could make an attempt at the altitude world record. Then came the rather more complicated flight with my Pi payload at the top, then the GoPro payload, and finally my backup “Buzz” tracker which I’d flown before. Here’s “PIE1” waiting to go:
and the balloon it’s being attached to:
The entire train of parachute and 3 payloads weighed 1kg (same as my very first payload) and from the balloon to the lowest payload it was around 60 metres in length! The launch was interesting, as initially the wind kept the balloon low and the line was nearly horizontal! After a short wait the wind eased, the balloon lifted and got to an angle where it was safe to launch after running towards the balloon as fast as I could! I was relieved to see it all lift nicely, and that huge train made an impressive sight as it went up towards the clouds.
The launch site is in the village where I live, so afterwards we drove the chase cars back to my house to our “mission control” to watch the tracking and images from there. The predicted landing spots meant there was no hurry to get back into the cars to chase the payloads, so we had plenty of time to watch the images come in and grab some food.
The first flight was the altitude attempt, using a make and size of balloon that from experience either bursts early at around 27km, or exceeds specification to reach 40km or so. In fact the top few places in the altitude record table are all held by that make/size. Anthony was of course watching the altitude reading in the telemetry quite closely!
Meanwhile I of course was much more interested in how well the Raspberry Pi was doing. The GPS position was still showing the position at the launch site, which is a sure sign of interference to the GPS signal. I’ve not determined yet which it is, but the GPS receiver and antenna were quite close to both the Pi and the webcam in the payload. For next time I’ll add screening and increase the distance a little. However, the image data was coming in perfectly, not only through my antenna and receiver at home, but also via other receivers around the country. As the balloon got higher the pictures got better, and more receivers started getting good data, with some image data even being received as far away as Northern Ireland (over 500km away – not bad for 10mW!). Now, a PIE flight isn’t complete without a PIE chart, so here is one, showing the number of image packets received by different listeners (thanks all!):
The first flight meanwhile was creeping up the altitude table, eventually reaching the #4 position only 300-odd metres below the world record. Part of me was hoping it would go higher, but part was happy that it didn’t knock me down from my #2 spot in the table! The balloon then burst, and initially the descent looked perfectly normal. However most of the balloon was still attached and it managed to produce a parachute-like shape which slowed the descent to only 2 metres per second at an altitude where it should have been doing at least 5 times that! Turning to the main flight, it was sending in image after image without errors, and each image being better than the last as the balloon got higher and higher.
We were expecting it to burst at around 34km, but obviously the balloon wasn’t aware of our calculations. It went through 34km, and 35, and …. and eventually burst just a few metres short of 40km (39,994 metres to be exact, putting it at 12’th place in the UK altitude record table). Quite amazing for a medium sized balloon with about 1kg of payloads underneath it! With both balloons having burst it was time to get going in the chase cars, both of which were equipped with aerials, radio receivers, netbooks or car PCs for decoding and mapping, and 3G internet. The landing prediction for the main flight was for near Didcot, so we headed there and parked up to check on the latest prediction. We weren’t far away when the payloads landed in at Milton Heights, just a few miles from the launch site. Amazingly, one of the receivers was close enough to still be picking up live images, and after a while everyone could see that the payload had safely landed in long grass:
Anthony saw the payloads first from his chase car, in long grass next to a football field. Having obtained permission from the club we rescued all 3 payloads and the parachute:
Meanwhile, the earlier flight was still coming down, but very very slowly – less than 1 fifth of the expected rate! We didn’t know at the time but we’re pretty sure now that the latex had managed to form its own parachute. Then, with a few km to go, it suddenly sped up (we think the latex tore) and landed in a field north of Oxford. Here’s the very unsual altitude plot:
It took a while for us to get the final position but having done so it seemed that it was in a rather inaccessible location. With the rain pouring down, Anthony decided to call it a day rather than try to retrieve what is only £50-worth of tracker. He then drove off, and I went online to tell the other receivers in the UKHAS chat room that I was about to go home too. “Ah, but it’s near a layby on the A34” I was told, “easy to get to” and “the rain will pass in 5 minutes”. Well, that didn’t sound so bad so I set off north up the A34, then back southbound to get to the layby.
Well, of those 3 statements, 1 was correct – it was just 155m from the layby. However the rain just kept on coming, only easing from torrential to very heavy as we sat in the car waiting. Eventually I decided to just go for it, and crawled past trees and bushes to find … a field full of 5′ high maize. No chance of seeing the payload from there, though I tried. After failing I went back to the car to get my Android phone loaded with HamGPS software that guides you to a target location. It took a lot of effort to get there, and for a while I felt like I was starring in “Dave Of The Triffids”, but as I got to the target position I walked into the nylon cord between the payload and remains of the balloon! It really wasn’t visible at all until I was almost on top of it. Here I am emerging, successful, after my expedition:
So, all in all, a great day HABbing. All 4 trackers worked well, all were recovered, and we got some stunning live images back. For more information on this fascinating hobby, visit the UKHAS web site. For more images and video, see:
All SSDV images
Photos from the day
pAVA Inflation Time-Lapse
Burst video from the GoPro
Launch video of PIE1, uAVA and BUZZ8
Landing video from the GoPro
Recovery of PIE1, uAVA and BUZZ8
Anthony’s Write-Up
Thanks go to Anthony Stirk for driving down from sunny Yorkshire to grimmest darkest Berkshire for the launch, and supplying the GoPro HD footage, to Philip Heron for providing the webcam imaging and image encoding software, to Nick for coming along to help out, and of course to my wife Julie for keeping us fed and watered during the day and for driving my chase car whilst I did the techie stuff.Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu today invoked Constitution amendment to nullify the Supreme Court order in the Shah Bano case as a possible way out to allow jallikattu, which was banned by the apex court recently.
Venkaiah Naidu hinted that in the view of strong emotional connect of the people of Tamil Nadu with jallikattu, the Centre is mulling over a way out after the Supreme Court banned it.
"We are getting suggestions (to amend the law). After all, we did it in the Shah Bano case," said Naidu adding, "But, we will have to see. We will have to discuss. We will have to weigh what court thinks."
However, Naidu was non-committal about bringing an ordinance to deal with the Supreme Court order on Jallikattu, saying, "I am not dealing with the subject in the government."
Speaking at the India Today Conclave South in Chennai, Venkaiah Naidu said, "Personally, I feel that Jallikattu is a traditional art. It is a traditional sport in Tamil Nadu. Nobody should have problem with this."
But, Naidu also added, "I don't know whether I should be saying this as a minister."
Shah Bano, a 62-year-old mother of five children from Madhya Pradesh, was divorced by her husband in 1978. Later, she filed a maintenance lawsuit against her ex-husband.
In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled that Shah Bano was entitled to maintenance like any other Indian woman. But, this led to a huge uproar among the Muslim clerics.
The then Rajiv Gandhi government amended the law by passing Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 to set aside the Shah Bano verdict of the Supreme Court.
WHAT ELSE DID HE SAY: THINGS TO KNOW
Venkaiah Naidu rejected the allegation of misuse of central agencies against political rivals, a charge leveled by several opposition leaders including West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi. On the question of Tamil Nadu's chief secretary being raided, Naidu said, "He is not a rival of the BJP or central government. He is an officer. I don't know whether he is still the chief secretary or not but he should not have leveled allegations. Other officers have condemned his statement." "In 2014, we got mandate to act against black money. We are implementing that mandate. If every corrupt, who is held starts saying that he is a politician or a bureaucrat, so he should not be touched, how will we fight corruption," asked the Union minister. On the question of the post-Jayalalithaa scenario in AIADMK and the Tamil Nadu government, Venkaiah Naidu said, "We work with the state government. Here, people elected AIADMK, which has selected O Panneerselvam as the Chief Minister. We will work with him." Naidu did not give a straight answer to the question about whether BJP favours Panneerselvam over Sasikala. "Any politicians with some experience or knowledge should not answer question of ifs and buts," said Naidu before adding, "You want to make a headline, giving me a deadline but I won't change my line," bringing laughter in the audience.
ALSO READ | Congress in panic over overwhelming support to demonetisation: Venkaiah Naidu
WATCH VIDEO HERE: M Venkaiah Naidu: Jallikattu is a traditional art110 Beauty Tips for Men
If you’ve stumbled across this page, there’s a good chance you’re a guy searching for pointers on men’s beauty tips. In fact, a lot of men just like you found this page simply by typing: “Beauty tips for men” right into Google.
Does this describe you?
If so, you aren’t alone. I’ve found that men are eager to learn all they can about personal care. Specifically, guys are interested in skin care routines, hair care products and the best ways to fight signs of aging.
But here’s the thing.
Because of our unspoken “bro-code”, we men don’t talk to each other about such topics.
We just don’t.
Maybe that’s why a recent research study found that the majority of guys seek out personal care information from the privacy of their home – meaning online.
Here’s a video of Aaron Marino; someone I give credit to for being super direct with his 12 men’s grooming (beauty) tips for guys. Why can’t we all be this way?
Men’s beauty tips you can use
As a men’s counselor that specializes in wellness issues, I completely get it. The bro-code is what is.
That’s why I decided to write this article. My hope is to offer you real male grooming tips in a straight forward, easy to understand way.
I’d like to give you a little background to help put things into context.
Men are searching for “beauty” info
Remember the “bro-code” I mentioned earlier? Because we don’t talk to one another about certain things, we’ve been left to figure some of this stuff out on our own.
For years, the male personal care industry has tried to make “men’s grooming” work. But in my opinion, it’s failed miserably. Honestly, how many people do you know that say things like: “Hey, do you have any men’s grooming tips?”
Let me guess – probably no one. I sure as heck don’t.
So, until someone comes up with a term that guys search for on how to look more handsome, I’ll be sticking with what guys input into the search engines.
With that out of the way, let’s move on to why you are here!
What follows are 110 men’s beauty tips for men. To help prepare this piece, I’ve consulted with a number of dermatologists and skin care experts. The goal is to give you the best advice to keep you looking sharp.
We’ll start at the top of the head and work down to the feet. It just seemed like the easiest way to do it.
For each suggestion, I’ve given some “how to” information plus product recommendations where necessary. The links go directly to either Amazon or product’s manufacturer.
As a matter of full disclosure, I am an affiliate for Amazon and Carhartt. Just leveling with you for the sake of transparency.
As you read this, keep in mind that I’ll use terms like beauty and grooming interchangeably. FYI: The 110 tips below are broken down in body segments.
Let’s jump right in!
MEN’S BEAUTY TIPS: HAIR
A) Get rid of dry hair
If you’re a man with dry hair that’s frizzed out, there could be a number of reasons for this. For example, if you live in a cold weather climate, wearing a winter hat can zap moisture from your follicles like crazy.
But other things can cause damage; like shampooing every day or using a hair dryer too frequently.
Men’s Beauty Tips 1-4:
1) Skip daily shampooing and switch to daily conditioning.
2) Pick up a bottle of Rugged and Dapper remedy conditioner. It’s made from natural ingredients and helps to restore texture, luster and shine.
Shampoo only once a week or once every other week. A high-quality product to think about is Mancave’s caffeine shampoo. It acts as a moisturizer without stripping your hair. Also, it encourages hair growth at the root.
In cold weather that requires you to wear a hat, consider dabbing on a little anti-frizz cream. This will keep your hair moist so you don’t develop “static hair”. Great options Redkin’s Anti-Frizz hair milk.
B) Stop hair loss
If you are like most men, the older you get, the more hair you lose. There are a few guys who are genetically gifted but to keep it real, most us weren’t blessed this way.
If you want to prevent and stop hair loss, you’ll need to invest some money. The research shows that a combination of minoxidil and Propecia are effective against male pattern baldness. See this research study from the New England Journal of Medicine to learn more.
Beauty Tips 5-7:
To get Propecia, you will need a prescription from your doctor.
Minoxidil can be purchased over the counter. To reduce costs, consider buying in bulk. You can get a six-month supply from Amazon at a reasonable price.
Some men say Biotin (vitamin B7) helps to prevent hair loss and encourage growth. Do your research on this to discover potential benefits.
C) Men’s hair care tips
Every guy has his own way of taking care of his hair. The problem is, many of us do it wrong. I can’t list everything here but I’ll try to hit the biggies.
Men’s Beauty Tips 8-17:
Never “scrub dry” your hair with a towel. Instead, gently pat dry. Harsh, aggressive scrubbing movements can damage your hair follicles and in extreme cases, yank strands from their roots.
The shorter your hair, the easier it is to manage. Check out these male celebrity hair styles for ideas.
Be careful with haircare products. When you leave them on your scalp, they can damage tiny follicles and prevent growth.
Avoid over drying your hair. Use a medium heat setting and don’t aim your dryer directly on the head. Instead, attach a diffuser and hold dryer so that it’s at an angle.
If your hair is getting grey and you want to liven it up, you can either go to a professional and have it dyed. You can also pick up a hair glaze product that’s applied in the shower. Works like a charm and doesn’t look fake.
Use sprays and gels that don’t weigh your hair down. There are tons of products to choose for men. Pantene makes great ones because the folks at Proctor and Gamble spend millions each year doing research. They know their stuff.
If you have dandruff, it’s possible you aren’t properly washing out the products from your hair. You could also suffer from eczema or seborrheic dermatitis. Talk to your doctor about this.
Most physicians recommend a coal tar extract product, like T-Gel, to treat dandruff. You can get this at most pharmacies and grocery stores.
If you can find one in your town, consider going to a barber instead of a hair stylist. Barbers are specially trained to use clippers and blades. FYI: When you locate one you like, stick with him. That’s because barbers are becoming a dying breed.
MEN’S BEAUTY TIPS: FACE
There’s lots to cover here. To begin with, how you care for your face as a man largely depends upon your skin-type. For example, normal, oily or dry.
There are several “universals” that apply to all of us. I’ve listed a few of them on this this facial care for men page. What follows is a basic run-down, broken down by issue.
You’ll also find tips on beard trimming and shaving.
A) Moisturizing, wrinkle prevention, eyebrows
Most every man I know wants to prevent unwanted wrinkles and lines. The problem is a lot of us engage in the wrong routines and use the wrong products because we don’t know any better.
Right off the bat, you need to know men’s skin tends to be thicker than our female counterparts. A major reason for this is collagen production. We simply produce more.
That’s great news on the anti-aging front. The bad news is if you mistreat your skin, you’ll end up minimizing any benefits.
Men’s Beauty 18-30:
Never use soaps on your face – ever. Most are too harsh and will strip oils and collagen from the dermal layer. Instead, use a gentle face cleanser that locks in moisture. Many guys have found Philosophy’s one step facial cleanser to be an excellent option. There are others as well to consider (see facial care for men hyperlinked page above).
If your skin is oily, it’s important to start using a cleanser with salicylic acid. You can get this product at almost any pharmacy. If you can get store brand, you should. The name brand product (for this one) are made from exactly the same ingredients.
Start exfoliating with a high-quality scrub. This will reduce the dullness on your mug and helps to dislodge debris that contributes to wrinkles. You’ll find many of these on the market but most of them are made with harsh chemicals and fillers. I highly recommend trying Men’s Science micro-fine scrub. It’s light, easy to apply and won’t rip your skin. Use at least 2 times a week.
Start using a mask at least once a week and if you can do it twice, even better. You’ll need to do some checking around to see which is best for your needs. One product that is good for all skin types is by Brummell. It’s made from natural elements, like bentonite & kaolin clay. If you want something that reduces pore size, gets rid of excess oil and helps your face look smoother, consider this guy (check Amazon).
Use a high quality facial moisturizer twice a day. Guys, I’m telling you now that this one is key. Many men find the products made by CeraVe work great. You can read all about these products on them on this men’s anti-aging Don’t forget to creams on your neck.
If you have Rosacea or are prone to red skin, talk to your doctor. An excellent product that many guys use to calm redness is Cetaphil’s Night Moisturizing cream for redness prone skin. Dermatologist recommended. I use this product and it does exactly as it says. See Amazon for great price.
Start focusing on your eyes daily. One of the first places your face will show age is underneath and around the eye area. Read my page on how to get rid of baggy eyes in men and reduce wrinkles to learn more.
Use a sunblock. I won’t go on forever and a day about this because you’ve probably heard it a million times. The key thing is to apply the block on all of your face, meaning your neck and ears. Read this post on removing sun spots on the face if you’ve been struggling with this problem.
If you have stress pimples, start to incorporate acne reducing activities into your life. See this post.
Protect your face in winter with a scarf. As guys, we like to come off as rugged. But trying to look manly during winter has consequences. Generally speaking, if the temps start to dip below 25 degrees, you need to wrap your mug in a scarf. If you live in a super cold climate, I recommend a full head and neck mask. Check Carhartt to see pricing on their Liner Mask.
Trim eyebrows so they appear even. Never shave the space between eyebrows. Otherwise, you may cause a unibrow to grow. See video: “How to trim eyebrows for men” to learn more.
To keep eyebrows neat looking in between trimmings, use a spot of beard oil or cream. Then, use a beard brush to straighten. See info on beards below for more.
B) Beard Trimming and Shaving Tips
Men’s Beauty 31-39:
Check out the video above for basic beard trimming tips.
If you shave daily, it’s important to use high quality, precision trimming/cutting products. This means durable and beard trimmers.
Never use the same razor blade twice. Doing so make cause a bacterial infection.
Use a skin conditioning product prior to shaving to avoid nicks and cuts.
If you have sensitive skin, use a gel or cream designed to reduce bumps and inflammation. See the many shaving products listed on this men’s stocking filler guide for ideas.
If you are going for the shorter beard look or goatee, learn how to properly shape your facial hair to achieve the desired look. See this short beard styling guide for information.
If you wear your beard longer or if you want to achieve the classic lumberjack look, see this lumbersexual style post.
Use a little beard oil with a beard brush to create a well-groomed, attractive look. Consider Grave Shave’s beard kit that includes brush, oil, balm and wash (See Amazon).
To achieve a more youthful appearance, consider coloring your beard with a product like Just for men. Available at nearly all drug stores.
MEN’S BEAUTY TIPS: TEETH
You can have the most attractive skin in the world but if your teeth look crooked or have large gaps, they can take away from your appearance in a major way. Let’s face it, people notice when you are smiling and when you’re not.
Before I move onto the tips, none of what’s suggested below will work unless you get yourself into the dentist office. As a counselor, I know how many men absolutely hate going in for checkups.
But guys, I’m here to tell you that the longer you wait, the worse your teeth will get. I should know. I did this and waited years between dental visits. The end result; thousands of dollars in repairs that were 100% preventable.
Read this post if you hold dental fears.
A) White Teeth and Lips
Your goal should be to have teeth that are as white as possible. You’ll also want them to look polished. Ideally, your teeth will be framed by a pair of healthy, red lips.
There are a number of things you can do to make this happen. I’ll give you teeth and lip tips below.
Men’s Beauty Tips 40-48:
Brush after every meal (if possible). I mention this because research suggests nearly a third of men admit to brushing only once a day. If this describes you, it’s time to up that number massively.
Use a high quality, fluoride toothpaste with whiteners. There are many on the market to choose from. Excellent brands include Colgate and Crest.
If you want super white teeth, consider ordering a custom teeth whiting tray kit. After you mold tray onto teeth, you ship to dental lab. They return customized trays to you that are perfectly fitted to your choppers. Amazon sells a product almost identical to what you see in video above.
Floss at least once a day. An obvious point but worth mentioning because many men don’t floss. If you aren’t sure how to floss your teeth, see this video.
Pick up a bottle of fluoride mouth wash. Most dentists recommend using ACT. It is recommended you rinse when you’re done brushing. The most important time to use this tooth saving product is just after brushing your choppers at bedtime.
Use a tooth whitening product with proven results. One of the best on the market is Active White Teeth Whitening Powder (See Amazon for price).
Visit the dentist at least 2 times a year for cleanings.
Moisturize your lips with a balm designed to lock in moisture. Dime store Chapstick is fine but if you can get your hands on Jack Black’s intense lip therapy, even better. (See Amazon).
B) Crooked, Uneven, Gap Teeth
If your teeth are crooked, uneven, chipped or have gaps, you have lots of options. I’m not going to lie to you, cosmetic dental work can get very expensive! The reason is most insurance companies don’t cover these types of procedures.
Still, if you have a health savings plan at work or if you can afford it, it may be worth your while to have your teeth fixed so that you can smile with confidence.
Men’s Beauty Tips 49-52:
For crooked teeth, talk to your dentist about straightening options. A lot of guys opt for Invisalign; a product that works over time to align teeth evenly.
Porcelain veneers are another option. They are placed on teeth that appear crooked or gapped. Again, not cheap but they can help to create unbelievable transformation.
For brown or yellow teeth, consider laser whitening. Your dentist can fill you in on the details. Very effective option for guys who want a super white smile.
Get teeth x-rayed once every 3-5 years to assess for bone loss.
MEN’S BEAUTY TIPS: HANDS
Men tend to be tactile creatures, using their hands to accomplish much work. For this reason and a host of others, the hands are one of the first areas to shows signs of old age.
In this area, I’ll give you the rundown on how to keep your hands looking young with a specific focus on skin and nails.
A) Hands
Men’s Beauty Tips 53-63
Get hands professionally manicured at least once per month.
Use care when trimming nails and make sure they are the same length. Avoid pointy edges when trimming.
If your hands are rough and dry, consider soaking them in warm water and olive oil for 10 minutes, two days per week.
Use gloves designed to deliver and seal in moisture. You can buy these online via Amazon.
Always wear winter gloves when the weather turns cold.
If doing manual labor, construction or household renovations, pick up a pair of Jersey gloves and use them. Most hardware stores carry.
When camping, hunting or hiking, carry a pair of heavy duty work gloves.
At least twice a day, apply a high-quality moisturizer to your hands. Brickell’s sells a great men’s product. Check online at Amazon for pricing.
When outdoors, even for short periods of time, apply a moisturizer with a SPF sunblock of 30 or higher. This will prevent sunspots and wrinkling.
Use a moisturizing cleanser when washing hands and avoid harsh soaps. If possible, try to apply a hand moisturizer afterwards.
If you visit the gym and use free weights or machines, always wear gym gloves. You can get these at any sports store.
MEN’S BEAUTY TIPS: BODY
As men, we often |
think is completely normal and "reasonable" for the most part. So it's little surprise that large parts of people's music collections seem to come from friends and family, especially the younger generation (where it's even greater than downloading from the internet).This, once again, suggests that the absolute wrong strategy is to focus on greater enforcement. It's not going to stop that kind of sharing at all. It seems entirely counterproductive, and only serves to piss off those who are most interested in the music (and often the most interested in paying).The end result is the same as always. The problem is not "piracy." It's just a symptom of failing to properly respond to the market. The market doesn't "just want stuff for free." I keep seeing people claim that piracy definitively decreases sales, but we know that's not true. We've seen some cases where it has helped sales -- so what explains the difference? I'd posit it's pretty simple:. However, if you do treat your fans like fans, give them ways to support you, don't act like they're criminals, and actually adapt to the changing market, you can turn what would otherwise be a negative into a positive. But it involves quite a bit of work, and that's the big challenge.
Filed Under: buyers, fans, file sharing, researchA vocal member of the Senate Armed Services Committee is calling for the U.S. Navy to challenge Chinese claims to artificial islands soon near the Philippines following a decision from an international tribunal that ruled against several Chinese claims in the South China Sea.
Specifically, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) called on the Obama administration to send Navy assets to contest Chinese territorial claims around their artificial island on Mischief Reef via a freedom of navigation operation.
“In the coming weeks the U.S. Navy should conduct a FON op at Mischief Reef, which the Hauge tribunal has determined is a low-tide elevation,” he said speaking at Center of Strategic and International Studies conference on the South China Sea on Tuesday.
As part of the extensive ruling, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Arbitration Tribunal through the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague declared Mischief Reef a low tide elevation that does not, “generate entitlement to a territorial sea, exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.”
In the last three South China Sea FON ops conducted by U.S. guided missile destroyers, the U.S. ships transited by Chinese claims via innocent passage – a legal right in which a warship can quickly transit within a 12 nautical mile territorial sea without conducting any military operations.
However, the status of Mischief Reef – according to the ruling – would allow more than just an expeditious transit, Sullivan said.
“In Mischief Reef’s case that would allow military maneuver, a FON op beyond simple innocent passage and we need to look at all the options and I’m confident that our admirals are doing that,” he said.
“We shouldn’t be going through with just innocent passage. These FON ops should be based on what the international law allows.”
Navy officials said on Tuesday morning they could not discuss future operations. Currently, the Navy’s forward-deployed Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group is operating in the South China Sea.
While the service is loathe to broadcast FON ops before they occur, USNI News understands that U.S. Pacific Commander Adm. Harry Harris in the past has pushed for a FON op past Mischief Reef. Unlike other Chinese territorial claims in the Spratly Island chain, there is little ambiguity to the legal status of the island allowing a FON op to send a clear message to Beijing.
Sullivan, along with SASC chairman Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), were both vocal in publically pushing the Obama administration to undertake more South China Sea FON ops following the innocent passage of a Chinese flotilla through U.S. territorial waters in Alaska in September.
“Early on in the administration, the FON ops seemed to be something that our administration was reluctant to undertake. It was clear there was some distention between different leaders in the Obama administration,” Sullivan said on Tuesday.
The U.S. has conducted three FON ops past Chinese holdings in the South China Sea since late October.
In late October, USS Lassen (DDG-84) conducted a FON op past the Chinese artificial holding on Subi Reef in the Spratlys. In January, USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG-54) came within 12 nautical miles of a Chinese installation on Triton Island in the Paracel Island chain near Vietnam. In May USS William P. Lawrence (DDG-110) came within 12 nautical miles of the Chinese installation on Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Island chain.
All three of the operations have met with fierce rhetoric from Beijing accusing the U.S. of violating Chinese territorial sovereignty.
In his speech at CSIS, Sullivan also called for the U.S. to examine basing two carrier strike groups in the Western Pacific and stepping up U.S. surface and aviation operations in the region.The Japanese anime news website Anime! Anime! confirmed on Wednesday that the new original video anime ( OVA ) of Yunosuke Yoshinaga's Broken Blade ( Break Blade ) manga is still in the works. The anime will center on the past of the Golem Delphine and its mysterious creation, and the producers intend to make the OVA for both fans of the original story and new fans. The staff and release date for the OVA is as yet unannounced.
The manga already inspired a six-part 2010-2011 film series that Sentai Filmworks released in North America. Sentai Filmworks describes the film series:
In Cruzon, children are born with the ability to control quartz. This power allows them to levitate simple objects—or control enormous and complex mobile battle suits called Golems. But when an ancient Golem is discovered during the height of a brutal war, a Young King and his beautiful queen turn to Rygart Arrow. Though an “un-sorcerer”, Rygart can miraculously pilot this ancient and powerful weapon. But in war, school friends can turn into bitter enemies and allies have suspicious motives.
The six-part film series was recompiled into a 12-episode television anime series that premiered in April 2014, and featured previously unanimated scenes.
Tetsuro Amino ( Macross 7, Shiki ) and Nobuyoshi Habara ( Negima!, Fafner ) helmed the 2010-2011 films, with Production I.G and Xebec handling the animation. Masashi Sogo ( Bleach, Fairy Tail, Gantz ) wrote the screenplays.Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/4/2017 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
A young Syrian refugee with a traumatic past and a hostile attitude toward police has ended up with a criminal record at only 12 years old.
The 12-year-old girl, who recently arrived in Winnipeg with her family, was charged with public mischief and assaulting a police officer after she and her younger sister called 911 60 times between July and August last year. They used different cell phones they found, making false reports that were designated as high-priority and wasted police’s time, court heard. After the final 911 call on Aug. 24, police responded to the family’s home, diverting resources away from investigation of a bomb threat that was happening simultaneously downtown.
When officers arrived, the 12-year-old punched one while he had his back turned, and tried to hit him a second time. She threatened to make false allegations that the police had “touched her,” and threatened to kill the officers.
“I am going to work for ISIS. I hate you guys,” she told police, according to details shared in court during the girl’s sentencing this week.'The Young Turks' host Cenk Uygur discusses his thesis that "Brick Voters," who voted for Trump to take down the political status quo, decided the election.
He says the argument that Donald Trump drove huge voter turnout is a myth, noting that he got fewer votes in Michigan than George W. Bush did when he lost the state in 2004. Uygur says this proves that it was Hillary Clinton's failure to connect with working class voters and drive Democratic turnout that cost her the election, not Trump energizing new voters or turning out the Republican base.
"Brick Voters are not going to vote for Hillary Clinton, they are going to vote against Hillary Clinton -- because she is the Establishment," he said. "And the Democratic Party said, 'No, no, no, you ruffians, you philistines, you don't understand. This Bernie Sanders doens't comb his hair!'"
"It can't be Bernie Sanders," he said, speaking for the DNC. "We're going to put up this robot instead, and she is going to give you every scripted talking point that the Establishment has pre-agreed to."
Next, Uygur points to an exit poll which said that 17% of voters who backed Trump believed he was not qualified for the job. "That's the most amazing thing I've ever seen!" he exclaimed. "17% of his voters said he's not even qualified for the job, but they voted for him anyway, you know why? Somebody hand me a brick."
"Because they can't stand what is happening today. And they're right. They can't stand that all the burdens have been heaped on them, but they don't have any opportunities. They can't stand that they don't have the jobs that they used to have, let alone the jobs that their kids are going to have. This economy is killing them. It is not because the stock market didn't recover, Obama did a great job of having the stock market recover. It is because they used to have a decent job, and they don't anymore, and they have to work literally -- one article I saw was about a guy who voted Democrat for his whole life. He's delivering pizza now. He used to work in a factory. He used to be able to provide for his family. Now he's making pizza deliveries. Somebody hand me a God damned brick."
"17 percent of them said: 'I'm going to vote for the guy who is unqualified for the job, because I can't stand the system,'" he said. "Yet, every pundit on TV, most of them millionaires, are telling you: 'No, everything is fine. Why won't they vote for the qualified person who is going to keep things just as they are?'"
"If you are already a millionaire, or you work for a multi-million dollar corporation that owns your network, you don't want to rock the boat. You don't want any Brick Voters. So you keep telling them: 'Hey, hey, know what is good for you. There is something the matter with you. If you just knew what was going on, you would bow your head and accept the status quo as it is, that keeps us rich,' -- and you, not so much."
"They didn't want to bow their heads, and they knew there is something wrong with the system," he continued. "It isn't me, guys. It is 17% of the voters saying: 'I don't care how unqualified he is. I don't care how atrocious he is. I'm not going to vote for you. Because the system and the Establishment is screwing me, and I'm not going to take it.' So for God's sake, Democratic Party: If you don't turn around and go populist-progressive right now, you're going to keep losing to people like Trump... Because this country is going populist whether you like it or not. Whether that bothers you because we're rocking your boat. That doesn't matter, it is going to happen either way. If you don't present an alternative on the left, you're handing this country to monsters, and the country knows they're not even qualified, and they're going to do it anyway. Because they can't stand you."
"It is not about her [Hillary Clinton]. It is not personal. It is because she stands for the Establishment, and they don't like the Establishment," he pled to the DNC If you don't get it through your thick skulls, you're going to hand people like Trump, the alt-right, and all of those people you call 'Deplorables' more and more elections. Turn around right now. Otherwise the country is going to turn you around."There are many stories about the origin of Bengaluru’s name. One popular apocryphal version recounts the tale of a king from the Hoysala dynasty coming to the city in the 12th century on a hunting spree and losing his way. The hungry king, the story goes, was given a traditional welcome by an old woman, who offered him water and boiled beans—benda kaalu in Kannada. The grateful king was supposed to have named the settlement “Bendakaaluru": The town of boiled beans. This evidently metamorphosed to Bengaluru in due course of time.
However, the discovery of a ninth century temple inscription—referring to the name of Bengaluru—has put paid to the story and, literally, relegated it to an urban legend.
There is no such doubt regarding the role played by the Kempe Gowda bloodline—the feudatory rulers under the Vijayanagara empire—who founded the city of Bengaluru. Named after their family deity’s consort, Kempamma, Kempe Gowda I founded the city in 1537. He soon constructed a mud fort with a protective moat, and established markets in its premises.
Kempe Gowde I is also credited with the construction of several lakes or keres in and around this original mud fort, for the purposes of drinking water and irrigation: the Dharmambudhi lake, the dried bed of which today houses Kempegowda Bus Station, and the now decrepit Kempambudhi lake are some of the most noteworthy ones. His grandson, Kempe Gowda II, also built many lakes and watchtowers around the city.
Many of these medieval lakes that once slaked the city’s thirst and watered its crops have today been ravaged by urbanization and the ensuing encroachment. Kempe Gowde I also championed the construction of several temples around the town; one of the earliest such temples that was renovated and constructed outside the fort’s perimeter was the Gavi Gangadhareshwara temple.
And it was to this temple that I boarded the No. 35 bus on 14 January. The time was 3.10pm and the bus was uncommonly crowded. On most days, buses starting from the Kempegowda Bus Station tend to be crowded. Bengaluru is a city in the throes of agonizing urbanization. Everything is crowded.
But this was a Saturday. And yet, the bus thronged with people. All of them, like me, were on their way to the bus stop near the swimming pool in Gavipuram. We were going to witness a breathtaking celestial phenomenon.
Opening scenes
To visit the Gavi Gangadhareshwara temple, alight at the bus stop overlooking Kempambudhi Lake. A short walk up the road leading south takes you to the temple.
From outside its walls the temple looks unremarkable. But on stepping into the forecourt several distinctive features catch the eye. The main idol of the temple is inside a cave that devotees descend into via steps. Unusually for a South Indian temple, the complex is not aligned to any of the cardinal directions—it faces south-west. This is perhaps the first clue to the temple’s astrophysical relevance, and why it is such a draw for the hundreds of devotees who throng around me. There are more such clues.
In the forecourt stand two monolithic structures, named Suryapana and Chandrapana—each consisting of a massive disc atop a supporting pillar, like giant stone lollipops. Engravings of sitting bulls on the discs face each other. The discs are identical in size and have a diameter of about 6ft. Grooves cut into the discs are at right angles to each other, on both faces, giving them the appearance of a sniper rifle’s crosshairs.
Along with these structures are the objects associated with the iconography of Shiva—the trishula (trident) and the damaru (an hourglass-shaped, two-headed drum). In between the two discs there is a brass dhwajasthambha (flagstaff), and a small cubicle housing a statue of Nandi, Shiva’s bull mount.
The outer mantapa (vestibule) leading to the cave has pillars in the Vijayanagara style, set into the floor, a few inches below the level of the forecourt. The entrance to the cave is flanked by statues of Shiva’s dwarapalakas (doorkeepers).
A small flight of stairs leads one down to the cave that is hardly 6ft high; the height tapers off further into the shrine. In the cave temple the presiding idol, a Shiva linga, is surrounded by several smaller deities and sages, and the two pradakshine (circumambulatory) paths. Another statue of Nandi faces his master. There are also entrances into two secret tunnels which, according to legend, lead to Shivaganga and Varanasi.
The low height of the pradakshine paths lends itself to the Hindu customary practice of bowing one’s head while paying obeisance to god or one’s elders. A steady, thin stream of water always flows through the cave, next to the main idol. This undoubtedly harkens back to the myth of Ganga (the personification of the holy river) getting entrapped in Shiva’s hair and emerging from his matted locks as a small stream and thence flowing onto the earth.
Hence, the temple derives its name from this combination of topographical features and mythology: gavi, meaning cave, and a representation of Shiva as Gangadhareshwara (dhara meaning adorning and eshwara meaning divinity). Thus, Gavi Gangadhareswara means the Cave of the Lord who adorns the Ganga. The name of the locality, Gavipuram (puram meaning dwelling or settlement), too draws its name from the cave temple.
A touch of the sun
I was here, along with hundreds of others, on the auspicious occasion of Makara Sankranti, which marks the entry of the sun into the zodiac sign of Capricorn. Each year on this day the temple experiences a huge influx of devotees, eager to witness the headlining celestial event. Anticipation builds up to a fever pitch. In large tents specially put up to house visitors, hundreds of eyes eagerly watch TV monitors broadcasting live pictures from inside the cave. Elsewhere all over Bengaluru, thousands more wait anxiously as they watch live TV broadcasts.
Then, not a minute too soon, the rays of the descending sun made their way through an arch on the temple’s western compound wall. The rays passed through a couple of windows into the cave and pierced through the haze of the aarathi.
The beams gradually traversed the length of the Nandi’s body in the direction of his head; and then an hour before sunset, amid the beating of drums, fervent chanting and the pouring of milk libations over the idol, the rays passed through Nandi’s horns and sought the foot of the idol at precisely 5.19pm.
In ten minutes the beams enveloped the idol. Bathed in light, it shone for five whole minutes. Devotees watched their eyes glued to the screen. And then the beams moved away. This annual, ephemeral phenomenon is called Surya Majjana, or the Sun Bath.
For some devout Hindus—apart from being a visual spectacle—this phenomenon is steeped in strong religious symbolism, which explains its draw. But behind it lies a tale of scientific knowledge, architectural prowess and some intriguing local history.
The wobbling earth
As I had described in an earlier Mint on Sunday article, a unique and crucial characteristic of the earth is the tilt of its axis with its orbital plane. In the absence of this tilt (nearly 23.5 degrees in the present day), the sun would rise and set in the same position every day. And we would have no seasons at all. It is this tilt that gives the planet its seasons and a temple in Bengaluru its annual celestial spectacle.
Because the earth rests on its side, so to speak, the points of sunrise and sunset move like a pendulum between the tropics, from one extreme in late December to the other in late June. Correspondingly, the length of the day varies across the world based on the sun’s real-time position.
However, on any given day, somewhere on the planet, the sun is directly overhead at noon. An object on that latitude would have its shadow move exactly on that imaginary latitudinal line from sunrise to sunset; what is more—at local noon, the object could cast no shadow at all. Think of an actor standing on a stage as a spotlight passes directly overhead, in a straight line from one side to the other, pointing straight down.
Now at each hemisphere’s summer solstice, the sun is directly overhead at the respective extreme tropical latitude (~21 June in the northern Tropic of Cancer and ~22 December in the southern Tropic of Capricorn). These are the extremes of the pendulum motion we spoke about before. The sun will go so far and no further to the north or the south. If you live outside these extremes you will never experience the sun directly overhead.
For a person located between the tropics, on the other hand, the sun is overhead at noon twice a year—once when it moves from north to south and once when it goes in the opposite direction. On the tropics, where the sun takes a U-turn so to speak, it happens only once—at the respective solstice. And outside this band, never. This is why "tropical" is a term used to describe places that are very warm at least part of the year.
Cultures all over the world have used observations of winter solstice to keep track of food reserves and agriculture. Many of them even built structures to track this southern extreme point of the sun’s perambulation. The most famous examples include ancient observatories at Stonehenge, Goseck and Chankillo, graves at Newgrange and Maeshowe, the Mayan structures at Tulum and Chichen Itza, and the Karnak Temple complex in Egypt.
Many Hindus believe that different times of the year are suitable for different types of religious worship; auspicious rituals (shubha karya), such as sacred thread ceremonies, are performed by some only during uttarayana (uttara meaning north and ayana meaning motion). Uttarayana (referring to the period of movement of the sun in the northward direction), with its longer, warmer days, signifies a period of positivity for them.
In a similar vein, many believe that dakshinayana (due to shorter periods of daylight) is associated with negative effects. Hence, penitential activities like fasts, fire sacrifices, pilgrimages and charity are undertaken by some during the sun’s movement southwards. The journey of the sun, as it seeks god and cleanses itself after witnessing the debilitating effects of dakshinayana (dakshina meaning south), is a story of redemption strikingly reminiscent of traditional customs.
Signs of confusion
The festival of Makara Sankranti marks the entry of the sun into the zodiac sign of Makara, or Capricorn. The festival is known by many other names—Pongal, Bihu, Maghi, Maghe Sankranti—in different parts of India and Nepal, and all celebrations include some form of a ritual feast, celebrating the harvest and ceremonially using new items, all signifying new beginnings. At the Gavi Gangadhareshwara temple in Bengaluru, too, this alignment of stars is known as both Makara Sankranti and uttarayana.
This year, Makara Sankranti was celebrated on 14 January. Like the dates of the solstice, it can vary by a day or so in the short term due to Earth’s period of revolution. So currently we live at a time when Sankranti falls on 14 or 15 of January.
But hang on, isn’t there something amiss here?
Recall, uttarayana is the movement of the sun in the northward direction; by definition, shouldn’t it be at the winter solstice, where the sun has reached its apparent southernmost extent? The transition to the northward movement should happen at the end of December, as discussed earlier.
By the middle of January, when the sun moves into Capricorn and Makara Sankranti is celebrated, isn’t the sun in uttarayana already? If so then why is Makara Sankranti confused for uttarayana in the temple’s ceremonies and lore? In fact, there is one more name for the Sankranti festival that I deliberately withheld earlier—it is called Uttarayan in Gujarat and parts of Rajasthan, which lends its name to the kite festival during its celebration.
Over the long term (~25,700 years), the earth wobbles around its axis, slowly changing its orientation (like a wobbly top). This phenomenon is called precession. It causes a gradual shifting of pole stars once every thousands of years.
Similarly, the date of “entry" of the sun entering different zodiac signs also varies—going through a full circle every ~25,700 years, or by 1 degree every ~71.6 years. Makara Sankranti will shift further away from the winter solstice by a day every ~72 years. Amazingly, after about 12,000 years, Makara Sankranti would happen in June, in the peak of northern hemisphere summer, and then move into the dakshinayana realm!
There are other places also where this confusion manifests. The Tropic of Capricorn owes its etymology to the sun entering the constellation of Capricorn (Makara) at the same time of the winter solstice, about 1,700 years ago—also the time when the date of Makara Sankranti exactly matched with that of the winter solstice.
This confusion is quite puzzling given the fact that Indian astronomers were aware of this phenomenon (called ayanamsha) and computed accurate values. The Wikipedia page for Uttarayana notes that lack of understanding of differences between two different existing scales of measurement of a year causes this confusion.
In 2006, a scientist in Bengaluru decided to investigate the matter further.
Structural learnings
Some two decades ago one of her colleagues showed B.S. Shylaja a photograph of the beams of sunlight falling on the Gavi Gangadhareshwara idol. Shylaja, a widely published astrophysicist and director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium in Bengaluru, was intrigued. So she paid a visit to the temple.
“I found it peculiar that it was not aligned to any of the cardinal directions. The various structures in the patio also added to my curiosity. In order to get to the bottom of it, I started visiting the temple frequently and observing shadows through the year," she said. Many years later, realizing that this called for a proper investigation, she roped in two graduate student then associated with the planetarium’s Research Education Advancement Program.
From 2006 to 2008, Jayanth Vyasanakere, who now has a doctorate in physics, and K. Sudheesh diligently observed and recorded the sun’s shadows at the temple and how these shadows fell on idols and other statuary. Over the course of their investigation, Shylaja and her team discovered that the shadow of the western pillar would fall exactly on the eastern pillar on the summer solstice sunset in late June; and, despite the trees hampering observations during sunrise, they conjectured that the shadow of the eastern pillar would fall on the western pillar at sunrise on the winter solstice.
Furthermore Shylaja’s team discovered that, close to the time of the summer solstice sunset, the shadow of the dhwajasthambha in the forecourt also fell on the vertical mark of the eastern "crosshairs" disc. These observations had never been made before, leading the researchers to believe that there was much more to the temple’s layout and design than merely the Makara Sankranti spectacle.
But the primary question on Shylaja’s mind remained. Why did the temple seem to celebrate Makara Sankranti and uttarayana at the same time when clearly there was a significant gap in the occurrences of both events? And if the Surya Majjana was not timed to occur at the solstice then that meant that the alignment of the idol with the sunbeams should happen not just once in the year but twice—once just before the solstice and once again when the sun took the solstice U-turn and came back. But there was no record of a second such event at the temple.
By a quirk of fate, Shylaja found a clue to resolving these problems right at home.
Art imitates life
“My father, the late Ba Na Sundara Rao, authored a book on Bengaluru’s history many years ago. I remember him showing me paintings of a barren Lalbagh. Unfortunately, he could not get the requisite permissions to feature them in his book, but through him I was aware of Thomas Daniell’s work," she said, pointing me in the direction of the famous English landscape painter.
Daniell was a man of serious painting pedigree. Unable to establish himself as a painter of repute in England, he obtained permission to travel east in 1784—from the East India Company. On his travel to India via China, he took an assistant—his nephew, William Daniell. The Daniells spent nearly nine years (from 1786) travelling the country, making sketches, drawings and aquatints of scenery and architecture. Between 1795 and 1808, they produced Oriental Scenery—a publication of six volumes containing a total of 144 hand-coloured aquatint views of India. Two such aquatints were connected to the temple.
The first one was of the view of a nearby hill (called the Harihara gudda), just east of the temple. From the painting, it can be observed that the region surrounding the temple which had a Kempegowda tower and other upright structures was barren, and devoid of any vegetation, unlike today; it must have been ideal for making astronomical observations of the solstice.
Today, the same view is marred by thick foliage--the white paint of the Kempegowda tower (circled in orange in the picture below) barely sneaking a peek amidst the greenery.
The second aquatint—titled Entrance to a Hindoo Temple—is the mother lode. Due to the settlements next to the temple, obtaining such a vantage point is impossible today.
The footnote accompanying the painting notes the various features of the temple:
“The entrance of the temple has a very striking effect from the size and singularity of the mythological structure wrought in stone,... trident of Mahadeva and the chakra of Vishnoo supported perpendicularly... The passage leading to the interior which is partly evacuated, is completely choked up with large stones so as to be inaccessible. This place having now no establishment for religious duty, is accordingly deserted."
It must be noted that the painting was from 1792—the time immediately following the Third Anglo-Mysore war. Since the temple was located outside the ramparts of the Bengaluru Fort, it must have been deserted fearing an attack, with the entrance being made inaccessible.
Nevertheless, the resemblance to the temple’s features is striking. The hill in the background contains some of the stone structures from the previous aquatint—the Kempegowda monument, a pillar and a disc atop a column. Crucially, clues regarding the temple’s architecture at the time can be garnered by careful observation. Shylaja’s team pounced on them.
The temple’s terrace was not accessible at the time Daniell produced the aquatint; the gopurams (ceremonial towers) were much closer to the entrance of the temple, which indicates that the temple has undergone a recent facelift. At some point in the past 225 years, new walls and enclosures were constructed; the three arch-like structures are now enclosed inside the temple; and, most importantly, there was no longer a window on the western wall of the temple (present location is circled in orange).
Hence the Suryapana and Chandrapana might have been used in order to ascertain the day of the solstices.
In light of this newfound evidence, Shylaja and her team concluded that the outer mantapa—with its pillars—was a later addition. The last set of the pillars in the mantapa were at the entrance of the cave; their deductions showed that the construction of the westernmost pillar (now fused with the entrance of the cave) blocked the sun’s rays from ever reaching the idol from the winter solstice onwards. It was a clever bit of architectural retrofitting, sometime in the last two centuries, that facilitated the spectacular events of January.
Taking inspiration from Shyalaja, I did some small-time sleuthing of my own. It turns out that there was another artist, James Hunter, who sketched scenes from everyday and military life in late 18th century India. He was a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery who served in the Third Anglo-Mysore war and, additionally, was a military artist—not quite boasting the same artistic credentials of the Daniells.
He too, painted the scenery of the temple, but wrongly identified it as a Moorish Mosque. In spite of it also being painted from a similar perspective, the orientation of various structures have been misrepresented. Additionally, his aquatint has one crucial extra detail—that of the arch on western compound wall, suggesting that it might have existed around 1792.
A second glance
“There is another reason I was interested in this temple. When I first heard about the event, I wondered why it had to occur only on 14 January; it was a solar event after all," Shylaja said, adding a new twist to the tale of the temple.
Earlier in this article, we’ve seen that the sun is directly overhead at noon twice a year for every latitude between the tropics (and only once at the tropics—at the solstice). Since the Surya Majjana does not occur on a solstice, and Bengaluru is not on a tropic, it follows that there is another date on the other side of the solstice, when the sun follows a near-identical apparent path across the sky, and aligns perfectly with the idol, like it is at Makara Sankranti.
Hence, the phenomenon of Surya Majjana should be observable on that day too, but this is not publicly known or acknowledged by the temple authorities.
In order to explore this theme further, I looked for other structures around the world which have a similar, cleverly designed and short-lived solar phenomenon as their main draw. The Abu Simbel rock temples witness a similar event; it is believed that the axis of the temple was positioned by ancient Egyptian architects in a fashion such that on two particular, non-contiguous days at sunrise, the sun would illuminate all the sculptures on the back wall, except for Ptah—the god of the underworld—who always remains in the dark.
There are other temples in India—the Srivaikuntanathan temple at Srivaikutam and others—where similar sights are witnessed, but all of them explicitly publicize two distinct events, unless they occur on a solstice.
My search for similar "paired" solar events took me to another corner of the world. The Anthem Veterans Memorial—located in the Anthem Community Park in Anthem, Arizona—was constructed to honour the service and sacrifice of the US armed forces. The memorial consists of five vertical pillars (with elliptical holes bored in them), which signify the five branches of the US military.
The monument has been designed so as to allow the sun’s rays to pass through the five ellipses of the five pillars, and form a perfect spotlight over the mosaic of the Great Seal of the United States, on 11.11am each Veteran’s Day, 11 November.
On the memorial’s webpage, chief engineer Jim Martin notes that they used a mean of 100-year-old data in order to create this illumination at 11.11 (with a time fluctuation of ±12 seconds). Once again, this is a phenomenon that should occur twice this year as the event is not on a solstice. But here too, the website didn’t explicitly mention the second occurrence, or that it was an annual one-off.
I sought out Martin over email. He confirmed my suspicions. There is in fact a second occurrence of the alignment, in January. “In fact many of the pictures that you see floating on the internet were probably taken on the January occurrence since the Veterans Day Ceremony is quite crowded during the illumination. There is a little variance in the date of the return illumination. As you might guess, we do get questions from around the globe about the math and this same question came up a couple years ago".
To his credit, he shared with me a detailed PDF containing the math of the memorial—which had a descriptive account of the various computations, and the date of the second occurrence (with near-perfect illumination) around 31 January (though not at 11.11). This second date with the sun has no special connotations. Thus, crowds are conspicuous by their near-absence.
Perhaps the experience of a great, convenient narrative taking precedence over a fact is not unique to a single culture.
The sun has left the building
So, when would the second celestial event occur at the Gavi Gangadhareshwara temple?
The December solstice of 2016 was on the 21st; the Surya Majjana was celebrated on 14 January—after a gap of ~24 days. In the Gregorian calendar that we use today, the solstice points are held to a fixed set of dates, and this is continuously corrected over time to retain them as reference. The latitude of zero shadow varies a lot more slowly (~47 degrees in ~183 days) compared to the sun’s angular position (1 degree every 4 minutes), and hence partial illumination can be observed both at the temple and the American memorial on the days neigbhouring the events.
Hence, and we can skip more math here, the corresponding event of a second Surya Majjana with near-identical illumination would have occurred ~24 days before the solstice—around 28 November 2016.
Would it have taken place at a similar time in the day?
The short answer is no. The long answer is: It’s complicated and has to do with the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun. In the temple’s case, though the phenomenon occurred at 5. |
a million miles an hour. Sometimes, I feel like life has the wind behind it, pushing it forward, and it leaves me behind, gasping for breath and calling for it to slow down. Books are a tiny piece of magic in a constantly moving world. In my opinion, they’re the world’s greatest and worst metaphor for life all in one go.
I’ll start with why they’re the worst metaphor. They’re the worst metaphor, because you can close books. You can shut them whenever you want and go and do something else. You can stay up all night reading, get to the end of the book and put it down, shut your eyes, and return to your dreams. You can’t do that with life and maybe that’s the reason I love books so much. Books allow you to live a thousand lives and a dream a hundred dreams, put yourself in the position of someone completely different, or someone completely similar. In real life, you only get once chance. There’s no rewind button (which is a great shame for some stupid jokes I’ve made), and you never get the chance to just stop your life for a minute to do something different, and then come back to it. I get really jealous when I think about books like that. Then I remind myself I’m being jealous of an inanimate object and go back to the page.
No matter what happens, there’s always another page.
But the true reason I love books is because they’re such a great metaphor for life. A metaphor to tell you that no matter what happens, there’s always another page. No matter what awful things and events might have happened on one page, something different will happen the minute you give your fingers the chance to turn the page. A character who seems simple at the beginning develops, and you never quite know them until the very last page. And lastly, some books are great. Some books are not so great. Some books are great to certain people. Others are great to other people. And that’s ok.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some books are great, others less so. Just like people. Photograph: Agencja Fotograficzna Caro / Ala/Alamy
There’s a reason people still read books over watching one more episode of Suits (although that’s a really great programme). And it’s because you can’t the feeling that you get reading a good book that you get watching a programme. There’s something fulfilling about feeling those crisp edges on your hands, of watching scenes play out in your head, of fantasising over characters you wish existed. There’s just something truly magical about having something so simple in your hands that has the power to make you feel so much, to make you feel less alone and to make you feel worth more, as you become involved with the plot, the twists and the turns.
What are the best retellings and sequels of classic books for kids? Read more
Books need YOU to be complete and that’s why we still read.
As a typical teenager, I stopped reading. I would tell myself this was it, this wasn’t cool. And then I’d stop. And each time I’d tell myself I was too old or some other excuse, but I always came back to reading, because reading stands on its own two feet, but it needs yours too. Netflix needs a strong internet connection, and maybe the new episode of your favourite show isn’t out yet. But if it is, it tells you what to think, it tells you what to believe, it tells you what the characters look like, how they act towards one another. It’s the same with television and Youtube and even radio and audiobooks: all claimed to be threats to the bookish industry. But books need YOU to be complete, and I think that’s why we still read. They need us to decide in our heads if we like the characters and what they look like, and how they talk, so we can daydream in empty classrooms and watch the world go by. They need us to decide exactly when we pick them up, when we put them down. If you miss something, go back a couple of pages. Books are just so unbelievably calming, having the control to read whenever and wherever and whatever you want.
Terry Pratchett: 'I taught myself more in the library than the school taught me' - video Read more
So, what’s future of books? They’re not going anywhere. People love them too much. There’s a reason why hundreds of people campaign against libraries the government threaten to close. And there’s a reason why pieces of people, with magic ingrained in their spines, and love and thought drenched in the marks on the page, still exist.
Because, as long as we’re humans, we will love escaping. And as long as we love escaping, we’ll love finding new paths and people to learn about and love. And as long as we love finding new paths and people, we’ll love stories. And ultimately, as long as we love stories, we will love books.
How do I get involved in the Guardian children's books site? Read more
Will books ever die? Tell us what you think on Twitter @GdnChildrensBks or by email childrens.books@theguardian.com and we’ll add your thoughts to this blog.The Resonanz Children’s Choir (TRCC) is one of Indonesia’s most amazingly talented musical groups, a fact they proved once again last weekend with a huge win at the Claudio Monteverdi Choral Festival and Competition, which was held in Venice, Italy, from July 7-10.
TRCC came out on top at the end of the international competition, in which they sang against other top choir groups from all over the world. They not only earned the top spot in the Children and Youth category, they also earned the Grand Prix award for the best overall score of any team in the competition.
The Jakarta-based choir’s winning performances mixed Asian and Western song choices, including a stirring rendition of “Táncnóta”, by Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, as well as the traditional Papuan song “Yamko Rambe Yamko”, which they performed in the final round.
In a press release announcing the big win, TRCC’s manager Dani Dumadi wrote: “The Resonanz amazed the jury and audience in the Santa Margherita auditorium. That could be seen from the standing ovation they gave the choir.”
This is not the first major international competition triumph for TRCC. The 42-person choir has also won singing contest in Hong Kong, Hungary and San Francisco.
But obviously their latest win in Italy meant a lot to them. Just watch how happy they were after their victory was announced!With two markedly different approaches to player acquisitions, manager Harry Redknapp and Chairman Daniel Levy were always likely to struggle to agree on potential transfer targets. Yet, somewhere between Levy’s preference for young players with high re-sale potential and Redknapp’s penchant for seasoned, experienced Premier League veterans, Spurs stumbled upon a middle ground that has the potential to greatly improve the squad and performances.
With just £5.5m spent on three senior first team players (Scott Parker for the full £5.5m, Brad Friedel on a free transfer and Emmanuel Adebayor on loan), you might think that Spurs’ transfer window was something of a failure. However, in Adebayor and Parker, Spurs have found themselves two very good players who could dramatically alter Spurs’ fortunes on the pitch.
Emmanuel Adebayor
Adebayor brings a blend of two philosophies of football. The first is the robust and physical, typically English, dimension. He’s strong, powerful, direct, great in the air (so should be effective at converting Bale/Lennon/Assou-Ekotto/Walker’s crosses), and has a burst of speed that you have to have in the Premier League to be a top striker. He’s also more than capable of contesting the very many speculative long balls Messrs Dawson, Assou-Ekotto and Huddlestone like to play. The second is the more continental, on the deck style. He integrated well into the Real Madrid team, and he spent several successful years at Arsenal who play a possession based (more European) style. With both teams he showed an effectiveness with the ball at his feet, intelligence, great close control, smart movement, good use of the ball, and an ability to link up play (and pass and move). So as well as being able to mix it physically with the likes of Vidic, Terry and the plethora of other no-nonsense, powerful centre-backs in the Premier League, he can also combine to great effect with Spurs’ foreign craftsmen, like Modric and van der Vaart.
Perhaps the greatest asset Adebayor possesses that Spurs’ current strikers do not, is a busyness and presence in the final third. Below is a chalkboard showing the final third activity of Pavlyuchenko and Defoe in the 2-1 defeat to Chelsea last season:
Pavlyuchenko and Defoe made just 15 successful passes between them in 90 minutes, and did not play a single pass inside the final third. They had minimal impact on the match, provided almost zero creativity and were ineffective in providing an outlet or release ball for the midfield and defence.
To contrast that, here is a chalkboard of Adebayor’s performance for Arsenal away to Manchester City in February 2008. In an attempt to preempt suggestions that I’ve shown one of Adebayor’s best games and one of Defoe/Pavlyuchenko’s worst, I’ve also added Defoe’s chalkboard against Wigan in 2009 when he scored five times:
The difference could not be greater. Adebayor made just one unsuccessful pass (completing 41 of 42 passes), played 15 passes in the final third (as many as Pavlyuchenko and Defoe made across the whole pitch against Chelsea) and picked up an assist. Defoe, on the other hand, attempted 15 passes (12 of which were successful) and made just five successful passes in the final third (four of which were backwards). This was Defoe’s best ever game in a Spurs shirt, and yet he completed just 12 passes.
This lack of activity, passing ability and final third creativity amongst Spurs’ strikers was/is crippling. Last season, Pavlyuchenko managed 16.3 passes per game and De foe slumped to a measly 12.3 passes per game. In 2009/10, Adebayor clocked up an average of 31.4 passes per game (just 0.5 less than Carlos Tevez) – more than Pavlyuchenko and Defoe combined. Crouch’s passes per game average wasn’t quite as terrible at 20.9, but this came primarily in deep areas. His involvement was generally more significant than his peers, but his lack of pace allowed opposition defences to push up, thereby restricting the space available to van der Vaart between the lines. Adebayor’s speed will deny opposition defences the chance to hold a higher line, thereby creating more room for van der Vaart to operate in.
Another big plus with regard to Adebayor is how many of his goals are scored inside the penalty box. Last season, no team scored more goals from outside the box than Spurs – 15 (which accounted for nearly a third of all goals scored last year) – while Defoe failed to score a league goal from inside the box all season. In Adebayor’s Premier League career, 59 of his 61 goals have been scored from inside the penalty box. Another point worth noting is how much better Adebayor is at running the channels than Spurs’ current strikers. Below is an excellent YouTube video that exclusively shows Adebayor’s build-up play:
There are question marks over the signing of Adebayor though, namely: 1) Consistency and 2) Temperament. Point one stems from the notion that Adebayor only plays well for the first few games of the season. This is not the case. Between January and the end of the season for the last four years in all competitions, Adebayor has scored a combined total of 41 goals from 82 appearances – a goal every other game. The second point (which refers to the belief that Adebayor is a trouble-maker) may well be a media exaggerated myth. Adebayor came across very well during his pundit stint with the BBC at the 2010 World Cup, while Arsene Wenger (Adebayor’s former manager) disagrees with the idea that Adebayor is hard work: “I fight against that he is high maintenance. He is not high maintenance. When he comes in, in the morning, he is on time. He works well. He is never disrespectful. He is a top class player and attitude-wise, we had no problem with him.” Wenger also added that, “He is a player who needs confidence. He needs to feel that he is a regular.” At Tottenham, Adebayor will be the main man.
Scott Parker
At almost 31-years old, and having played for a side that finished bottom of the league last year, Parker may not instantly strike you as a player that can propel Tottenham forward. There have been accusations that Parker will block Sandro’s development, that his legs have gone, and even that he’s simply a “jobs for the boys” style signing on Redknapp’s part. But that does Parker a great disservice.
Three time “Hammer of the Year” and FWA Footballer of the Year, Parker has been a consistently talismanic figure for West Ham over the past few years. He has almost single-handedly dragged West Ham through matches, and they would have been relegated a lot sooner but for his presence. He’s an excellent motivator (see his half-time speech against West Ham that invoked the spirit of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech…and made Carlton Cole cry like a baby), he’s a great person to have in the dressing room and he sets an example both on the field and off it (the sort of player that would never need a super-injunction, according to Alan Curbishley). Parker is vocal, he never gives up, he delivers consistently high quality performances, he’s a leader on the pitch, he’s passionate, he drags his team through matches and he never lets his side roll over. The reemergence of Spurs’ soft core (briefly plastered over by the signing of Wilson Palacios), means Parker is exactly the sort of player the Spurs team desperately needs.
But aside from those characteristics, he’s also an excellent and versatile footballer and below are four chalkboards which highlight that:
The first chalkboard shows Parker in a more disciplined, defensive role against Liverpool (who were in the middle of their “King Kenny” fueled resurgence). This is the sort of role you can expect to see him play if partnered alongside Modric in a 4-4-1-1 or 4-4-2, lots of lateral passing and not too adventurous in the final third (though he did score). He completed 37 of 43 passes. The second chalkboard shows Parker’s tenacity, bite and tackling ability against Spurs in a 0-0 draw in March. Parker was literally everywhere, pressing, marking and winning the ball back for his team. He won a massive 9 of 14 tackles and made four interceptions. He also finished the match with a passing accuracy of 87%. The third and fourth chalkboards show Parker in more all-action displays. His role is closer to that of a box-to-box midfielder, picking the ball up from the back four and retaining possession in the midfield, as well as probing offensively in the final third. Both chalkboards highlight a willingness to get on the ball and dictate proceedings. Against West Brom he attempted 81 passes with a completion rate of 88% (also winning six tackles), while against Stoke City he attempted 82 passes with a completion rate of 83% (also winning three tackles and making six interceptions). Parker is not just a pure water-carrier like many defensive midfielders, but offers calmness and creativity on the ball too.
How does Parker compare to our other central midfielders (2010/11)?:
The first point to note is that Parker makes almost twice the number of tackles as Huddlestone or Jenas and also has the highest interceptions rate. However, that comes at a cost: eight yellow cards and 1.4 fouls per match – though interestingly, that foul rate is the same as Sandro (and is more economical than Huddlestone, who concedes 1.3 fouls for every 1.6 tackles he wins).
What sets Parker apart as a defensive midfielder is his ability on the ball. His average of 46 passes per game is far higher than Spurs’ other two primary defensive shields (Sandro and Palacios), while his 83% passing accuracy actually eclipses Huddlestone. Parker also chips in with assists, completed more successful dribbles than anyone bar Modric, has the third highest key passes per game average and scores goals (with a greater goals per shot ratio than any other Spurs midfielder). He is a complete player, offering steel, grit and defensive solidity, as well as ball retention and creativity.
In summary
All things considered, Spurs did pretty well in the transfer market this summer. Three issues were addressed: 1) A misfiring frontline was strengthened (at least in the short term) by the loan signing of Emmanuel Adebayor; 2) A shaky, gaffe-prone goalkeeper (Gomes) was given competition in the form of Brad Friedel; 3) A fragile, quiet and often timid midfield core was fortified by the signing of Scott Parker.
There are still weaknesses however, and Spurs are in need of further investment in January and next summer (see Windy’s Blog on the short-term nature of Redknapp’s squad), specifically: 1) A long term goalkeeper; 2) A long term, permanent striker; 3) A centre-back; 4) Quick left/right wing cover.
But, having retained key players, shifted dead-wood (which resulted in a net profit of about £27m in the summer window) and reinforced the squad with experienced players, the transfer window should be considered a relative success. The starting XI has improved, there is competition for places, quality back-up in almost every position and Redknapp’s senior squad should receive support from some able youngsters (Yago Falque, Andros Townsend).The city's longest running mayor will have to wait a little while longer to see if his decades-long time in office will end.
With the exception of one term, John Land has been mayor since 1950. When the now-93-year-old served his first term in office, Harry Truman was president of the United States.
But after Tuesday's municipal election, none of the four candidates received the required majority of the vote, sending the race into an April 8 runoff between Land and City Commissioner Joe Kilsheimer, who received more votes than the longtime mayor.
Land received only 38 percent of the vote; Kilsheimer got 48 percent, the closest to the necessary 50 percent plus one vote. Glen Chancy received 10 percent of the vote, with 4 percent to Gregg Phillips.
Land said he has led the city through tough economic times, but is looking forward to the next four years, even with Tuesday's initial election so close.
"You never can tell in an election how it's going to go," Land said. "Sometimes you get a good feeling and it goes to the other people and goes the other way."
"Well, we're going to be out there, you know, addressing the issues and talking to the voters and arguing our case for change," Kilsheimer said.
The mayoral race is not the only runoff election scheduled for April 8 in Apopka. None of the candidates for City Council Seat 3 received the 50 percent plus one of the vote.
On the City Council, Diane Velazquez beat out incumbent Marilyn Ustler McQueen for seat 2.
Meanwhile, further south in Winter Garden, incumbents celebrated victory as John Rees will retain his position as mayor. Also, Kent Makin will continue to serve District 1 on the city commission.
Incumbent Sarah Sprinkel also retains her District 2 seat on the Winter Park City Commission.About
Fight Like a Girl Phoenix is working to bring fans of all pop geek culture something they can wear, use, or display in everyday life. These objects are subtle but make a powerful statement. Its like belonging to a special club and only those that are in the know are invited in.
The first in our (Hopefully) long line up is the Sailor Scout Bows. You know, yes, THOSE bows. Representing the planetary guardians of the solar system.
Each of these pins are going to be hard enamel and are rich in color and dainty in size. Only 25mm (1 inch) Wide.
Perfect for pinning on just about anything. Fellow fans will be jealous of your one of a kind specially made pin. Don't worry though. You can tell them that they will also be available at a later date at www.fightlikeagirlphx.com.
Thank you so much for your time!
Once we have funded I will be able to place an order for the Pins. I will post updates with live photos of the actual pins. For now these are the mockups.
When we reach $3,000 the super fun starts with all the stretch goals!
I went back through and did the calculations. If we hit $4k I can include a free pin of each unlocked pin for each physical initial pledge! So if you order 1 pin and we unlock every pin then you will receive 1 of each of the stretch goal pins. Pretty sweet huh? Pledge and Share!On New Year’s Day, the Michigan State Spartans dug deep down, especially on defense, in the fourth quarter to hold off the Pac-12 Champion Stanford Cardinal to win the 100th edition of the Rose Bowl. It was the team’s first victory in Pasadena since 1988, giving Spartans fans what they’ve been craving for a long, long time.
Just as they were after their win over the Ohio State Buckeyes a few weeks ago to claim the Big Ten Championship, the entire Michigan State team was excited as they basically tore their way through the 2013 season, save that inexplicable loss to Notre Dame, of course.
Now following the win over Ohio State in Indianapolis, Michigan State head coach Mark Dantonio made reference to music artist Rich Homie Quan in his post-game interview with the FOX crew. The we learned that the rapper would indeed be in attendance on Wednesday for the Spartans’ big game, which he absolutely was.
So, it was even more spectacular when he joined in, along with head coach Dantonio, the post-game celebration with the team in the locker room afterwards as they all sang their rendition of Quan’s ‘Some Type of Way.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=nBFHOBWrSew#t=0Champions League Monaco game put back to Wednesday
German police say cause of Dortmund attack still unclear
In pictures: Dortmund bus attacked on way to the Westfalenstadion
Already having been operated on because of the rupture in the radius of his arm and the wounds in his right hand, Borussia Dortmund's Marc Bartra is now concerned about possible ligament damage.
He is awaiting discharge from the hospital, something that, if everything goes as planned, will happen on Thursday.
The delay reported across Signal Iduna Park
MARCA has been able to ascertain that the player had several pieces of glass in his arm but that he remains well and lively.
Police said they did not know who was behind the attack, in which three explosions went off at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday near the hotel where the team were staying, but said the team appeared to be the target, according to Reuters.
The father of Mikel Merino, the other Spanish footballer of Borussia Dortmund who was inside the bus, told Carrusel Deportivo that the players felt three objects hit the team bus.
A sombre calm as the fans leave Signal Iduna Park
"My son was on the bus, he was not scared, the objects have blown glass and the worst part was taken by Batra, two obejcts exploded from behind, Bartra has damaged his arm," he explained with police confirming the three hits.
The explosion occurred at the team hotel, just over 10 kilometres from the stadium in Hoechsten, located outside the city, according to police. Any sense of the attackers' identity has yet to emerge.
"The bus turned into the main street, when there was a huge explosion," goakeeper Roman Burki recounted to Blick. "I was in the back row next to Bartra, who was hit by shards of the broken window.
"After the explosion, we all ducked down on the bus and got on the floor. We didn't know what else was going to happen. The police were quickly on the scene and they handled the situation.
"We're all shocked."
Monaco goalkeeper Danijel Subasic told Croatian daily newspaper 24sata soon after the incident: "We are currently in the stadium, in a safe place, but the feeling's horrible."
The club have confirmed the quarter-final first leg to be delayed by a day, and will take place at 18:45 CET on Wednesday.
Police said initial investigations showed that the blasts near Borussia's team bus on Tuesday were caused by "serious explosives".
"After the initial investigation, we assume that this was an attack with serious explosives," Dortmund police said on its @polizei_nrw_do Twitter feed.
BVB said in a statement: "Shortly after the departure of the Borussia Dortmund team bus from the hotel to the stadium there was an incident.
"The bus has been damaged in two places. One person has been injured and is in the hospital. At this point we will inform as soon as we know more."
Bartra, 26, joined Dortmund for eight million euros last year from Barcelona, after coming through the Catalan club's youth system. He has made 12 appearances for the Spanish national team.
Borussia Dortmund's managing director Hans-Joachim Watzke was quoted telling Sky TV: "The whole team is in a state of shock."In 2010, Jane Kleeb founded Bold Nebraska, a political advocacy group working in the state to advance progressive causes and unite residents against projects like the Keystone XL pipeline.
In June 2016, with the help of Bernie Sanders supporters, Kleeb was elected chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, defeating Chuck Hassebrook (a Hillary Clinton backer) by 42 votes out of 410 cast. Following her election, she threw down the gauntlet and declared: “The opposition party is now here.” On the national stage, she serves on the board of Our Revolution, the organization that grew out of the Sanders campaign.
Kleeb, 43, lives on a farm outside Hastings, Nebraska, with her husband Scott, three daughters and their three-legged dog. She describes herself as a “mom with a minivan.”
In the following interview Joel Bleifuss, In These Times editor & publisher, asks Kleeb what the climate change movement could be doing better, how the Democratic Party can best reach rural voters and whether she is an agent of the Lutheran Church.
Joel Bleifuss: The climate change movement has in recent years become a force in national politics. As someone who is a leader of that movement, and looking back at yourself critically, what do you think that movement could have done better?
Jane Kleeb: After seven years where rural farmers and ranchers were at the forefront of one of the most significant battles of the climate movement, when I’m in a room with some of the most respected leaders of the climate movement there is still neither a connection or acknowledgement that rural people matter.
A lot of these fights are in rural communities, whether it’s rural Louisiana, rural Oklahoma or rural Nebraska. And the vast majority of their membership and donors are on the coasts, so that’s where their mindset is. I’ve been challenging this group to hire people, to not hire a young kid out of college and put them in Oklahoma, but spend time on the ground in Oklahoma so you can identify the true grassroots leaders who may not come from an Ivy League background, but know the land and water better than anybody else.
It’s important that we talk about climate change in different ways, right? In rural and small towns we may not use the word “climate change” in the first five sentences, but everything we’re doing is talking about protecting the land and water and stopping these risky projects, which ultimately, obviously, impact climate change. So I think that there’s got to be an embracing of rural communities, an embracing of the agriculture sector, not as a villain, which still, to this day, some of the big green groups, you know, villainize farmers and ranchers. And instead, look at the things that they are doing to help on climate change, like decreasing water use, many of them are putting up solar and wind to become energy independent. They’re a big part of that kind of revolution in our country. That’s one of the biggest lessons.
At the marches—and I’ve been to a lot of marches with the climate community—they always acknowledge, rightfully so, the indigenous communities who are given the first several rows of the march. But at the Forward on Climate march, on Feb. 17, 2013, when Keystone was in the height of its resistance, they didn’t even ask a farmer or rancher to be onstage. For me that shows how far we still have to come to get them to understand that focusing on things like ending imminent domain for private gain is one of the best things that they can do to help stop climate change.
JB: And I ask this as having grown up in a very small town in Missouri, why is there this divide between liberal, urban America and rural America? What are its origins? What are its roots?
JK: Some of it is because folks in urban towns have never really met or engaged with folks in rural communities. And so, there’s this stereotype that everybody in rural communities or small towns are right-wingers, which, as you know, is just not true. Right-wingers exist everywhere, right? Urban towns, small towns. They’re everywhere.
But I find, on all the small towns that I work in, that there is this beautiful ecosystem happening, and because they’re not near a Target, people become very resourceful, and there are a lot of small creative businesses that cater to the local economy—that build up the local economy. And local food is very much part of, not just a fun thing to do at a farmers’ market, but how that economy keeps going. I know not everybody from an urban town can go visit a rural community, but you can create an open space that integrates more rural thought into everything that we’re doing, because that will not only get us the votes needed to pass critical climate policy, it will also make us look at those two words—“climate change”—in very different ways.
JB: As you note, in our culture, information flows from the coastal big cities to the rest of the country. If that were reversed, what are some of the things about rural life, rural communities, small towns, that rural communities could teach the rest of the country?
JK: That relying on your neighbors is the number one key to surviving. Cattle ranchers, without their neighbors, can’t get branding done, they don’t get their fences fixed, they don’t find a stray cow. There’s a very strong connection to neighbors and the culture of helping out each other in small towns. We all know each other. There’s a very deep moral connection to the land and to the water. It’s obviously connected to their very livelihood, but it’s also connected to their culture. That is, I think, a lesson to be learned. If you actually spend some time with a farmer in a combine, he knows every contour of that land. They’re the best environmentalists. They do everything to protect endangered species. They know where the endangered species are on their land, where the whooping cranes come, you know, the nests. So, taking a step back and looking at rural communities differently and really seeing that they’re the ones that know the land and water best, and those are the experts that you should be talking to, as well as the climate scientists.
JB: How do Nebraskans feel about opening up public lands to drilling? And is this an issue that could attract more rural voters to the Democratic Party?
JK: They hate it. When the Bundy thing was happening, ranchers that I know were so pissed off at the Bundy family, because some of them graze on public land, and pay the government to do that. And they see it as a beautiful circle. Their cattle are helping manage the land and helping turn over the soil, which is critical, especially in our prairie. They’re not freeloaders. They want to see more cattle grazing on public land, and more parks that our kids can enjoy for hunting, fishing, et cetera, and not a bunch of oil companies, polluting the land. So, yes, this is one of those issues that urban and rural folks can be joining hands. We could and should be talking to rural communities. But, you can identify several of these types of issues. Public land is certainly one of them. But you can’t just do a TV ad or brochure, right? You’ve got to have the Democratic Party in these towns, talking about that issue and making it clear that Republicans are completely on the opposite side.
JB: So you think there are a significant number of Bernie/Trump voters in Nebraska, and have you met any?
JK: Yes! (Laughs) Just at the hearing this week, one of the ranchers came up to me, and said, “You know, Jane, I respect and love you for standing with us this entire time. I don’t always agree with all of those stances, like that gay marriage thing, but I know you’re always with us on our property rights and our water.” And he said, in this election, “I would’ve voted for Bernie, because Bernie really had our back. I could have never voted for Clinton.” And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Bernie supports that gay marriage thing, too.
Rural voters definitely saw Bernie in a different way. They saw him as respecting them. His ad, America, that showcased farmers and ranchers, was earth-shattering, like the way he respected the poll workers at that one town hall with CNN.
You know, small towns hate big corporations. Right, they hate big anything. They think Tyson is the devil, trying to consolidate markets and put chicken farmers under these really bad contracts. And so, there are lots of threads that Democrats should be talking to rural and small town voters on. And Bernie was obviously one of the best messengers for that.
JB: In recent years, Nebraska, on a per capita basis, has settled more refugees than any other state in America? And the Nebraska Democratic Party, under your leadership, has become known for supplying welcome baskets to refugees who are settling in Nebraska. And in that welcome basket a Democratic Party voter registration card included. Why are you doing that? Are you agents of the Lutheran Church?
JK: (Laughs) Yeah, you know, I definitely come to the party with one foot in the advocacy world and one foot in electoral politics. In every single job I’ve held, I’ve always straddled both worlds. So even when I was at AmeriCorps in the 1990s, I was always connecting the issues we working on at the local level and in school to laws that we needed to change in order to help our kids. Whether it was reduced free lunch, or money going to all-minority schools, et cetera. So when President Trump created his travel ban against Muslims, as the Democratic Party chair, I was like, we have to do something. I’ve worked with refugees, some of whom are from the Ogoni tribe along the coast of West Africa. They are our best pipeline fighters, because they had had to leave their land in Nigeria because of the oil pollution from Shell. We had to do something other than writing press releases and going to the vigils, which we did, and those were important stances for us to take.
So I called the Lutheran Family Services and the Refugee Empowerment Center and asked, what do families need? And they said it’s really difficult just getting the basic stuff: silverware, dishes, blankets, towels. So we put up an Amazon wishlist, and put out the call that at our next state Democratic Party meeting. Within a week there was very little room to walk in our office, we were getting boxes from Amazon daily with items that people donated.
People really kind of leaned into that. And at each meeting, we do this. We collect something to leave behind for the community that we’re holding our meeting in.
We have four meetings a year. So, the first meeting we collected diapers for a homeless shelter and left those with the community we had the meeting in. We did the refugee baskets this last time. This next time we’re having a meeting out in Western Nebraska, right near a reservation, so we’re collecting hygiene kits, which is something they’re in need of. There’s a lot of homeless folks up there.
It’s important that we live our values, and that we don’t just do it through statements to the press.
JB: I heard about the kerfuffle over the Democratic Party registration form and a Nebraska Democratic Party sticker that you were giving to refugees, the implication being that you are encouraging voter fraud.
JK: Yeah, it was a major week-long battle in the state. I got some death threats and some ugly posts during Keystone, but the amount of death threats and rape threats and just flat-out disgusting, racist emails and phone calls I got during those two weeks was, like, mind-boggling.
I make no apologies for including a Democratic sticker, a voter registration form in those baskets and a letter from me, as the state party chair, saying the Democratic Party welcomes you.
Our president was part of the Republican Party and I wanted them to know that there was a political party here in our country that does welcome them and does see them as a critical part of our nation. And of course the refugees couldn’t vote they weren’t citizens, but they were on the path to becoming so in the future, and I wanted them to know that it was the Democratic Party welcoming them. But of course, the Republicans take any good deed and turn it into some type of scandal. Which is so typical of the Republican playbook. So, we keep our head high, and we’re not going to back down from what we did.
JB: What kind of welcome baskets has the Nebraska Republican Party supplied to refugees settling in?
JK: None. Instead, our Republican governor just vetoed a bill that would have given felons the right to vote back. So, you know, the Republicans don’t |
, an epic drive took Verstappen all the way to the Austin podium, holding off Hamilton along the way.
Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing - Formula 1 2018 Honda Japanese Grand Prix P15 to P4, with a string of his signature sweet overtakes… there wasn’t much not to like about Daniel Ricciardo’s fine display at Suzuka, and your votes proved it.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing - Formula 1 2018 VTB Russian Grand Prix Starting 19th on the grid after engine penalties, the Dutchman stormed through the field to an amazing fifth place in another epic drive...
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing - Formula 1 2018 Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix Verstappen out-qualified and then beat the pre-race favourite, Sebastian Vettel, en route to unexpected but very well-deserved podium...
Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari - Formula 1 Gran Premio Heineken d'Italia 2018 He may not have been able to hold back a rampant Hamilton, but the Iceman's cool drive to second for Ferrari gave him his 100th F1 podium - and in front of the adoring Tifosi...
Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari - Formula 1 2018 Johnnie Walker Belgian Grand Prix A forceful move on the opening lap gave him the lead over championship rival Lewis Hamilton, and from there on in Vettel controlled things from the front in masterful fashion...
Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing - Formula 1 Rolex Magyar Nagydij 2018 It almost ended in tears thanks to a late-race clash with Valtteri Bottas' Mercedes, but nothing could take the gloss off Ricciardo''s charge from 12th to fourth...
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes - Formula 1 Emirates Grosser Preis von Deutschland 2018 Yes, race leader and title rival Sebastian Vettel crashed out. But that didn't detract anything from Hamilton's amazing drive from 14th to win amid unpredictable Hockenheim showers...
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes - Formula 1 2018 Rolex British Grand Prix He may not have scored the record sixth British Grand Prix victory he was looking for, but his charge back through the field from 18th on the road to P2 made him your overwhelming Driver of the Day...
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing - Formula 1 Eyetime Grosser Preis von Osterreich 2018 Yes, a double DNF for Mercedes helped his cause, but that didn't detract from what was a mature and measured drive from the young Dutchman for his fourth F1 win...
Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari - Formula 1 Pirelli Grand Prix de France 2018 A mistake at Turn 1 ruined both his and Bottas' chances of victory, but despite being deemed at fault for that clash, his charging recovery drive to fifth earnt the Ferrari man your nod...
Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari - Formula 1 Grand Prix Heineken du Canada 2018 Drives rarely come this close to perfection - Vettel led away from pole and never looked back as he dominated throughout to break Lewis Hamilton's recent stranglehold on Montreal victory...
Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing - Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco 2018 Winning Monaco is tough at any time. Winning Monaco while nursing a power unit issue and using only six of your eight gears is nothing short of heroic. Step up the Honey Badger...
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes - Formula 1 Gran Premio de Espana Emirates 2018 After a patchy start to the season, it all came together for Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes in Barcelona, with the reigning world champion obliterating his opposition to win by over 20 seconds...
Charles Leclerc, Sauber - Formula 1 2018 Azerbaijan Grand Prix In a chaotic race around the high-speed streets of Baku, the Monagasque rookie kept his cool and scooped his very first F1 points with a superbly mature drive to sixth place.
Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing - Formula 1 2018 Heineken Chinese Grand Prix Yes, his team made a superb strategy call when the safety car came out, but it was the superb passing moves which followed that gave their Australian driver a shock win in Shanghai.
Pierre Gasly, Toro Rosso - Formula 1 2018 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix An updated aero package, Honda power unit improvements and a magnificent drive from a man in only his seventh Grand Prix resulted in an amazing - and fully deserved - fourth place.Hawkesbury River, NSW, Australia: Discover the natural beauty of a river that is etched in Australian history. Along its 120km length, the Hawkesbury River meanders through beautiful National Parks and towering sandstone cliffs. With an abundance of incredible wildlife and scenery to match, the Hawkesbury River is the perfect destination for a paddling adventure.
The Hawkesbury River, known as Deerubbun to indigenous Australians, was primarily used to transport goods during the European settlement. Today, the River is enjoyed by many and boasts an array of water activities including waterskiing, wakeboarding, fishing, canoeing, kayaking and of course, Stand Up Paddle boarding.
*Read Trip Preparation before commencing any journey as it contains valuable information about planning your paddle
WHERE
• Nearest Major City: Sydney, NSW
The Hawkesbury River is located in the Sydney region of NSW, 47km / 29miles NW of Sydney CBD
ROUTE
• Windsor to Wisemans Ferry
DISTANCE
• 64km / 40miles
TIME / DAYS
• 4 days
ACCOMMODATION
• Riverside Oaks Golf Resort, Cattai
• Jerimuda Bed & Breakfast, Lower Portland
• Cliftonville Lodge Resort, Lower Portland
TRANSPORT
• Drive to Wisemans Ferry which is 1½ hours from Sydney by car
• Public Transport: Bus
Departs Wisemans Ferry to Windsor (Kable Street), with a bus change at Pitt Town Bottom
*Busways offer this schedule during school days only and timetables can be found at busways.com
*Alternatively, if you have the option of two cars, leave one at Wisemans Ferry and drive the other to Windsor to begin
DAY 1
* Arrive at Wisemans Ferry, park your car, then board the bus into Windsor
ROUTE
• Windsor to Riverside Oaks Golf Resort
DISTANCE
• 16km / 10miles
ACCESS SITES
• Windsor Wharf, Old Bridge St, Windsor
• Boat Ramp, Riverside Oaks Golf Resort
ACCOMMODATION
• Riverside Oaks Golf Resort
NOTES
• To find the boat ramp access at Riverside Oaks Golf Resort, be on the lookout for Merrymount (sandstone ruins) on top of the hill on the right riverbank
*Check GPS for 16km reading
• Be sure to visit Ebenezer Church for an afternoon tea break to enjoy a serving of devonshire tea and scones. The Church is Australia’s oldest operational church. (check opening times)
*Access to Ebenezer Church is on the lefthand side riverbank via a small sandy beach landing. This beach is situated after two red marker buoys. You can see Merrymount from here, so it is close by the golf resort
* Check GPS for 14km reading
DAY 2
ROUTE
• Riverside Oaks Golf Resort to Jerimuda Bed & Breakfast
DISTANCE
• 18km / 11miles
ACCESS SITES
• Boat Ramp, Riverside Oaks Golf Resort
• Boat Ramp, Jerimuda Bed & Breakfast
ACCOMMODATION
• Jerimuda Bed & Breakfast
NOTES
• Make sure to check out Merrymount (sandstone building) on the golf course before starting. Built by George Smith Hall, one of the First Settlers’ son’s in 1826
• Remember, there is a ferry crossing at Sackville, so keep your distance
DAY 3
ROUTE
• Jerimuda Bed & Breakfast to Cliftonville Lodge Resort
DISTANCE
• 17km / 10.5miles
ACCESS SITES
• Boat Ramp, Jerimuda Bed & Breakfast
• Boat Ramp, Cliftonville Lodge Resort
ACCOMMODATION
• Cliftonville Lodge Resort
NOTES
• The sunrise at Jerimuda Bed & Breakfast is one not to miss, get up early!
• Remember, there is a ferry crossing at Lower Portland, so keep your distance
• Stop off at Paradise Cafe for lunch
*Located after ferry crossing at Lower Portland on the confluence of the Colo and Hawkesbury rivers
DAY 4
ROUTE
• Cliftonville Lodge Resort to Wisemans Ferry
DISTANCE
• 13km / 8miles
ACCESS SITES
• Boat Ramp, Cliftonville Lodge Resort
• Sandy beach, Wisemans Ferry
NOTES
• Remember, there is a ferry crossing at Wisemans Ferry, so keep your distance
• Access at Wisemans Ferry is just before the second ferry crossing on the sandy beachYou've no doubt heard the famous quote about race in politics spoken by the late Lee Atwater, the most skilled Republican strategist of his generation. Liberals have cited it for years, seeing in it an explanation, right from the horse's mouth, of how contemporary Republicans use "issues" like welfare to activate racial animus among white voters, particularly in the South. Race may be an eternal force in American politics, but its meaning and operation change as the years pass. It's time we took another look at Atwater's analysis and see how it is relevant to today, because it doesn't mean what it once did. Atwater may have been extraordinarily prescient, though not in the way most people think.
If a certain word unsettles you, you might want to read something else with your coffee, but it's important we have Atwater's quote, spoken in 1981 during an interview with a political scientist, in front of us:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"
As Rick Perlstein explained, the common interpretation of the quote—that Atwater was describing how the GOP shrewdly encourages and benefits from racism among voters while maintaining deniability for doing so—isn't quite correct. Heard in context, it seems clear that the point Atwater was trying to make was that the GOP was evolving beyond racism, even if some of its favored policies were still better for some races than others. Eventually, the deniability wouldn't just be plausible, it would be genuine.
At the time, this was more than a little ridiculous. Just a year before, Ronald Reagan had opened his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, then spent a good deal of his campaign talking about welfare queens. Four years before, Reagan had told Southern audiences about how frustrating it was to stand in line at the grocery store behind a "strapping young buck" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. And seven years after the interview, Atwater would join with Roger Ailes to mastermind the "Willie Horton" strategy for George H.W. Bush, in which the mug shot of a menacing black convict became as ubiquitous in the campaign as flags at a Fourth of July parade.
But in 2014, Atwater's vision of a GOP evolving on race has finally come to pass, though not precisely in the way he intended. Back then, attacks on safety net programs like welfare and food stamps were used by Republicans as a means to activate barely contained racist feelings, with the knowledge that the more hostility white voters felt toward minorities, the better it would be for Republican candidates. Today, we see the reverse: Stirring up a bit of subconscious racism, or attacking the rights of minorities in much more practical ways, is a means to attack the safety net and undermine government.
Take, for example, the issue of voting. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, it was meant to dismantle the system under which white Southerners had kept blacks from exercising their right to vote, a system created to maintain white supremacy. And when the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the law last year, Republican states rushed to rewrite their laws to do things like require ID in order to vote. Republican states all over the country have cut back on early voting, making sure to eliminate it on the Sunday before election day, when many black churches conduct "souls to the polls" voting drives after service. In Arizona and Kansas, Republicans even passed laws requiring that you not just document who you are but provide proof you're a citizen in order to vote, laws that were just upheld by a federal judge.
Are the people who are going to be disenfranchised by a requirement for proof of citizenship going to be disproportionately minority? Of course they are. But that's not the reason Republicans are so eager to impose these requirements. The reason is that the disenfranchised voters will disproportionately be Democrats. If there were a way to just as easily keep large numbers of Democrats from the polls without harming minorities particularly, they'd be perfectly happy to adopt that method instead. That's why, for instance, in Texas the voter ID law passed by a Republican legislature and signed by Governor Rick Perry says that a gun license is a valid form of identification, but a student ID issued by a Texas university isn't. When a legislature engineers a "racial gerrymander" to pack as many black voters into as few districts as possible, the goal isn't white supremacy, it's Republican supremacy. The result may be bound up in race, but the intent is pure partisan power politics.
And when Paul Ryan starts talking about how "We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work," the racial implications may be perfectly clear (it's the "inner city," i.e. the place where black people live, that has a "culture" of laziness, as opposed to the places where there are a lot of poor white people). But Ryan's real goal isn't to get you mad at black people, it's to get you mad at the safety net. I have no trouble believing Ryan, in a way, when he says that race was not the heart of his intent. The man who once said that "the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand" is surely motivated primarily by a Randian contempt for the "takers" who might need help with food or health insurance, whatever color their skin.
Today's GOP is a place where open expressions of racism are far less tolerated, no one talks about "strapping young bucks" anymore, and the next Willie Horton is presented with more subtlety—and deniability—than ever. How much of that is because the mainstream blowback from blatantly racial appeals is just too high (just look at all the flack Ryan got), and how much because of a sincere change in perspective? It's almost impossible to say. But if America's blacks and Hispanics woke up tomorrow and starting voting 60 percent Republican, the party's leaders would welcome them with open arms, then call an emergency session of every Republican-run state legislature to get rid of all those voter ID laws.
Of course, that won't happen any time soon, so Republicans will continue to pass laws limiting minorities' ability to vote, and offer roundabout appeals aimed, some more directly than others, at the darker places where people's less generous feelings about race lie. Were he alive today, Lee Atwater would probably say, "See? I told you so."While World War Z definitely isn’t the greatest zombie film of all-time, when one considers its seemingly cursed production history, it’s a wonder director Marc Forster was able to deliver even the decent movie that we ended up getting.
Unsurprisingly, Forster wanted nothing to do with a sequel, having no desire to relive what was likely the most arduous directing experience of his career. Forster also reportedly clashed with star – and producer – Brad Pitt over creative decisions, one aspect that led to so much production turmoil.
Last year, a report surfaced that Pitt was attempting to convince his friend and frequent collaborator David Fincher to come on-board for World War Z 2, believing he would be the best man for the job of directing the high-profile project.
Realistically though, most assumed it wouldn’t happen, as Oscar-winner Fincher has been busy making mostly prestige dramas for decades now, and hasn’t made a true genre film in quite awhile.
Well, surprise surprise, Variety now reports that Fincher has officially signed on to direct World War Z 2, or whatever it ends up being called before it’s finally released. Pitt will of course return as Gerry Lane, with production likely to begin in the first quarter of 2018.
This will mark the first sequel Fincher has directed since Alien 3, on which he had a legendarily bad experience with studio FOX.
His relationship with Pitt was seemingly the deciding factor for him to break that tradition for Paramount’s big-budget zombie sequel, Fincher’s first directorial effort since 2014’s Gone Girl.
While not a critical darling, World War Z holds the distinction of being the most financially successful zombie movie ever, having hauled in nearly $600 million worldwide. Zombieland comes in a distant second on the list with $102 million worldwide.Akira Wyatt may be the face of the U.S. military’s social policy evolution during the past five years.
Transgender corpsman part of new military frontier Transgender corpsman part of new military frontier SEE MORE VIDEOS
Wyatt, a 24-year-old Navy corpsman at Camp Pendleton, enlisted as a straight man and then soon after came out as gay following the September 2011 repeal of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” guidelines.
Now, Wyatt is publicly acknowledging her status as a transgender person after the Pentagon on June 30 announced that it would immediately stop discharging transgender troops. In addition, Wyatt plans to officially change her gender to female when the Navy allows it starting in October.
“I need to do this. This is me,” she said. “I never hid my flamboyancy. When I found out that being transgender was an automatic discharge, I identified myself as a gay man. That was my cover because I still couldn’t medically transition and say I was transgender.”
An estimated 2,500 of the nation’s 1.3 million active-duty troops are transgender, along with 1,500 among the 825,000 people in the reserves, according to the Pentagon. Other estimates run as high as 12,800 active-duty and reserve personnel.
Going forward, these troops will be able to get medical treatment for transgender issues, including hormone treatment and surgery for gender reassignment if a doctor signs off.
After July 2017, recruits who are transgender will be accepted — as long as they have completed the related medical treatment and a physician has confirmed that they have been “stable” in their new gender for at least 18 months.
The Pentagon also said it will add gender identity to its equal-opportunity non-discrimination policy.
Transgender troops are just a fraction of the people affected when the ban on openly gay service members was lifted. But to critics and supporters alike, the issues are just as profound.
In making the transgender-policy announcement last month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said it’s important for the all-volunteer force to be able to draw from the largest pool of talent. Also, he billed it as a fairness issue.
“Americans who want to serve and can meet our standards should be afforded the opportunity to compete to do so,” Carter said in a speech from the Pentagon. “After all, our all-volunteer force is built upon having the most qualified Americans, and the profession of arms is based on honor and trust.”
The Center for Military Readiness decries the Defense Department’s move as social engineering.
The conservative public policy organization in Michigan also opposed the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the recent opening of combat roles to women. It argues that these moves distract from the task of maintaining a strong military. In a recent policy paper, it described being transgender as a psychological problem.
“There is no good reason for the military to normalize psychopathology as normal behavior for military service,” the group said. “These policies could force out of the military personnel who question delusions that are now official policy. None of this will improve readiness, discipline, or morale in America’s over-stressed all-volunteer force.”
Public opinion has largely mirrored the changes taking place in the American military.
In 2008, Military Times found that 35 percent of the active-duty troops it surveyed said gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve in uniform. Five years later, the figure jumped to 60 percent.
Some see the Defense Department as late to adapt, as the federal government has long allowed open service of gays and provides family benefits to same-sex couples. Carter pointed out in his announcement that over a third of Fortune 500 companies — including CVS and Ford — offer employee health insurance plans with transgender-inclusive coverage.
Of course, the U.S. military is not a retail chain or a manufacturer of sedans.
Wyatt, who was born in the Philippines to a father who had been a U.S. Marine, had experimented with dressing in drag since 2012, though she didn’t know much about transgender people.
She decided to accept her gender identity in October 2014. That’s when a Marine lance corporal on deployment with her was arrested for killing a woman in the Philippines after discovering she was transgender.
“After catching a glimpse of that guy, looking in his eyes... I felt very scared. And I felt that I needed to do something. And it occurred to me that that was my sister. I am her,” she said.
“That’s when I decided if my life was going to end with one of my Marines’ hands, then so be it, I’m going to do this.”
Wyatt has served with two all-male Camp Pendleton infantry units as their “doc” or medic, including a deployment to Okinawa, Japan with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit.
The Marine Corps was the service that warned most loudly about possible ramifications of the Pentagon’s social policy changes, including the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and combat jobs being opened to women.
Her comrades in arms have largely been supportive of her path, Wyatt said last week.
That’s because it wasn’t a surprise when then-Clark Wyatt came out as gay, and later transgender, she said.
“With Marines and corpsmen, there’s a degree of attachment, a degree of brotherhood. And I was a part of that,” Wyatt said. “They were like, ‘Oh, I knew it all along.’ But it was for me to come to terms with.”
A few fellow troops have given her pushback — “side eye,” as Wyatt calls it — but it has never turned physical.
The corpsman notified the Navy about her situation in September 2015 — roughly two months after the defense secretary convened a working group to examine the status of transgender troops with an eye toward normalizing their service.
Now Wyatt plans to make the Navy a career. It’s a path that was not open to her before June 30.
She wants to again serve with Marine infantry units, which is, ironically, something that a woman couldn’t do until recently with the end of gender restrictions on combat jobs.
“If definitely will be a bit of a challenge,” Wyatt said. “But that’s where I grew up. That’s kind of my world.”
jen.steele@sduniontribune.comSWNS Headteacher Shirley Taylor of Annette Street Primary in Glasgow with some of her pupils
Annette Street Primary School in Govanhill’s 222 children are all either from Slovakia or Romania or the children of Asian families. But head teacher Shirley Taylor said the teachers only speak English: “So the children who have been here for a while act as interpreters for the children who are new.” Mrs Taylor said: “Families originally came from Slovakia.
A lot of the children have never been to school in their home countries Shirley Taylor, headteacher at Annette Street Primary School
They settled and then started communicating with families back home, and word got out for others to come. “And now the same thing is happening with our Romanian families. "Most come from the same area, Arad, and word has got back to their extended families that if you go to Glasgow go to Annette Street. “A lot of the children have never been to school in their home countries.”
SWNS Annette Street Primary School in Glasgow
SWNS English signs at the school
The school has joined Strathclyde Business School students to launch a crowdfunding campaign. The public is being asked to provide funding for puzzles and jigsaws that require communication in English to improve pupils’ English.
SWNS Annette Street Primary School in GlasgowNever miss the latest news from TexAgs! Join our free email list
The momentum of the Texas A&M basketball program continues to grow.On Monday Billy Kennedy and his staff added another piece to the already top 10-ranked 2015 recruiting class. Kobie Eubanks, a 6-5 shooting guard from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (Elev8 Sports Institute) has committed to the Aggies and will be eligible to play December 19 of this year.Eubanks was in Aggieland this past weekend to visit with the coaching staff and players. After watching the Aggies manhandle Texas A&M International at Reed Arena on Friday night, he was impressed with where the program is headed.The talented wingman was formerly committed to Baylor and Alabama, but due to potential qualification concerns neither school was able to solidify the commitment. After the official ruling and clearance by the NCAA, Eubanks was highly recruited by Baylor, Georgetown and Texas A&M — with the Aggies ultimately winning out.Much like what Raquan Mitchell was expected to do for the Aggies, Eubanks is a quick and athletic and adds a new dimension to this recruiting class (although Mitchell was just a pure, raw athlete). The 6-5, 215-pound Eubanks can finish above the rim, as well as in the paint after contact, and has really good body control. He is a decent shooter from long and mid-range and is also able to create off the dribble.Eubanks will have to work on his defense to prepare for the collegiate level, but his physical stature will help him adjust quickly.My biggest concern currently is how this addition will affect A&M's team chemistry. The Aggies have obviously developed a great relationship as a unit and to add a new, young personality to the team at this point in the season could be strenuous on the players and coaches.Still, overall this is a good addition to the team and one that will help improve the chances of the Aggies making a good run through March Madness.As soon as we arrived in Dublin I knew it was gonna be a good one: the apartment we’d booked was deadly & only 10mins walk from the stadium, the sun was shining & AC⚡️DC were in town for a close as it gets to being a home town gig for me these days! Sweet!
Had to pop out to deliver a ticket we’d promised to a mate months ago but was a chance to soak up a bit of the atmosphere – place was buzzing already & I doubt you could fit one more person into any of the pubs nearby!
Arrived at the Aviva without any hassle & just time to pick up the Dublin tshirt then it was time for find our seats: premium level don’t you know! Fecking la di da! To be honest they were great seats and nice and easy to get to – pretty important with a two year old in tow…
So a new experience for me this time – taking our two year old daughter Beau to her first AC⚡️DC show: was a bit nervous about how she’d react to the volume and to the big crowd but whilst she was a bit overwhelmed to begin with she was soon having a great time.
Just caught the end of Vintage Trouble making some new friends again with another brilliant show but to be honest we were all there for the main event!!!
The band hit the stage and the party kicked off – have never seen a stadium fill so fast, two minutes before stage time there was loads of empty seats and gaps in the standing area, two minutes later the place was heaving…
Thankfully the party atmosphere reached the seats: they got very little use once the riff of Rock or Bust crunched around the stadium – happy days as there’s nothing worse than sitting at a rock show. It was a good natured crowd too, nobody complained when we had to sneak out and in with Beau – it might be AC⚡️DC on stage but no two year old has the patience to stay in the same place for two hours & the staff were happy to let us stand at the back and enjoy the show from there.
Best stadium sound of the UK & Ireland dates for me – crisp, loud & clear and a perfect Dublin evening: 55,000 having a blast as the sun set and band slammed through their set!
Observations:
Angus in green (obviously!)
Crowd was loud as fook
Band were definitely happy to be back in Dublin
Brian had a bash at some Irish dancing
Angus used a beer bottle thrown onstage for part of his LTBR solo
No Malcolm shout out in High Voltage
Brian seemed to be struggling with his ear piece
First appearance of boobs or bust for me on this tour!
Aviva is a great modern stadium with great acoustics
Highlights
Beau had a ball
TNT, Back in Black, Shoot to Thrill and Highway to Hell
Being back in our apartment 15mins after the end of the show
So great performance: sorry Glasgow but Dublin was so much better – better stadium, better sound, band played better, and a better crowd! This show will take some beating….
AdvertisementsAs a physicist at California Institute of Technology and the author of many books and articles, a number of them on the science of probability, Leonard Mlodinow spends a lot of time considering the question, What are the odds?
For instance, what are the odds that a single person might write — as Dr. Mlodinow has — a paper titled “Pseudo-spin Structure and Large N Expansions for a Class of Generalized Helium Hamiltonians,” a best-selling book with Stephen Hawking and at least one episode of “McGyver.” (Answer: Pretty low.)
Dr. Mlodinow has a particular, and personal, interest how the most painful events can sometimes yield unexpected results. In the first chapter of his best-seller, “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” he writes of a conversation with his father, who tells him of how he came to survive his time in the concentration camp in Buchenwald:
It struck me then that I have Hitler to thank for my existence, for the Germans had killed my father’s wife and two young children, erasing his prior life. And so were it not for the war, my father would never have emigrated to New York, never have met my mother, also a refugee, and never have produced me and my two brothers … The outline of our lives, like the candle’s flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate.
He answered the following questions via e-mail:
An earlier post by the psychologist Daniel Gilbert makes the argument that uncertainty — not knowing what misfortune will come — makes people more unhappy than misfortune itself. Do you find that to be true?
It does seem to be true of my own psychology. Also, I find that what’s most important, whatever happens, is how you deal with it. And once something bad actually happens, you can start that process, and bad can eventually even turn into good.
Many people are understandably anxious and depressed about their present and future situations. Based on what you know about predictions and human behavior, should they be?
I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct. In my own life, many things that seemed to be very bad at first actually had good consequences. For example, just as I had begun making a living writing in Hollywood many years ago, the Writer’s Guild called a strike. I thought it was awful for my fledgling career, not to mention financially ruinous. But as it turned out, the strike gave busy producers a chance to catch up on their reading, and the day the strike ended I got a call from the show runner at “Star Trek: the Next Generation,” who said he read a “McGyver” script of mine he had found lying around, loved it, and wanted to hire me on the show’s writing staff. It was a plum job and a boost to my career, and it would have never happened if not for the strike.
So I try to relax, and work on making the best of whatever develops, rather than worrying about how awful it is.
In times of crisis, such as this one, are most people able to accurately predict the outcomes of situations? Or do they tend toward too much optimism or too much pessimism?
“As someone who has taken risks in life I find it a comfort to know that even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success.”
I don’t think complex situations like this one can be predicted. There are too many uncontrollable or unmeasurable factors. Afterwards, of course, it will appear that some people had gotten it just right: since there are many people making many predictions, no doubt some of them will get it right, if only by chance. But that doesn’t mean that, if not for some unforeseen random turn, things wouldn’t have gone the other way.
The social historian (and socialist) Richard Henry Tawney, wrote, “Historians give an appearance of inevitability… by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up.” And the (neo)conservative historian Albert Wohlstetter said it this way: “After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear. We can now see what event the disaster was signaling … but before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.”
In some sense this idea is encapsulated in the cliché that “hindsight is always 20/20,” but people often behave as if the adage weren’t true. In government, for example, a “should-have-known-it” blame game is played after every tragedy. In the case of Pearl Harbor, for example, seven committees of the United States Congress delved into discovering why the American military had missed all the “signs” of a coming attack. One of the pieces of evidence cited as a harbinger recklessly ignored by the U.S. Navy was a request, intercepted and sent to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, that a Japanese agent in Honolulu divide Pearl Harbor into five areas and make future reports on ships in harbor with reference to those areas. Of special interest were battleships, destroyers and carriers, as well as information regarding the anchoring of more than one ship at a single dock. In hindsight, that sounds ominous, but at other times similar requests had gone to Japanese agents in Panama, Vancouver, Portland and San Francisco. [The analysis is most famously laid out in the 1963 book, “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,” by Roberta Wohlstetter, who was married to Albert, noted above.]
In addition to the intelligence reports that in hindsight seem to point toward a specific attack, there is also a huge background of useless intelligence, each week bringing new reams of sometimes alarming or mysterious messages and transcripts that would later prove misleading or insignificant. In advance of the event, you can’t tell one sort from the other.
It is hard to say whether people are too optimistic or too pessimistic. That depends on the person. But we should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past, or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism.
Should emotions — despair, anger, happiness — play a part in the decisions people make in their lives? In other words, should our feelings matter?
Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level. One study even showed that subjects holding a hot cup of coffee judged people differently than subjects holding a cold cup. In my case, that effect wouldn’t have been unconscious, though. I know that cold coffee makes me grumpy.
A recent news story about treating cancer told the story of one woman — a non-smoking vegetarian who exercised and had little incidence of cancer in her family — who was shocked by her cancer diagnosis. Was her reaction — and others like it — reasonable? Does “living right” work against the odds that illness or misfortune will strike us?
Assuming one is correct about the proper way to “live right” — and I’m not convinced that a straight vegetarian diet is the healthiest — it is possible to decrease the odds of bad outcomes, but that doesn’t mean they won’t occur. Anything that is possible eventually will occur, which means that some healthy-living people will get cancer, and some chain smokers won’t. I once read a story about a church group that was supposed to meet at a certain time. Ten minutes after the appointed time, due to a gas leak, the church blew up. If they had not showed up late, all 10 would have been killed. Some see that as evidence that God was watching over them. Others might conclude that you should always show up to church late. All I learn from that is that it is a big country, and if you ask around enough, you’ll hear some pretty improbable stories.
Another example, which I analyze in “The Drunkard’s Walk,” is the time Roger Maris, a very good but not great player, broke Babe Ruth’s beloved record, hitting 61 home runs in 1961. Maris had never came close to that output before, nor did he after. What happened?
We |
. I was scared of what God would think and what all of these people I loved would think about me; so it never was an option for me."
Pearson is married with two young children. He says he had "romanticised" the idea of falling in love with a woman but that this had "resulted in a marriage where I couldn't love or satisfy my wife in a way that she needed".
He says that while he had married with the intention of spending the rest of his life with his wife Lauren, he had "come to accept that there is nothing that is going to change who I am".
He pays tribute to her, saying she "has been the most supportive, understanding, loving and gracious person I could ever ask for, as I have come to face this".
Pearson concludes by saying he is "taking another step into health and wholeness by accepting myself, and every part of me. It's not only an idea for me that I'm gay; it's my life. This is me being authentic and real with myself and other people. This is a part of who I am... I trust God to help love do the rest."
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Everyday Sunday was founded in 1997 and has released several successful albums, including 2009's Best Night of Our Lives, which broke into the Billboard Top 200 list.
In an extended interview with (614), Pearson acknowledges his revelation might have an effect on his career, saying: "I realise a lot of gate holders in that industry may want to never play my songs again, due to fear – but I also think the world is changing– and I think there are a lot of people out there that want to be a part of this conversation. So, wherever people are willing to listen to my music and my story, I will go."A collection of 8-bit and glitchy audio samples constructed throughout 2011. Henry Homesweet had always loved the raw and groovy waveforms that retro consoles generate. The tones, textures and unique warmth of these systems are the main reason that they have continued to be a staple sound source in his production.
The samples here are entirely original and have been extracted from most of my music released last year or designed exclusively for this release. There are over 250 individual sounds and loops in this sample pack including a folder of SFX designed for an independant arcade game that was never released.
This sample pack is royalty free, meaning that you are more than welcome to use these sounds in your creative projects, either commercial or non-commerical. (Archive: 49 MB)
Format : WAVYou may wonder if curry can fit into a healthy eating diet plan? Here’s the answer!
We have put a healthy twist on your typical curry to give you guys the chance to enjoy it guilt free! This curry has it all! It’s packed it full of protein and healthy fats from the best wild salmon and light coconut milk. Calories and fats are kept to a minimum by using wild salmon rather than farmed salmon. In addition to that, just one serving has 180% of your RDA for Vitamin A and over 70% for Vitamin C.
Serve with rice (brown or basmati), and choose how much rice you have based on your dietary requirements: we recommend around 75g of rice if you’re cutting, 125g if you’re bulking, and 100g of rice otherwise. Enjoy!
Ingredients
Servings: 4
Macros: 473kcal, Protein 40.4g, Carbs 12.0g, Fat 29.1g
Curry
700g wild salmon fillets
2 x 400g tins light coconut milk
2 medium red onions
2 sweet pointed peppers
10 cherry tomatoes
2 cloves garlic
2 cm ginger
1 fresh red chilli
Handful fresh coriander
2 lemons
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Spices
2 teaspoons medium curry powder
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
Method
Prep time: 15 mins
Cooking time: 45 mins
Preheat the oven to 160ºC/325ºF Peel and finely slice the onion, garlic & ginger Slice up the pointed peppers and chilli Pick the coriander leaves and put aside, then chop up the stalks Add 1 ½ tbsp of Olive Oil to a medium-sized saucepan Add the spices to the pan and stir over a low heat for 2-3 minutes Chuck all the sliced veg into the pan and cook for 15 mins, stirring occasionally Tip the veg into a large baking dish Place the salmon fillets skin-side down on top of the veg in the baking dish Season the salmon with salt & pepper and drizzle with ½ tbsp of Olive Oil Flip the salmon over so the skin is facing up and put the dish in the oven for 20 mins Once the salmon is mostly cooked through, remove the tray from the oven Remove the skin from the salmon (or leave on if you don’t mind a little extra fat) Pour the coconut milk into the dish, add the tomatoes and juice of 1 lemon Break up the salmon with a wooden spoon and mix all together Return to the oven for 10 minutes and then remove and place on the side Break up the coriander leaves and scatter on top
Serve with a slice of lemon and coriander to garnish on a bed of steamed rice.By Jeremy Symons
While running for president, Donald Trump threatened to virtually eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), leaving only "little tidbits."
Scott Pruitt, Trump's EPA administrator, has been tasked with the job of tearing down the agency from within. This is the man who sued the EPA 14 times—with strong financial backing from companies seeking to weaken clean air and clean water standards—when serving as Oklahoma's Attorney General.
The president has used deception to reassure the general public that critical environmental laws will continue to protect public health and he is now taking our country in a dangerous direction.
Here are five ways he and Pruitt will go about weakening the agency responsible for keeping our air clean, drinking water safe and toxic chemicals from harming our families:
1. Gut the EPA's Budget
Deep budget cuts at the EPA are being proposed under the guise of fixing budget issues.
In reality, the agency accounts for a mere two-tenths of one percent of federal spending. Any claim that major budget issues can be dealt with on the back of such a small sliver of the budget is false.
Instead, the proposed budget cuts are a clear signal to a narrow group of special interests and supporters who share Trump's disdain for the EPA because environmental regulations don't serve their agenda.
2. Relax Enforcement Against Illegal Pollution
Leaked budget documents show that Trump has already directed the EPA to curtail pollution-monitoring and get states "to assume more active enforcement roles." But this isn't about states' rights; it's merely a convenient cover for gutting federal enforcement responsibility without any assurance that states will pick up the slack.
In fact, Pruitt took Oklahoma in the opposite direction as attorney general by shutting down the state's environmental enforcement unit.
Meanwhile, delegating enforcement to states puts everyone at the mercy of neighboring states' enforcement. Almost every state has communities that are downwind or downstream from polluters across state boundaries.
3. Roll Back Pollution Standards
"The future ain't what it used to be at the EPA," Pruitt explained in a fiery speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington shortly after his contentious and narrow confirmation by the Senate. He went on to pledge he would "roll back the regulatory state."
President Trump has already issued an executive order seeking to weaken Clean Water Act protections for American rivers and streams. With Pruitt now at his side, he is expected to next take aim at rolling back standards that reduce toxic emissions from cars and power plants.
Trump says he is slashing federal clean air and water standards to ease what he calls "job-crushing regulations." Of course, increasing pollution does not grow the economy.
4. Use Misinformation to Justify Political Agenda
During his confirmation hearing, Pruitt ran away from his anti-environmental record and assured senators that he was "concerned" about pollution contributing to climate change, that mercury "should be regulated" and that ground-level ozone is "a dangerous pollutant."
Once he had been confirmed as EPA administrator, his tone changed back to his roots. Pruitt is already a ready partner to Trump when it comes to spreading misinformation and denying climate change.
Political interference in science will come in many forms, but the most dangerous may be an effort to permanently meddle with the EPA's scientific capacity under the guise of "reforming" the scientific process. Such meddling is a top Trump transition goal, according to Myron Ebell, the head of Trump's EPA transition team.
Ebell makes no bones about it: The objective, he's said, is to permanently cripple the agency's capacity to bounce back under future presidents.
5. Surrender to Allow "Sue and Pollute" Lawsuits
We expect Pruitt and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take up a new practice of surrendering to "sue and pollute" lawsuits in court. That would abandon the legal defense of EPA rules against suits brought by some polluters who would rather fight in court than invest in cleaner technology.
Pruitt may even take the unprecedented step to refuse to recuse himself from overseeing decisions about lawsuits that he himself brought against the EPA as Oklahoma's attorney general—conveniently switching sides from plaintiff to defendant.
The question now is how Pruitt and Trump will contend with growing opposition as they walk the tightrope between broad public support for the EPA's mission while serving the narrow interests of those who want to permanently weaken the agency.
If we remain vigilant and demand accountability from our elected officials, we can make every step they take along that tightrope more strenuous than the last.T wenty-three years is a long time to wait for a band’s next album.
Especially when it is best known as doom legend Scott ‘Wino’ Weinrich’s ‘Other, Other, Other Band’. Still, like a really crappy rural bus service, The Obsessed has at last arrived with a new LP, Sacred.
In summary, there’s a lot here to be impressed by. Though only time will tell if it is truly on par with the band’s earlier output, like its 1991 classic, Lunar Womb. There is also a bit too much filler, as you’d expect from an album with twelve tracks, plus two bonus songs.
Nevertheless, it starts strong with the first track, “Sodden Jackal.” This has that trademark mix of drone and sad whimsy the band’s sound is known for, with some truly heavy sections just to make it clear this is no nostalgia trip. Nicely following it up is “Punk Crusher”, which does, of course, also sound like an Obsessed song. But then it suddenly erupts into a nice spiky chorus and core riff. Throughout, it oozes blues-laden doom.
There is a need for some variety at this point. So the title track quite helpfully brings it. The end result is much more forlorn and epic in tone, and even sounds a bit like The Skull at its most dramatic. But it quickly springs back into the classic Obsessed sound, and flits between the two vibes throughout the song, before going into a brief full-on dooms/blues solo.
Sadly, “Haywire” doesn’t keep up the winning streak. A buzzing and rather by-the-books number, it is hardly the band pushing its own envelope. It is good in its own way, but it is hardly a revelation. Similar problems afflict track six, “It’s Only Money”. It is, in practice, a bit of filler, and its stop-start tempo starts to get on one’s tits after a while.
Jumping back to track five, however, and we have the ominously titled “Perseverance of Futility.” Not to worry, though. Its deft use of organs (and a dash of the old cowbell) adds a depth to the song, helped along no end by a suitably riff-tastic and polished solo.
Track seven, “Cold Blood”, meanwhile, rides to the album’s rescue after “It’s Only Money” fails to impress. Indeed, this is more like it, an instrumental full of lovely riffs and that gloriously catchy and emotive sweep the band does so well. (Oh, and some strong solos too.)
Another stand out track, “Stranger Things”, follows straight after. Showing off some wonderful riffing and vocal distortions, it builds up to a series of crushing heights. Even the lyrics are wonderful. “Dealing with dichotomy”, Wino croons at one point. You don’t get lyrics like that in a fucking Kasabian song. All in all, it’s epic and catchy without being trite or repetitive. It even ends on a nice acoustic guitar section.
“Razor Wire” is next. It’s stripped down and simple (not as much as “Be The Night”, but more on that later.) It’s very catchy and direct, and has an excellent solo mid-song.
And yet, this is followed up by the oddest track on the album, “My Daughter My Sons.” Setting aside the downtuned wistfulness of the band’s usual output, the song is instead a sort of heartfelt address to Wino’s kiddies. The end result sounds odd because it tries to use the Obsessed sound for something that is more… life affirming? Even the core riff of the song sounds a bit confused, like it wants to drop down, but finds itself pulled up awkwardly by all the paternal adoration.
Of course, the song has an added poignancy, given Wino’s relapse into crystal meth use back in 2014 (the daft sod). Indeed, with its rather reverential tone, the song sounds a lot like it was written by someone who worries he doesn’t deserve what he’s got. All very well, of course, but does it make for good doom?
No, but only because Wino is trying to play badminton with a cricket bat, so to speak. You can’t say how great your kids are via a sub-genre that excels in existential despair, drugs, madness and monged out cosmic sex-wizards from the 1970s. The Obsessed still gives it a fair go though.
In any case, it’s a hell of a leap from “Born Too Late” via St. Vitus, or that compelling, horrific Goya painting of Saturn eating his children that graced the cover of “Lunar Womb”. It’s said misery is good for art. But surely it’s better to have a happy Wino instead?
The penultimate track, “Be The Night”, gets back to work with an almost jarring certainty. Fans of the band will, of course, have heard this many times already. It was previewed months ago by Relapse and featured on a Mojo cover-mounted CD. But while it is definitely the album’s ‘radio friendly’ track, given its urgency, hooks and accessibility, it is not dumbed down by any means.
Significantly, it sounds exactly like you’d expect an Obsessed song to sound, and it’s almost at the end of the album. You have to listen to the rest of the record before you get to it. It’s the cherry on the doom-cake. Then there’s “Interlude”, a fade-out with Obsessed riffs going nowhere in particular. Something from the cutting room floor, perchance?
And that’s an apt summary of the album through and through. It is, for the most part, well-made doom metal with a passion and refinement that belies the fact that this band hasn’t recorded zip since Bill Clinton was in office. Yet it also has one or two moments where some quality control (and a bit trimmed off here and there from the track list) would have been in order. It is a great album, but also a frustrating one – if only now and then.HOW IT ALL BEGAN
by Ian Hendry
It all seems improbable now. The New Avengers was born out of The Avengers, whose “Daddy” was a live cops-and-robbers-with-a-difference TV series called Police Surgeon (not to be confused with a later American series of that name).
The idea was that I, as a police surgeon, became an Avenger against everything evil after my girlfriend was shot down in the street by the baddies. It is one of the ironies of life that the shotdown girl was an actress called Catherine Woodville. Later, she was to become Patrick Macnee’s second wife…
Pat came into the series as my sidekick. For a long while, no one was sure if he was a goodie or a baddie. And, to be quite honest, neither did we.
But, in those first fumbling beginnings, it was Pat and myself as the actors who helped knock some shape into the whole thing. A lot of other people played their parts in it - as you will learn in this souvenir.
Here, of course, I’m talking as an actor. And from that point of view the series was both funny and furious.
Imagine it. In those early days, television was live. The viewer could watch a terrible fist fight - and 20 seconds later one of the fighters (who’d been covered in mud and blood) was supposed to walk in nonchalantly, impeccably dressed. That second scene, of course, was supposed to be happening hours, days, or even a few weeks later.
I remember one of those sequences where I was fighting a baddie in a studio mock-up of sewers. The fight ended wide me doing an 8 ft. back-fall into water. They had built an 8 ft. square water tank made, of all things, from whitewood.
If you have ever fallen backwards from a height of 8 ft. into a water tank only 8ft. square, you’ll know that it is slightly dangerous. I reckon that when I hit the water, the clearance between my head and the tank wall was about a quarter of an inch.
Then came the next problem. A green slime had developed on the bottom of the tank. The baddie had to jump into the water on top of me, and we were supposed to continue the fight until I delivered my killer punch. I certainly won that particular battle. As I lashed out at him, I slipped on the slime and knocked him cold - for real.
There was no time to do anything about it. I had to jump from the tank, run round the set to where the wardrobe and make-up departments were ready with a towel to dry my hair, and slap on a dry top coat so I could make a casual entrance to a room with Steed by my side. This scene was allegedly happening some many hours later.
Underneath I was sopping wet, but as far as me viewers were concerned, I was as warm as toast in my lovely overcoat. I was having it good. Back in the water tank, an inoffensive, unfortunate stuntman, trying to earn an honorable living as a TV baddie, was graciously drowning.
Happily, the studio crew got him out in time.
Those early days were all hysterical and mad and silly. We loved it, really. Most of all we loved the companionship and atmosphere. I’ve had a theory throughout my acting career that the first consideration of an actor is to be part of a happy company.
We rehearsed in an old building opposite a pub in Hammersmith. After the cast had been given their copies of the script, I would take them over to the pub, act as mine host, tell them not to worry because they were still on the payroll - and we’d get to work. Then Pat and myself, and sometimes a few others, would go to a nearby steak house. After that, it was usually Pat and I who would grab a bottle of scotch or brandy and go to a flat off Kensington High Street to beat out our latest approach to The Avengers characters.
There were some wonderful times. Once, we were supposed to be locked in a wardrobe from which we had to shout, in unison: “Let us out, let us out”.
The wardrobe, made of the most fragile plywood, couldn’t have withstood an assault by a placid four-year-old girl, much less the combined physical might of two magnificent Avengers.
Eventually, I think it was an old lady who let us out. In reality, if either of us had breathed out too hard the whole wardrobe would have burst apart.
And there were doors that wouldn’t open, and handles that fell off when they did. The scenery collapsed once.
Don’t forget, all this was going out live, just as your see it from your seat in a theatre.
But I do think we managed, in those early days, to develop a new style. I was supposed to be phlegmatic, and when I got too boring Steed was there to send me up and tell me not to be so serious. And when Steed got too outrageous I was there to say: “Oh come on, don’t overdo it”.
The New Avengers cost £4,000,000 to produce. In the beginning, Pat and I felt as though The Avengers cost fourpence. But it did have something special, it did develop into a world beating television series, and it did help a lot of people to stardom. Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg, Linda Thorson, and now, I reckon, Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt. Not to mention Pat Macnee himself.
Although I was the first Avenger, Pat will always be Avenger-in-Chief. Now he will take you down The Avengers memory lane in the following pages. I’m glad I was one of the first to go down it.October 27, 2016 23:58 IST
More than 60 individuals and entities, an overwhelming number of them Indians, were on Thursday charged by the Justice Department for allegedly participating in a multi-million dollar scam involving call centres based in India which conned thousands of American citizens.
Twenty of these individuals were arrested in the United States on Thursday, while 31 of these individuals and five call centers have been charged for their alleged involvement in the scam.
An additional US-based defendant is currently in the custody of immigration authorities.
Many of these, who were arrested in India recently, face deportation to the US.
The indictment alleges that the defendants were involved in a "sophisticated fraudulent scheme organised by conspirators in India, including a network of call centers in Ahmedabad", the Department of Justice said.
Using information obtained from data brokers and other sources, call-centre operators allegedly called potential victims while impersonating officials from the Internal Revenue Service or US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
According to the indictment, the call-centre operators then threatened potential victims with arrest, imprisonment, fines or deportation if they did not pay taxes or penalties to the government.
If the victims agreed to pay, the call-centres would then immediately turn to a network of US-based co-conspirators to liquidate and launder the extorted funds as quickly as possible by purchasing prepaid debit cards or through wire transfers, federal prosecutors alleged.
The prepaid debit cards were often registered using misappropriated personal identifying information of thousands of identity theft victims, and the wire transfers were directed by the criminal associates using fake names and fraudulent identifications, the indictment said.
According to the indictment, the co-conspirators allegedly used "hawalas" to direct the extorted funds to accounts belonging to US-based individuals. These individuals were expecting the hawala transfers but were not aware of the illicit nature of the funds. The co-conspirators also allegedly kept a percentage of the proceeds for themselves.
Mumbai Police unearthed the scam, involving more than Rs 500 crore, after raiding seven call centres on Mira Road. The con job had been going on for a few months, police have said.
The daily transactions of the call centres stood at around Rs 1.5 crore.
"This is a transnational problem, and demonstrates that modern criminals target Americans both from inside our borders and from abroad. Only by working tirelessly to gather evidence, build cases and working closely with foreign law enforcement partners to ensure there are no safe havens can we effectively address these threats," Assistant Attorney General Leslie R Caldwell told reporters at a news conference in Washington.
One of the call-centres extorted $12,300 from an 85-year-old victim from San Diego, California, after threatening her with arrest if she did not pay fictitious tax
violations.
On the same day that she was extorted, one of the US-based defendants allegedly used a reloadable debit card funded with the victim's money to purchase money orders in Frisco, Texas, the Justice Department said.
Some of the victim's money ended up on cards which were activated using stolen personal identifying information from US-based victims, it said.
The probe, which began in 2013, has revealed a trans-national criminal organisation was operating both in the US and overseas in India, making hundreds of millions of dollars.
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Exemption, Russell George said since 2013, have received over two million contacts from individuals who said they have received solicitations.
"Of that number, approximately 10,000 people have acknowledged they have fallen victim to this scam in the amount of $50 million," he said.
Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, John Roth, said the case was massive.
"Over $250 million in stolen money," he said.
"These fraudsters exploited the immigrants fears of deportation and the insecurity of the elderly with this deceitful assertion of power. In many instances, the scammers portrayed themselves as immigration agents who called to collect fines resulting from faulty immigration paperwork. Fines not paid would result in the immediate deportation," he said.
"These calls were from numbers that reflected that the call came from the national call center from the immigration services call center," he added.
Representative Image Courtesy Getty ImagesAn international student at Harvard Business School says that his fellow classmates from his home country live in a pricey party culture, treating the MBA experience as a “two-year vacation.”
“A lot of our social interactions center around expensive dinners and outrageous drinks where people chit-chat about their section mates, hook-ups and drunken shenanigans,” the first-year student writes in The Harbus, the MBA student newspaper. “Personally I’m unsure if this is the veritas I had come to seek at Harvard Business School.”
The student, who did not identify himself nor his home country, said the party atmosphere often starts at Park in Harvard Square, where the bar serves up 27 different bourbons and 19 different rums. It extends to dinners at Sorellina, a chic modern Italian restaurant in Copley Square, where the grilled octopus appetizer costs $19 and the lamb chips will set you back $48. And then ends up back to Park or Kong, also in Harvard Square, for which a Yelp reviewer asks, “Do people ever come here not drunk?”
‘MY EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN ASPHYXIATING’
“I am an international student and there are several students from my country,” he wrote. “Yet, I don’t fit into this international community and it hurts not to get along with my people. I signed up for HBS and the opportunity costs associated with it – most importantly spending two years away from my aging parents – to get a quality education and to learn both inside and outside the classroom. Unfortunately, my experience in RC (required curriculum) year has been asphyxiating and has often made me wonder: what should I do to fit in?”
His comments appear under the headline: “The Section X in all of us,” a reference to a secret society at HBS of ultra-wealthy, mostly male, mostly international students known for decadent parties and lavish travel. The group was first publicly revealed in a controversial New York Times story published last year. One commenter on the story noted that Section X is largely composed of about 100 MBA students from South America, the Middle East and Asia, out of a total enrollment of more than 1,800, “most of whom were making up for the fact that they did not have a ‘college experience.’”
The Times said that even though Section X is hard to pin down — some students said they did not believe it existed at all — it is a source of significant resentment on campus. Every HBS class is organized into 10 sections labeled A through J, and the name Section X suggests a separation from the broader HBS community. “The Section X dynamics really deteriorate the section togetherness,” said Kate Lewis, a 2013 graduate who edited the school newspaper, in an interview with the Times. “By the end of this academic year, Section X had become an adjective on campus for anything exclusive and moneyed, with one student talking about a “mini Section X dynamic” within her real section,” according to the Times.
‘I AM OFTEN THE BUTT OF MANY JOKES BECAUSE I AM TOO ACADEMICALLY INCLINED’
Writing in The Harbus, the MBA student says he often feels like an outsider because he is something of a teetotaler who is more interested in studying than drinking. “I like spending time on cases although it makes me an outcast in my international community,” he wrote. “In social interactions over expensive dinners, I am often the butt of many jokes because I am too academically inclined. I don’t party hard enough, seldom drink and have no idea about networking. Worse still, I actually take HBS classes seriously and the one thing that I have not realized after RC year is how to maximize my return on investment.”
The atmosphere he depicts is one in which little emphasis is placed on learning. “It’s not about treasuring resources at Baker Library, attending talks at the iLab, assisting fellow students with their finance exercises and trying to integrate our learning from the 200+ cases thrown at us during RC year that give us a return on our $90,000.
“It’s about pre-gaming at the Park, eating out at Sorellina, coming back to the Park and ending the night at the Kong (if you are not classy enough) that make our time at HBS worthwhile.”
‘WE ARE ON A TWO-YEAR VACATION AT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL AND WE NEED TO LIVE IT UP’
He concedes he has yet to find his path at the school. “And I don’t blame myself for it because what I want from the school is not what the community is willing to offer easily, especially if you want to fit in.
“‘After all, we are on a two year vacation at Harvard Business School and we need to live it up.’ And there, I just said it, at Sorellina earlier tonight.”
This is hardly the first time that assertions have surfaced about the heavy partying at top business schools. Only last year, a highly prominent business school professor at Stanford University decried what he called a “booze, cars and houses” culture at top business schools that has taken the focus away from academics and learning.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a long-time professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, said he believes that MBA programs have essentially become two years of vacation and partying for twenty-something students, a chance to have the college experience they may have missed when they were undergraduates.
“If and when business schools become more like many of their professional school brethren—where status comes primarily from academic/professional accomplishment, not from who can hold the most liquor or put on the best show—not only will less wealthy students no longer be disadvantaged, but the culture will change for the better—from booze, cars, and houses to ideas,” he wrote in an essay.
DON’T MISS: SCENES FROM HARVARD’S SUPER RICH MBAS or IS GENDER INEQUALITY ONLY A HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PROBLEM?Fortunately, they didn’t have to compare the size of our penis because I’m 99% sure that mine, even in its most excited state and theirs being held by an icy hand of snow, would pale in comparison. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if their groins get charge an additional fee for being an additional piece of luggage at the airport. But Tony and Ramon are professionals while conversely, I was just there to be creepy guy in mask number 6. Yea, this is the sort of stuff that Asa gets me into, one moment eating our salads and talking about diet and the next, casting me Squirt Woman. Of course I could have said no but who knows, maybe she finds another driver who says yes and next thing you know, I’m selling oranges and flowers at the freeway off ramp to Asa and the guy I could have been.
The location was located at a dungeon in the industrial part of Los Angeles, amid some lofts and boutiques where hipsters walked around with their mustache ends tied together tight. A man with hard of hearing let us in while the rest of the crew were prepping the scene - large mirrors, full and knee height cages, phone booth containers, thrones, s&m masks, vinyl sofas in the shape of a person in doggy style, mirrors, jesus christ size crosses, dildos, anything sexual and it was there. There were about 6 or 7 people roaming around, all very friendly making me feel at ease. Because the porn industry is so small, there’s a comfort and sense of familiarity that fills the set. Asa isn’t in the film (she’s contracted to Wicked Pictures so she’s not allowed to appear in any other movies) so she prances around the set, pulling me into her dervish whirlwind of carefree fun while taking photos for her instagram. The other people don’t seem to mind so I begin to enjoy myself. Forget Disneyland, this is the most happiest place in the world.
We get into our wardrobe, a black cloak and hood and a white mask, and stand in line facing the throne. The camera rolls and Bonnie Rotten, this years AVN performer of the year (Asa who?) dressed in a latex wicked queen outfit walk over to the throne and point over to one of the hooded creepers. He walks over and stands next to her while another kneels in front. Rotten takes off her gold bikini bottom and starts rubbing her vagina. She’s an expert at female ejaculation and after a few seconds of moaning and groaning, she starts hard spraying some clear liquid. And not just a spritz but a long fire hydrants worth. Whaaat. As Jeff Spicoli would say, “I shit you not”. There’s wetness all over the floor and poor guy got it straight in the face. Now that guy knows what it feels like when he decides it all fun and games to cum on his lover’s mug. Everyone is amazed and even Rotten is surprised at the amount of g-spot juice that got emitted.
Well, my job is done, I fill out some paperwork and leave with Asa. They still have a double penetration scene but we’re hungry so Asa and I go grab some lunch. Another salad, maybe another adventure.Company News Dark Pit amiibo Available July 31 Only at Best Buy Shane Kitzman Staff Writer Share
To say Nintendo’s amiibo are popular would be quite the understatement.
The $12.99 interactive figures have captivated gamers and collectors alike, and everyone seems to have a favorite character.
Come July 31, the Dark Pit amiibo will be released, and he can only be found at your local Best Buy store. You can’t pre-order this exclusive amiibo.
Fans will recognize the character from Kid Icarus: Uprising as Pit’s mysterious black-clad doppelgänger.
Compatible with a variety of games – including Super Smash Brothers – just tap the Dark Pit amiibo figure to your Wii U GamePad to bring him to life and expand your game play.
Word to the wise: Get to your local Best Buy store early because there will be limited quantities as they will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis with a limit of one per customer. Also be on the lookout for offers on Nintendo products that day.When I saw that Michelle Malkin will be on the Stephanopoulos panel this week, my first thought was that nobody as far to the left as she is to the right would ever appear on such a panel. But then I started to wonder (a) what I mean by that (b) if it’s true.
I don’t want to be like Bill O’Reilly, who considers anyone he disagrees with a “far-left” activist. So we need some objective metric. The most natural would seem to be voter opinion: what fraction of the American public is to Malkin’s right? Would somebody with an equally small number of people to his or her left get on a Sunday morning panel?
The trouble, of course, is how to measure that. In principle, it shouldn’t be hard. What I’d like to have is a Guttman scale of positions on political matters, such that almost everyone who gave the “liberal” answer to question 7 also gave liberal answers to questions 1-6, while almost everyone who gave the conservative answer to question 7 also gave conservative answers to questions 8-13. And we’d want population shares associated with each point on the scale. So we could then take known positions of public figures and place them on the scale: say, we might find that only 19 percent of Americans are to the right of Michelle Malkin, while 23 percent are to the left of Michael Moore.
But if there are any such data available, I don’t know about them. Anyone care to put them together?.@nytimes moves masthead to print A2, plus adds 'front of book'/how we do journalism type stuff; anti-#fakenews https://t.co/qoQBJ0CDJU — Jonathan Make (@makejdm) March 2, 2017
The New York Times has seen a lot of success with roundups in digital form: Its Morning and Evening Briefings are “among the most successful products that The Times has launched in recent years,” according to the Times’ recent 2020 Report, while its daily news podcast, The Daily, is No. 3 in iTunes.
Now it’s trying a version of that strategy inside the print paper with the redesign of pages A2 and A3:
The redesigned pages are meant to be a fun read on their own — a little value-add for the print paper — and they highlight some of the things that the Times is doing online. Thursday’s edition, for instance, includes a list of “six of the most read, shared and discussed posts from across NYTimes.com,” and mentions of the Times podcast Still Processing and Times documentary “Long Live Benjamin.” The Mini Crossword, which had previously only run online, now appears on page A3.
Glaring subtweet to POTUS in 5- and 6-across of today's Mini on A3 (filled in by a 7yo) pic.twitter.com/2atk2MJSsV — Jake Silverstein (@jakesilverstein) March 2, 2017
“The changes to A2 and A3 represent a |
ly inappropriate and offensive.” “I'm glad that he acknowledged this fact with an immediate apology to my family and the American people," she added in a statement.
-- Donald Jr. has made a series of offensive statements during interviews with shock-jock radio hosts. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski unearthed a trove of controversial remarks from the candidate's son:
He joked about the Aurora movie theater shooting on the same day 12 people were killed: After footage was played from a witness recounting the tragedy, Trump Jr. quipped that the survivor will still give the film “two thumbs up.”
After footage was played from a witness recounting the tragedy, Trump Jr. quipped that the survivor will still give the film “two thumbs up.” He joked about child abuse at beauty pageants: "They yell at the kids like, yeah 'You didn't do good, you forgot to turn! You forgot your turn!’” a host said, depicting the role of a stage parent. "The kids, they're crying," Trump Jr. said. “I just wanna play with Barbie.” "'She beats me when you're not here,'" said the host. "She's like limping," added Trump Jr., mocking a child's voice. "'Help me, help me.'" Trump Jr. added of the moms at beauty pageants, "They're all fat. Ugly."
"They yell at the kids like, yeah 'You didn't do good, you forgot to turn! You forgot your turn!’” a host said, depicting the role of a stage parent. "The kids, they're crying," Trump Jr. said. “I just wanna play with Barbie.” "'She beats me when you're not here,'" said the host. "She's like limping," added Trump Jr., mocking a child's voice. "'Help me, help me.'" On not being able to mock overweight people: "By the way you can't … even make fat jokes now … that's almost the worst one,” he said. “It’s easier to, like, do a racial thing, than it is a fat one because everyone knows they're fat and they get really offended."
-- Doubling down on his rigged election rhetoric, Trump yesterday provided his supporters with a list of three cities where they should watch for corruption on Election Day. "Take a look at St. Louis. Take a look at Philadelphia. Take a look at Chicago," Trump said in Colorado. "Look, look, if nothing else, people are going to be watching on November 8. Watch Philadelphia. Watch St. Louis. Watch Chicago, watch Chicago. Watch so many other places." (Two of those cities are in states that are not considered competitive, Jenna Johnson notes.)
-- Local election officials are panicking that Trump's reckless rhetoric will lead his supporters to bring guns to polling places, but they're mostly powerless to do anything about it: "The Prince William County (Virginia) electoral board... considered seeking a one-day ban on weapons at polling places located on private property but was rebuked by a gun-friendly state legislator," Patricia Sullivan reports. "Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) sent a letter to the board pointing out that it has no power to ban guns from polling places except for schools and courthouses, where weapons are prohibited by state law.... Virginia’s election officials have been discussing on their private email list the possibility of intimidation or violence Nov. 8 and talking about what to do about unruly observers.... Seventy of Prince William’s 91 polling places are in schools, with the remaining 21 in churches, fire halls and community centers. Firearms are allowed in county government buildings, such as fire stations, libraries and community centers."
-- Two little known but influential Democratic operatives lost their jobs after edited footage from a video sting by conservative activist James O’Keefe found them entertaining “dark notions” about how to win elections. From Dave Weigel: “Footage from the video shows [Scott] Foval, a Wisconsin-based politico with a long resume, bragging about a litany of political dirty tricks. In the first video, he boasts of ‘conflict engagement in the lines of Trump rallies,’ takes credit for the violence that canceled a Trump rally at the University of Illinois in Chicago (and) admits he's paid ‘mentally ill’ people to start trouble.” Robert Creamer also announced he is stepping down from the work he was doing for a progressive consulting group following release of the tape. On Tuesday night's episode of "Hannity,” two campaign representatives said that the tapes “validated everything” Trump had said about the possible threat of the election being stolen.
Supporters of Nicolas Maduro display a giant inflatable dummy depicting late President Hugo Chavez in Caracas. (Juan Barreto/Getty)
-- Venezuelan journalist and political scientist Francisco Toro argues that Trump really is much more like Nicolás Maduro than Hugo Chavez: “Again and again, since taking over in 2013, Maduro has run roughshod over the constitution in ways Chávez never dared to … [and] for Venezuelans, the past year has been an object lesson in how dangerous this approach can be. Last week, we followed this crazy dynamic off the deep end, when the court overturned 800 years of constitutional practice, dating back to the original Magna Carta, ruling that when the constitution says the legislative branch has to vote on the national budget, it means the president can just approve budgets on his own. … Having your democracy commit suicide under the lure of a charismatic demagogue is not the kind of experience you can fully make sense of unless you’ve lived it in your own skin. Before 2016, no explanation I could give my American friends was enough. Now, my American friends can just turn on CNN and watch it happening live.”
THE BATTLEGROUNDS:
-- A civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit to force Virginia to extend its voter registration period, after the state’s online system crashed on Monday. The technological glitch prohibited registration from an unknown number of participants. Some have estimated the number to be in the “tens of thousands.” (Laura Vozzella)
-- Pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA announced it will begin airing ads in two Senate races and will start airing television and radio ads in Georgia to boost Clinton. “New ads will support Gov. Maggie Hassan in the New Hampshire Senate race against Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Katie McGinty in the Pennsylvania Senate race against Sen. Patrick J. Toomey,” Abby Phillip writes. “The super PAC also plans a new seven-figure television ad buy in Georgia in addition to new radio ads targeted at African American voters. The state has not been won by the Democratic presidential nominee since 1992.”
-- DNC officials issued an apology after one of its campaign buses was recorded illegally dumping sewage into a Georgia storm drain, calling the leak an “honest” but “unacceptable” mistake. The driver of the bus – adorned with larger-than-life faces of Clinton and Kaine – said the vehicle’s sewage tank was full and leaking out. A guy in an auto parts repair store spotted him and record it. (Katie Mettler)
-- The race for Rep. Barbara Comstock’s House seat in Northern Virginia has tightened. From Jenna Portnoy: The Cook Political Report is moving the race up to toss-up, while the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report already considers it a toss-up district, tilting to the Republican. “Experts consider the district among the most competitive in the nation despite lackluster fundraising numbers from Democratic challenger LuAnn Bennett and evidence [Trump] might not be the anchor on down-ballot candidates some had expected,” Portnoy writes. The two will face off this morning for the final debate of the campaign.
-- “Clinton Challenges Trump for a Traditional Republican Bloc: White Catholics,” by the New York Times's Jason Horowitz in Philly: “Since the election of Ronald Reagan, white Roman Catholics have flocked to Republican nominees for a raft of reasons, including their stances on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. But this year, something seems different. ‘Trump is the exception to the rule,’ said 67-year-old Carol Robinson, leaving an afternoon prayer meeting in Philadelphia. ‘He’s a loose cannon.’ Roman Catholics are the country’s second-largest religious group after evangelical Protestants, and they are as diverse as the country itself, with young liberals, cultural conservatives and, increasingly, Democratic-leaning Hispanics.”
One quiet influencer could be Pope Francis, wh emphasizes inclusion and the welfare of the poor over divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality. In February, he suggested Trump “is not a Christian.”
-- Harry Reid reflects on when Trump used to be one of his donors in an interview with Paul Kane: “Reid found a priceless piece of memorabilia recently while sorting through 34 years of congressional papers. It’s a picture of Reid with [Trump], inside the real-estate developer’s Manhattan home, both men smiling. He’s pretty sure it’s from 1992, when [he] was running his first Senate reelection bid and when [Trump] was happy to help Democrats. Reid appreciated Trump’s generosity. ‘He wasn’t much of a big shot then, neither was I,’ Reid recalled … Over the years when Trump was a reliable donor to Senate Democrats, Reid saw no signs of a future Republican presidential candidate who he would later eviscerate as a 'racist' and a 'human leech.' Now, heading into political twilight, the former boxer is clearly relishing what is essentially his last campaign through attacks on Trump … ‘I’m kind of an unusual politician,’ he said."
Libertarian Lucy Brenton, Democrat Evan Bayh and Republican Todd Young debate in Indianapolis last night. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, Pool)
SENATE DEBATES:
-- “Indiana’s Senate race got personal Tuesday,” the Indianapolis Star’s Maureen Groppe and James Briggs write. “After weeks of attacking each other in campaign commercials, former Sen. Evan Bayh and GOP Rep. Todd Young directly accused each other of not representing Hoosiers’ interests in their [sole debate] … Young repeatedly charged Bayh, a Democrat, with following the orders of Washington insiders and looking out for himself. ‘Evan Bayh took the money and ran,’ Young said after criticizing Bayh's vote for the Affordable Care Act. ‘He joined a major lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., and he represented clients that needed relief from the very problem he created from Obamacare.’ Bayh said Young has voted against the needs of veterans, seniors and workers who are losing their jobs to overseas competition. And he accused Young of lying about his record. ‘Congressman Young has told so many whoppers here tonight, it's hard to keep track,’” Bayh said.
-- The final debate between Sen. Ron Johnson and Democrat Russ Feingold also turned personal, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Bill Glauber reports: “Skirmishing over campaign finance, national security, the economy and the presidential candidates, the men engaged in a feisty 90-minute clash … With polls showing a tight race, there was little room for error as the candidates sought to shore up their base support while reaching out to the small number of undecided voters. In a sense, the debate was six years in the making as the two men entered the closing stretch of their rematch race. Throughout the debate, Feingold claimed that Johnson ‘didn't have a plan’ on issues. Johnson fired back, ‘Senator Feingold is always going to have a plan to grow government.’” "I will stand with the people of this state," Feingold said. "Senator Johnson stands with the corporations, the billionaires and the multi-millionaires." In rebuttal, Johnson said he “understands what it’s like to work”: "I'm the working man,” he said. “I've worked hard all my life."
A pan handler sits with a "Give me $1 or I'm voting for Trump" sign in Manhattan. (Carlo Allegri)
IT'S SILLY SEASON:
-- A Wisconsin woman was arrested after she spread peanut butter on 30 cars that she believed belonged to Trump supporters. But it turns out the cars actually belonged to members of a local conservation club! “Witnesses said 32-year-old Christina Ferguson stormed into the club meeting on Monday night, holding what a Portage County deputy’s report described as a ‘family-size jar of low-sodium, creamy natural Jif,'" HuffPost reports. "Officers said Ferguson grew emotional as she explained how much she loved Clinton and hated Trump. She then explained why she’d misused peanut butter. ‘Peanut butter is better than fire-bombing,’ the officer quoted her as saying. She added that Trump wants to fire-bomb everybody in other countries.”
-- A naked, hoofed statue of Hillary prompted a scuffle in Manhattan. An outraged Clinton supporter destroyed it while the artist tried in vain to save it, the New York Post. (Travis Andrews)
Naked Hillary Clinton statue causes scuffle in New York https://t.co/YtbIrn7CNk pic.twitter.com/rb2cebKxCM — WGNO (@WGNOtv) October 19, 2016
SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ:
Over 62 million people on Facebook in the U.S. posted about, shared, liked or commented on content related to Trump over 931 million times in the last month.The chart below shows the unique number of people on Facebook engaging in the conversation about each candidate – as well as the number of interactions those people generated. Interactions represents the total aggregate number of likes, posts, comments and shares made about a particular candidate within the timeframe. The interactions figure includes not only the activity on the candidate’s page, but all of the likes, posts, comments and shares about that candidate from throughout Facebook:
The top five most talked about political topics on Facebook over the past month: 1. Crime & Criminal Justice; 2. Religion; 3. Taxes; 4. Government Ethics; 5. Racial Issues.
The Onion is on the lookout for late-breaking Trump news:
Coming soon to a Las Vegas billboard:
Republicans for Clinton putting up mobile Vegas billboard for debate. Will go up and down the Strip. It's subtle. pic.twitter.com/MJL6R4G3Qa — Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) October 18, 2016
Fox's Sean Hannity and CNN's Brian Stelter went back-and-forth on the issue of voter fraud:
BREAKING: James O'Keefe releases second video, VOTER FRAUD uncovered https://t.co/rgcOsqKwzp — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 18, 2016
@brianstelter What now "Mr Journalist" Will u admit voter fraud exists? https://t.co/0dyZZon5Br — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 18, 2016
From the transcript of my Sunday show: "Voter fraud is rare." When it happens, "it is investigated." https://t.co/yfwyzPHIPY — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 18, 2016
So does this video show organized voter fraud?? And will u admit @realDonaldTrump was right? https://t.co/k3iriUu6Np — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 18, 2016
Since we're chatting here, @seanhannity, will you accept the results of the election the same way you did in 2012? https://t.co/jDNuQA09CH — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 18, 2016
Mike Pence observed some of the damage from the firebombing in North Carolina and called it "an act of political terrorism":
I showed @MikePenceVP the burned out sofa chair that has Trump plastic sings melted all over it @NCGOP @newsobserver pic.twitter.com/ZJGGBN1G3D — Dallas Woodhouse (@DallasWoodhouse) October 18, 2016
Get ready for Trump to start accusing Republican Secretaries of State of collaborating to steal the election. https://t.co/r6IHW7sZrd — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 18, 2016
Vogue endorsed Clinton, making the first ever political endorsement in the magazine’s history. “We understand that Clinton has not always been a perfect candidate, yet her fierce intelligence and considerable experience are reflected in policies and positions that are clear, sound and hopeful,” the magazine's editors write.
.@voguemagazine makes its first ever presidential endorsement, complete with a gorg Annie Liebovitz shot from 1993. https://t.co/YVr6WBSNuu pic.twitter.com/0KFgfRoykf — Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) October 18, 2016
This is pretty funny:
Wyclef Jean posted this photo:
Debra Messing got a thank-you note from the White House:
When you get a Thank You note from the President of the United States of America and the First Lady. 😄 pic.twitter.com/UB8sEdL3cr — Debra Messing (@DebraMessing) October 18, 2016
Jason Chaffetz took this selfie while camping:
Kevin McCarthy went to a Dodgers game:
GOOD READS FROM ELSEWHERE:
-- New York Times, “David Letterman (and His Beard) Shop at Target These Days,” by Dave Itzkoff: “Why does David Letterman have a beard? To put it more precisely: Why did Mr. Letterman, after stepping down from CBS’s ‘Late Show’ and a 33-year career … spend the past year and a half cultivating a fleecy and prodigious mound of facial hair …? Did he grow these imposing bristles to keep the world at bay while he withdrew into retirement?” Was it his way of saying he was no longer the man who had spent 6,000 evenings reading Top 10 lists and interviewing 20,000 guests? Actually, he explained, ’I just got tired of shaving every day, but then it became something else, and I’m not quite sure what it became.’ In his dry Midwestern delivery, tinged with a new and unaccustomed element of wistfulness, he said: ‘The beard is a good reminder to me that that was a different life. I’m hopeful that I will either find something else, or something else will be presented to me.’ … With years of vitality left, he has been trying, since his ‘Late Show’ farewell in May 2015, to figure out what his next step should be.”
-- National security reporter Walter Pincus prepared a list of pressing foreign policy questions that Trump and Clinton should answer in tonight’s debate. Some highlights from his column for the Cipher Brief:
For Trump, on Russia: "At the last debate, despite your being briefed by intelligence analysts and after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper publicly identified Russia as doing the hacking, you said [Clinton] ‘doesn't know if it's the Russians doing the hacking,’ and then added, ‘Maybe there is no hacking.’ Do you not trust the U.S. intelligence community determination … that the Russians are behind the hacking of the [DNC] emails?”
"At the last debate, despite your being briefed by intelligence analysts and after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper publicly identified Russia as doing the hacking, you said [Clinton] ‘doesn't know if it's the Russians doing the hacking,’ and then added, ‘Maybe there is no hacking.’ Do you not trust the U.S. intelligence community determination … that the Russians are behind the hacking of the [DNC] emails?” For Clinton, on Syria: “You are advocating a no-fly zone and safe zones. Define just what would be involved on the part of the U.S. and its allies – including forces in the air and on the ground [for protection] … Would you seek congressional authorization to use American armed forces which will have to strike at Syrian government targets, something normally considered an act of war?”
“You are advocating a no-fly zone and safe zones. Define just what would be involved on the part of the U.S. and its allies – including forces in the air and on the ground [for protection] … Would you seek congressional authorization to use American armed forces which will have to strike at Syrian government targets, something normally considered an act of war?” For Trump, on Syria: On Oct. 9, you said “’Syria is no longer Syria. Syria is Russia and it’s Iran.’ You also said Assad forces and the Russians in Syria were fighting ISIS, and implied if you were president you would no longer support any anti-Assad forces. Instead you would join with the Russians, Iranians and Assad regime in fighting ISIS. Would that be your policy for Syria? And if the Assad regime, supported by Russian and Iranian military forces, attempted to regain control over all of Syria, would you stand aside and let that happen?”
DAYBOOK:
On the campaign trail: Trump and Clinton debate in Las Vegas. Tim Kaine speaks in Upper Arlington and Springfield, Ohio and Asheville, N.C.; Bernie Sanders rallies Clinton supporters in Reno, Nev. Pence speaks in Durango, Colo.
At the White House: Obama has no public events scheduled. Biden speaks about the Cancer Moonshot at the SAP Global CEO Summit in New York. Later, he travels to Boston to speak again about the project at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.
On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: Obama mocked Trump for griping about a rigged election: "You start whining before the game's even over?"
NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
-- “A solidly summerlike day, with partly to mostly sunny skies and noticeable humidity,” the Capital Weather Gang forecasts. “Highs head for the mid-80s, with light winds from the west-southwest around 5-10 mph. The record highs to beat for the day? — 88 at DCA, 83 at Dulles, and 82 at BWI.”
-- The Wizards beat the Cleveland Cavaliers 96-91.
-- The Capitals beat the Colorado Avalanche 3-0
-- A Richmond federal appeals court agreed to postpone oral arguments in a case over the Washington Redskins’ trademark registration, further delaying a long-running case that pits the NFL team against the U.S. patent office and Native Americans groups find the team’s name insulting. (Ian Shapira)
-- A high school senior was fatally stabbed on a D.C. Metrobus Tuesday evening, reportedly following a long-running dispute with another young woman over a cell phone. Police said the suspect has been taken into custody and charged. (Peter Hermann)
-- Marriott International announced plans to relocate its headquarters to downtown Bethesda, deciding to remain in Montgomery County after getting commitment on a $62 million publicly funded initiative. (Jonathan O'Connell)
VIDEOS OF THE DAY:
Tony Award-winning actress Laura Benanti returned to “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” last night to reprise her spot-on parody of Melania Trump — this time with some uncomfortable Billy Bush references:
Tonight! We welcome back Melania Trump and whoever she's looking at. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/sDcnFzhPz4 — The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) October 19, 2016
Watch as celebrities arrive at the White House for the Italian state dinner:
"Dreamer" Juan Salazar, who came to the U.S. when he was seven, contemplates what’s at stake in this election for him and his undocumented family members:
Judy Shepard, whose son Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, because he was gay, cut a 1-minute spot for the Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA. “I know what can happen as the result of hate,” she says to camera. “So when I see the hate that Donald Trump has brought to his campaign for president, it terrifies me. … Words have an influence, violence causes pain, hate can rip us apart. I know what can happen as the result of hate, and Donald Trump should never be our president.”
Bloomberg made an Ocean's Eleven-style explainer about whether the election is rigged:
Kathy Griffin taped a video against Trump (warning: profanity):
Viceland also used adult language in this Instagram video against Trump:
Compare some of what Clinton says in her stump speech to what she told Goldman Sachs bankers behind closed doors:
Watch Obama speak about Trump's "whining":
Finally, in this video, Canadians tell Americans why our country is already great:The Vancouver Canucks are nothing if not industrious. In the first 15 days of their season, they’ve stacked a five-game losing streak on top of a four-game winning streak, and everyone would feel better if it were the other way around.
Suddenly, October feels a lot like last spring for the NHL team — and that’s highly disconcerting.
For a second straight game, the Canucks played well on Saturday and still lost, 5-2 to the Washington Capitals, whose two late goals included an empty-netter.
Vancouver is last in the NHL in scoring, and they trail by daylight. Their 1.78 goals-per-game is nearly a full score behind the league median of 2.71, and the Canucks are about half a puck behind the next most inert offences, which had averaged 2.25 goals-per-game as of Sunday afternoon.
But the worst thing is this: after squandering their 4-0 head start to the regular season and failing to take advantage of an October schedule that saw them play seven of nine games at home, the Canucks now embark on a six-game eastern road trip in which no opponent is easy and a couple of the games, including Wednesday’s opener against the Montreal Canadiens, look unwinnable.
Cue the creepy Halloween music.
“You want to take care of home ice always,” Canuck winger Daniel Sedin said of the 0-3 homestand last week that included two shutouts. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s early on or later on. That’s the frustrating thing: we won our first four home games, and the last three haven’t been good enough. But there’s no reason we can’t be a good team on the road. We should be able to play a simple game that suits us well.
“We want to be a good team, and good teams don’t lose this many in a row. We’ve got to make sure it stops. We’ll show what kind of team we are on the road.”
Nobody embodies the Canucks’ offensive struggles as much as Loui Eriksson and Sven Baertschi. Eriksson is the US$36 million free agent who scored 30 goals last season for the Boston Bruins and is expected to do the same for the Canucks. Baertschi is a dynamic 24-year-old winger whose good second half last season was supposed to be an epiphany, a launch pad towards a major uptick in production this year.
Through nine games, neither has a goal. Give Baertschi and Eriksson five goals between them — and that might still have been below the pre-season over/under for October — and the Canucks probably have another couple of wins.
“It was fine the first four games when we were winning,” Baertschi said Saturday after earning an assist on Bo Horvat’s goal. “Now it’s a little tougher on me (mentally). But I’m going to fight through this. I’m going to stay patient and think when the goals come, they’ll come in bunches.
“There’s got to be a sense of urgency for us. I think that’s the most important part. I don’t think we’ve played well enough the last few games. The way we started the season, I think we were competing better and our structure was great. We were fighting for pucks. The last few games, at times we got away from our structure and it cost us.
“You don’t want to regret (at the end of the season) that you didn’t give it your all for a little span at the beginning. All we can do is push each other and hold each other accountable, and get through this together.”
Canuck coach Willie Desjardins, whose leash length may be revealed on this road trip, conceded the lack of production from Eriksson and Baertschi has surprised him. He noted that Baertschi is getting scoring chances and his line with Horvat and Jake Virtanen was good Saturday, but said Eriksson has yet to find a comfortable spot in the lineup.
“I think he is feeling pressure to perform,” Desjardins said. “I think he feels responsible. I haven’t seemed to find a good match with him yet on a line.”
The Canuck power play, which was 0-for-3 on Saturday and looked fairly dismal on its first two chances, is 3-for-28 in October and ranked 28th in the league. Eriksson has had 28 minutes of power-play time, Baertschi 12½.
Injured Canucks Alex Burrows (neck) and Derek Dorsett (shoulder) are expected to practice today and could play in Montreal, but neither should be expected to help the offence. The Canucks returned minor-league call-up Mike Zalewski to the Utica Comets on Sunday, which was a day off for the team.
“Tonight was a big game,” veteran Jannik Hansen said Saturday. “Being 5-3-1 or 4-4-1 looks a whole lot different when you’re going out on a six-game road trip to some tough cities.
“You never want to fall behind (in the standings). Your margin for error is so small. You lose one game and you see other teams pulling away from you. You scrape and claw every point you can get now to get yourself a cushion. You want to play important games and meaningful games in March and April. Nobody wants to play those games that don’t matter.”
They all mattered in October.LACHIE Hunter was taken to hospital on Friday night with concussion-like symptoms after the 'clothesline' tackle from North Melbourne forward Lindsay Thomas.
The Western Bulldogs midfielder played out the game after the final-term tackle but AFL.com.au understands he was taken to hospital after the Dogs' defeat by his father, former Bulldog Mark Hunter, in consultation with club doctors, to have the symptoms checked.
The Bulldogs will monitor the 21-year-old ahead of Saturday night's clash with Adelaide, but football manager Graham Lowe said Hunter had recovered well after Friday night.
"He was cleared to go home, but in consultation with the club doctors he went into hospital for further observation which he came through well, he was released a couple of hours later.
"He presented to the club well the next day (Saturday) and also today, and we’ll put him through the appropriate battery of tests to confirm that he is fit and available to be selected this week."
The Match Review Panel offered Thomas a one-game ban for the hit, which was graded as careless conduct and medium impact after taking a medical report from the Bulldogs into consideration.
Hunter was bending over to pick up the ball when Thomas' wayward tackle attempt caught him high.
Bulldogs teammates instantly remonstrated with the North forward, and on Saturday Marcus Bontempelli said the players "thought there was quite a bit of malice in it".
Hunter was the Bulldogs' best player in their 16-point loss to the unbeaten Kangaroos, with the left-footer gathering a career-best 44 disposals.
Hunter, who joined the Western Bulldogs as a father-son selection at the 2012 NAB AFL Draft, has this year emerged as one of the stars of the club's midfield.
He has averaged 33 disposals a game in the first six rounds, sitting second to only Hawthorn champion Sam Mitchell for total disposals in the competition.ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani has set November 1, 2017 for parliamentary and presidential elections in the Kurdistan Region.
In a decree signed on July 12, a copy of which was obtained by Rudaw, Barzani officially called the elections, saying the date was set in accordance with the presidential law passed by the Kurdistan legislature in 2005.
“All concerned parties are committed to do the necessary work and will support and coordinate with the Kurdistan Higher Independent Election Commission and Referendum to implement this decree,” the decree continued.
The Kurdistan Region last held parliamentary elections in 2013. The presidential election has not been held since 2009.
Barzani, who won the 2009 vote with a landslide, has already said that he will not stand in the November elections.
His term of office expired in 2013 and has since been extended twice, once by the Kurdistan parliament and then in a controversial court decision.
Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) won 38 seats in 2013, followed by the Gorran (Change) Movement with 24 seats, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) with 18, the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) with 10, and the Kurdistan Islamic Group (Komal) with 6.
Following the elections, Gorran, established in 2009, joined the broad-based KDP-led government, holding a number of key posts including heading the ministries of Peshmerga and finance, as well the parliament speaker.
Following days of protests and rising tensions between KDP and Gorran, the KDP sacked the Gorran ministers and blocked parliament speaker Yousif Mohammed from returning to the parliament building in October 2015.
The Kurdistan legislature has not convened since and every attempt to reactivate the parliament has failed.
The KDP announced this week that they have dropped their conditions to reactivate the parliament, thereby accepting the return of the parliament speaker, in order to help the referendum succeed.
Gorran has said they will respond to KDP’s offer after the party elects a new leader to replace their late founder Nawshirwan Mustafa who died earlier this year from cancer.
Gorran is set to elect a new leader on July 25.
The call for the elections comes as the Kurdistan region will hold an independence referendum on September 25.Media playback is unsupported on your device
There are an estimated 25 million Indians who live outside of India.
India's political parties are trying to use them to their advantage in the upcoming general election.
The three main parties, the Congress party, the BJP and the AAP, have all set up NRI - or Non-Resident Indian - teams abroad. They have intricate social media, online and call centre strategies in their attempts bid to garner more voters.
#BBCtrending takes a look at the Non-Resident Indians helping to shape India's general election.
Video journalist: Benjamin Zand
Are you in Bangalore? We're recording a special BBC Trending radio on the Indian elections on Friday 11 April. If you would like to be in the audience, please email us at trending@bbc.comLike many 30-somethings, Alen Hirmiz has tattoos. His – a large one of a cross and one of Jesus on each arm – bear witness to his Christian faith. His sister and family are now afraid they could endanger his life.
On June 11, a Sunday, immigration agents detained Mr. Hirmiz in front of his shocked parents at the family’s home in suburban Detroit. He’s now waiting in a holding facility in Youngstown, Ohio, where – barring an emergency stay – he will be sent back to an Iraq he hasn’t seen since he was a teenager.
“If he enters Iraq,” his sister Alina Senawi says, “he will be killed.”
Hirmiz’s detention was part of a broader federal operation that ensnared roughly 200 Iraqi-born immigrants, including 114 from Metro Detroit, the vast majority Chaldean Christians. Christians in Iraq are routinely targeted by the so-called Islamic State and other militia groups.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that all of the detained have criminal convictions, that their removals are in the interest of public safety. But family members and advocates say those slated for removal have already served their time – and that sending Christians to a region where they’re actively hunted by terrorists amounts to a death sentence.
It also would violate United States law, say lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a class action suit against the federal government on behalf of the detainees. The ACLU says, under the law, the detainees must be given an opportunity to prove they could face torture or death if returned to Iraq.
On Wednesday, a federal judge heard arguments on whether to grant an emergency stay. “Not only is it immoral to send people to a country where they are likely to be violently persecuted, it expressly violates United States and international law and treaties,” Kary Moss, executive director for the ACLU of Michigan,” said in a statement.
Beyond the legal questions, the case of the Iraqi Christians offer a window of deeply conservative people of faith who now find themselves baffled at their loved ones being caught in raids by the Trump administration. Chaldeans overwhelmingly favored the Republican candidate, ultimately helping deliver a close victory in politically crucial Michigan.
They thought, many of those interviewed said, that the president would safeguard their families because of their Christian faith.
“Everybody supported him – we all wanted Trump because we thought Trump would do good for us,” Steve Yaldo, an American-born Chaldean who lives in Southfield. “And now it’s like he turned his back on us.”
Hirmiz's family is not claiming the young man, who was born in Iraq and came to the US when he was a teenager, is innocent of the crime he was convicted of. When he was in his early 20s, he went to prison for taking part in a home invasion. But he served his sentence and had straightened out, Ms. Senawi said. Before his detention this month, he supported his family through his work at a grocery store.
According to the Associated Press, immigration officials said a judge determined the detainees were “ineligible for any form of relief under US law,” but declined to discuss the appeal process or specifics about the crime. Most of the removal orders had been issued some time ago, some under the Obama administration, but ICE could not remove the men until an agreement was reached with Iraq in March.
Chaldeans are Eastern Catholics who trace their ancestry to Mesopotamia, in present-day northern Iraq, and traditionally spoke Aramaic. In the 1920s, facing religious oppression and seeking economic opportunity, many began immigrating to Detroit. In southeast Michigan, the community now numbers more than 120,000, about half the total US Chaldean population.
The community is socially conservative and usually leans Republican, but in last year’s election Chaldeans were particularly energized. “I have never seen the enthusiasm we had this year to go out and vote,” Martin Manna, president of the Chaldean Community Foundation, told the National Catholic Register in December. “Many issues motivated people,” he added, “but especially what is happening to Christians in Iraq and Syria.”
“Many [Chaldeans] have hope with President Trump,” Mr. Manna said in a February interview.
In light of the June sweeps, some Chaldeans who voted for Trump, like Mr. Yaldo, can’t fathom why Iraqi Christians would continue to support him. Others are unsure about their loyalty. “I voted for Trump,” says Hala Barka, |
do a great job.
Thanks again for reaching out to me and I hope you’ll keep me in mind for future opportunities.
-Your name here
—
That’s it.
Those few lines have helped me dramatically grow my network while also generating countless gigs over the years.
If you use this script each time you have to turn down a gig, you too will grow your network and hopefully avoid wanting to pull your hair out.
Want to take my free email course about authentically marketing yourself? Just sign up below:A national monument that is said to have served as the coronation stone for the High Kings of Tara has been vandalised, it was revealed today.
Minister for Heritage Jimmy Deenihan condemned the attack on the Lia Fáil (stone of destiny) Standing Stone, which is situated on the Hill of Tara in Co Meath.
The standing stone, which is believed to date from 3,500BC, is considered an extremely important national monument and features extensively in ancient texts. The granite stone is associated with the inauguration rites for the Kings of Tara and was moved to its current position in the early 19th century.
The monument was reported to be damaged last weekend, but it is unknown when the attack occurred.
An archaeologist from the National Monuments Service examined the monument this week and concluded it had been struck – possibly with a hammer or similar instrument – at 11 places on all four faces of the stone. Fragments of the standing stone were also removed.
A report has been sent to the Garda.
Speaking today, Mr Deenihan said the national monuments at Tara, which include the standing stone, are nationally and internationally renowned.
"These monuments are a fundamental part of our shared heritage and history, and I condemn in the strongest terms the damage that has been caused to this monument," he said.
"I would ask all people to respect and appreciate the importance of our national monuments, and to keep a watchful eye on any in their locality."It’s holiday time again! There are so many fun things to do with your family in your area. This is a great time of the year to get out there and have some holiday fun! Here are some ideas in Jersey City and the surrounding areas :
JCFamilies’ Annual Holiday Party!
A day of holiday delight planned for the whole family including: Picture and Piñata with Santa, Spin Art, Cookie Decoration, Holiday-inspired Arts & Crafts, DJ, Dance Party and goodies,puppet show & more. This will be the holiday party of the season, so bring your little ones to join the Holiday-fun! Pay Here : http://bit.ly/1MoRPFl
No entry ticket for the adults Group of 4 kids :$40 Pay Here : http://bit.ly/1R40nWc No entry ticket for the adults
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BELL + GRAY Pop Up Market
Bell + Gray, Jersey City’s popular gastro-pub is hosting a holiday Pop-up market every Saturday + Sunday from December 12th & 13th until Christmas! Join us starting Saturday, December 12th from 11:00am-5:00pm! Come brunch + Shop!
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14th STREET GARDEN CENTER
DATES: Sunday, November 29th – 1pm to 3pm & December 13rd – 10am to 1pm
Free Photos with Santa! Free cookies and Hot Cocoa
793 Jersey Ave, Jersey City, JC, 07310
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SANTA’S ELF FACTORY – Raising Awareness and money for the Austism advocacy
The whole family can enjoy over an hour of fun, festive, holiday activities! Come experience what it really means to be one of Santa’s special helper elves and learn their secrets!
DATES:
Saturday and Sunday, Dec 5 th and 6 th – Sponsored Weekend for Autistic Children
and 6 – Saturday and Sunday, Dec 12th and 13th – Open to All
HOURS: 10am to 5pm
Tickets and Donations at http://www.jcfunraisers.com
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THE HOLIDAY MARKET
The Holiday Market at the Grove St. PATH Plaza is in conjunction with the regular Farmer’s Market on Mondays and Thursdays from Nov 16th to Dec 21st.
Free cookies for children.
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SANTA AT BROOKFIELD PLACE
PHOTO MEMORIES WITH THE MAN IN RED HIMSELF!
Create photo memories with the man in red himself! Santa’s Winter Wonderland is the place for families, friends, couples, co-workers, and dog owners (on select days) to capture the magic of the holidays while shipping, dining and ice skating at Brookfield Place! Packages start at $22.
DATES:
– December 2-23 I 10AM-6PM (break 2-3PM)
– December 24 I 10AM-4PM (break 1-2PM)
230 Vesey Shops at Brookfield Place, 2nd Level
SANTA PAWS
Special hours for you and your best friend! Small dogs under 15lbs only!
Dogs must be carried or in a carrier at all times with the exception of service animals.
DATES:
– Sundays, December 6, 13, 20, 9am-10am
– Tuesdays, December 9, 16, 23, 6-7pm
ELFIE SELFIES:
Snap a picture in our Elfie Selfie set during your visit to Santa’s Winter Wonderland!
DATES:
– December 4-24, 10am-6pm
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JC WEST SIDE HOLIDAY CRAFT FAIR
DATES: December 12th and 13th at 12pm to 5pm
Over twenty vendors with food and gifts for the whole family.
Come shop local!
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6TH ANNUAL GRACE HOLIDAY CONCERT
DATE: December 13th from 2:pm to 7:pm
Join for the holiday event of the season! An eclectic gathering of Jersey City’s favorite musicians perform all your favorite holiday tunes in one spectacular afternoon.
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JC NUTCRACKER
DATES:
Dec 18th at 7pm
Dec 19th at 1pm & Dec 19th at 5pm
Dec 20th at 1pm
Frank R. Conwell Middle School #4 Auditorium, 107 Bright Street, Jersey City, NJ 07302
COST: 18 dollars
Though containing elements of the original E.T.A Hoffman folktale and set to Tchaikovsky’s renowned orchestral score, Nimbus’ Jersey City Nutcracker presents an adapted narrative set in a contemporary urban environment.
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SUZUKI VIOLIN HOLIDAY CONCERT
DATE: December 12th from 1pm to 2pm
Come out for a year-end concert at Newport Mall.
Young students of Mengwei Shen will be performing selections from the Suzuki violin and cello repertoire and audience favorites, including Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and more, arranged for beginner student groups.
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CHRISTMAS WITH THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC CHOIR & ORCHESTRA
DATE: December 15th at 7:30pm at Saint Peter’s University
Led by critically acclaimed conductor Frederick Golz, the performance will feature excerpts from the Baroque Masterpiece Handel’s Messiah, alongside awe-inspiring acapella choral selections and thrilling Gospel arrangements. Ticket holders will be immersed in the magical sounds of Christmas and filled with the joyful wonder of the season’s miracle.
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Event Details:
Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Christmas Story
Sunday, December 20, 2015 at 7 pm
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 440 Hoboken Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07304
$35 General Admission (Open Seating)
Free for Children 14 and under (recommended for ages 6 and up)
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2461185
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HDSID ANNUAL TREE/ MENORAH LIGHTING
DATE: Dec 3rd from 5pm to 6pm
The Historic Downtown Special Improvement District presents its Annual Historic Downtown Tree Lighting and Menorah Ceremony at the Grove PATH Plaza AND Pedestrian Mall
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14th ANNUAL NEWPORT TREE LIGHTING
DATE: Wed, Dec 2nd from 6pm to 8pm
NEWPORT TOWN SQUARE (100 Town Square Place, Jersey City, NJ 07310)
Newport Town Square will be “merry and bright” with the return of the community’s annual celebration.
The event will feature:
A 30-foot tree lighting led by Santa, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, News 12 New Jersey’s Nick Meidanis and help from a Newport child
A synchronized light-and-music show across Newport’s Town Square
Meet-and-greets with Santa, Mrs. Claus and elves
Trackless train rides for children
Victorian Christmas carolers for entertainment
Hot cocoa, coffee and cookies from Jersey City’s Morton Williams
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HOLIDAY MART AT THE HUB
The Jackson Hill Main Street SID and the Jersey City Innovation Team is hosting the Holiday Mart @ The HUB for 4 consecutive weekends.
DATES: Opening Weekend is Saturday/Sunday November 28th/29th. Opening Weekend only, there will be an Ice Skating Rink in the HUB Parking Lot.
In addition, Saturday ONLY and weather permitting, there will be a Tree Lighting Ceremony, Stage featuring local artists singing positive/holiday songs.
Vendors are being provided an opportunity to display / sell their wares and art. $25 per day.
HOURS: Saturdays: 11am to 7pm / Sundays: 11 am to 4pm
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PROJECT MARKET
DATES: December 5th and 6th from 11am to 6pm- City Hall Plaza, Downtown Jersey City
The heated outdoor market located in the Historic Downtown section of Jersey City, NJ will act as a kick-off to the holiday shopping season highlighting local, celebrating seasonal, and encouraging economic growth amongst small businesses. Melding an old-world bazaar aesthetic with elements from popular culture, the market is not unlike the downtown area where it’s located – a burgeoning neighborhood rich with history and ripe with new development.
With new vendors each day, there’s good reason to spend your weekend with us. Come EAT. SHOP. DRINK. with us at City Hall!
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From embattled punk bands to Yakuza vampires, this year's action-thriller-horror series has something for everyone but your children and your grandmother.
Fans of thrills, chills and martial arts skills refreshed their Twitter feeds with great anticipation this morning as the Toronto International Film Festival revealed its Midnight Madness slate. Keeping to tradition, series curator Colin Geddes mercilessly teased MM fans last night with @mmadnesstiff, offering cryptic clues and carefully cropped stills, prompting a global guessing game on what the chosen films would be.
Fans of Jeremy Saulnier’s bleak Blue Ruin will be treated to his latest violent action thriller, Green Room. Takashi Miike, who went from Midnight Madness to the TIFF Masters series in years past, returns to MM with the promisingly bonkers Yakuza Apocalypse, billed as a “Japanese action fantasy Yakuza vampire film”—because, why not? Turkey (the country, not—never mind) makes its first appearance in Midnight Madness with the blisteringly brutal Baskin, in which a cluster of cops inadvertently bust in on a Satanic cult and find themselves battling their way out of hell. And the highly anticipated teen-slasher homage The Final Girls, a meta-horror comedy starring Taissa Farmiga that reputedly out-screams Scream, winds up the list.
Other titles include Russian cyborg thriller Hardcore; Katharine Isabelle starrer The Girl in the Photographs; The Mind’s Eye, the latest from Almost Human director Joe Begos; martial-arts crime-thriller SPL2: A Time for Consequences, starring the legendary Tony Jaa; supernatural chiller The Devil’s Candy; and the super-mysterious Southbound, by directors Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, and Radio Silence. Plus, for the first time since the delightfully deranged The Legend of Beaver Dam, the festival has programmed a short film, this one a madcap rearranging of The Shining called The Chickening. The shrieking, and clucking, starts Thursday, September 10 at 11:59 p.m. at the Ryerson Theatre.55User Rating: 5 out of 5
Review title of Erenjaeger66611 awesome game (DLC COMING 2019 HYPE)
the world and bosses are amazing and each fight feels like a new brawl with the stages of the fights either looking great or changing the fight or both! hen you see someone say its too hard or think it yourself just remember that boss that destroyed you, you WILL beat them with patience and you will feel like a god. if you think its too easy then challenge yourself in a way to make it harder, whether that being your loadout or how you fight a boss. checkpoint mechanism would help, but then it would lose the games appeal of get better at every turn and every boss phase. online co-op isn't necessary as thatwould lose the retro appeal and could create lag with bosses that would be impossible with the tiniest bit of lag. ith the new DLC being announced for 2019, i will continue playing what has become one of my favorite games.
Microsoft Team responded on 6/26/2018 Hi there, There's nothing quite as satisfying as finally taking down a difficult boss that's been giving you problems! Great to hear that you've enjoyed Cuphead. We're also looking forward to future content and having an additional playable character in Ms. Chalice! Happy gaming! Rey Xbox Customer CareEver had someone annoy you so much you wanted to beat them up, but you don’t actually want to cause them physical harm? Well now you can create the after effects in Photoshop! I first did these effects for a school project in which I made myself look like I’d gotten into a pretty bad fight. While doing that project I went looking for tutorials on how to make cuts and bruises. It was easy enough to find bruises tutorials, also figuring it out wasn’t difficult, but I wasn’t able to find anything on cuts. I didn’t want to create anything huge, just some split lips, so that’s all I’ve done in this tutorial, but when I do figure out a realistic large wound I’ll be posting it. For this tutorial there are a lot of steps that work only for this specific photo, settings will change depending on the lighting, skin colour, etc. There are download links at the end of this post if you wish to use this photograph.
This is what we’ll be making
Open up whatever image you’re working on and duplicate the Background layer using CTRL+J and rename the new layer as Safety. Now create a new hue/saturation adjustment layer.
And use these settings to create a base for the bruising around the eyes.
Change the name of the layer to Bruise Base50% and change the opacity to 50%. Invert the mask of the adjustment layer by selecting it and pressing CTRL+I. Select a soft brush and with white paint around the eyes. My mask looked like this.
The full image looked like this.
There will be a few adjustment layers like this. Make another hue/saturation but this time use these settings, rename Brown/Green72% and change the opacity to 72%.
Select the mask and invert it and paint with white around the eyes again, but paint in slightly different areas than before, overlapping is okay.
Create another hue/saturation layer and rename it Brown24% and set the opacity to 24 % and use these settings.
Invert the mask and paint with white again. I only painted around the right (left) eye, and around the top edge.
Create another hue/saturation layer and rename it Red/Brown71% change the opacity to 71% and invert the mask and paint with white. Use these settings.
Make one last hue/saturation layer and rename it Pink/Purple43%, change the opacity to 43%, invert the mask and paint with white around the eyes. Use these settings for the layer.
Select all the hue/saturation layers and put them into a group called bruises.
Now that we’re all done with the hue/saturation layers for the bruises we’re going to make another hue/saturation layer! Bet you thought I was done with them, but NOPE! (Most of this tutorial is adjustment layers). So make another hue/saturation layer and rename it Darken Eyes. Change the opacity to 46% and use these settings.
Invert the mask and paint on the whites of the eyes so that they are darkened.
It’s a very subtle effect but it pays off.
Now create a Curves adjustment layer.
And change the RED Curve by selecting it in the drop down menu on the Curve Adjustment.
Using the same drop down menu switch back to the RGB curve and dark the image by dragging the bottom point to the right.
Rename the Curve Redden Eyes and change the opacity to 42%. Invert the mask and paint on the eyes with a soft brush.
Copy the Redden Eyes layer and rename Right Nostril Blood. Select the two eye adjustment layers and put them into a group called eyes. Fill the Right Nostril Blood mask completely with black so that it no longer affects the eyes. Select one of the crack brushes (download link at the bottom) and paint with white under the right nostril. Switch to black and brush out any parts you don’t wish to keep.
Copy the Right Nostril Blood layer and rename Left Nostril Blood. Fill the mask with black and paint under the left nostril same as you did with the right nostril.
Copy the Left Nostril Blood curve, rename it lower cut, and fill the mask with full black. Select a crack brush and paint a small cut along the bottom lip.
With the curve adjustment selected choose the FX button and apply an Inner Shadow, and a Bevel Emboss. Use these settings.
Copy the Lower Cut curve and rename it as Upper Cut. Once again fill the mask with black and select a crack brush and paint a small cut along the upper lip.
The settings for the FX can remain the same. Copy the Upper Cut layer and rename the copy Upper Cut 2, you can rename the original Upper Cut 1.
Now copy the Upper Cut 2 layer and rename it Extra Blood. Remove the effects and fill in the mask with black. Select a soft brush and paint with white around the nose and the cuts on the lip.
Select all the cut and blood layers and put them into a group called Cuts/Blood. Use CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E to merge all layers into a new layer. Rename the new layer WIP (Work In Progress) and make a copy of it using CTRL+J. Rename the copy Liquify. With the Liquify layer selected go to Filters>Liquify (or use SHIFT+CTRL+X).
Using the settings below use single clicks with the brush to bloat parts around the eyes, nostrils, and lips to simulate the swelling (I really recommend single clicking and building on those slowly, that way it won’t be over done, and can be easily controlled).
Use CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E to merge all the layers to a new layer. Rename this new layer HDR and convert the layer to a Smart Object.
Double click the Smart Object and click yes on the dialogue box that comes up. This will open the Smart Object into its own file that is still connected to the layer in the original. In the Smart Object file go to Image>Adjustments>HDR Toning… it will say that it will have to flatten the image, just click yes it’s okay.
Use the settings below to get the image to how I’ve made it. You can play around with them to get the image to your liking, and just to see what they do.
When you have the settings to how you want them click Okay. Then go to File>Save (this will only save the Smart Object file, not the original PSD, but what’s awesome is that it will save the changes to the HDR layer in the original). Now back in the original PSD use CTRL+SHIFT+N to open the New Layer dialogue box. We’re going to make a Dodge & Burn layer. In the dialogue box change the Mode to Soft Light, check the box to fill with Soft-light neutral color (50% gray), and click OK. Select a soft brush and set the brush opacity to 5% paint with black around areas you wish to make darker (I painted around the bruises, cuts, nose, and other shadows) and paint with white around the areas you wish to make lighter (I just painted in areas to highlight the edges around shadows).
Open the new layer dialogue box and give it the same settings, this time name it Vignette. Right click the new Vignette layer and convert it to a Smart Object, then go to Filter>Lens Correction (or use SHIFT+CTRL+R). Use these settings to create the vignette.
And that’s it. Here’s what my layer panel looks like.
And here is what the final looks like.
I hope you found this tutorial informative, and useful. And that it explained things well. Feel free to comment or send me an email.
Download Links:
RETOUCHED PORTRAIT
UNRETOUCHED PORTRAIT
CRACK BRUSHESNEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Lawyers for a black judge argued on Thursday that Bernette Johnson is entitled to become the next chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court because she has served on the state high court longer than any other sitting justice.
The dispute over whether Johnson should be the first African American to head the Louisiana court has brought to the surface tensions rooted in the civil rights struggle in the U.S. South decades ago.
The question of succession on the Louisiana high court should be an easy one to answer as the state constitution stipulates that the longest-serving associate justice succeeds to the top post. Johnson began serving on the state Supreme Court in 1994 while white justice Jeffrey Victory did not join the court until 1995.
But the argument is over the manner in which Johnson ascended to the court. Although she was elected to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, she was assigned to serve on the Supreme Court as its first black justice as part of a racial discrimination settlement between the U.S. government and Louisiana.
Under that agreement, Louisiana temporarily added a seat to the high court in 1994. The current composition of the court is six white justices and one black.
Because she was initially appointed and not elected to the Supreme Court, her colleagues on the high court argue that she should not get credit for the first six years she served.
The dispute has ended up in the court of federal judge Susie Morgan, who heard arguments from Johnson and the state of Louisiana on Thursday.
“In the 200-year history of the Louisiana Supreme Court, every chief justice has ascended to that position automatically,” James Williams, one of Johnson’s lawyers, told the judge.
Current Chief Justice Katherine Kimball sought to keep the matter within the high court and has set a deadline of August 31 for people to file their views on the matter with the court.
But aware that her fellow justices would likely rule against her, Johnson chose to bring the matter to federal court.
President Barack Obama’s administration has weighed in on the side of Johnson along with the civil rights organization NAACP and the city of New Orleans.
Until last week, it appeared that Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal would keep his distance. But late on Friday the governor’s office said the Louisiana Supreme Court should decide the issue and the federal government should stay out of the matter.
Johnson’s supporters said leaving it to the high court would likely result in her being passed over for the chief justice post.
Judge Morgan ended the hearing without saying when or how she is likely to rule.Image caption Ryan Cleary has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome since his arrest
A man accused of hacking the Serious Organised Crime Agency's website has been released on conditional bail.
Ryan Cleary, 19, must observe a curfew between 2100 BST and 0700 BST, be electronically tagged and only leave the house with one of his parents.
The teenager, from Wickford, Essex, is not allowed to access the internet or possess devices which can go online.
He was arrested as part of a Scotland Yard and FBI probe into online hacking group LulzSec.
The group claims responsibility for hacking attempts on Soca, the US Senate and the CIA.
Flooding target
Mr Cleary is alleged to have set up a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) on 20 June.
A DDOS attack typically involves flooding a target website with data, in an attempt to overwhelm it so it cannot serve its legitimate users.
His mother, Rita spoke at Southwark Crown court on Monday to say she would agree to any bail conditions imposed on her son, who has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome since his arrest.
Describing him as "my life", she said: "I'm aware that I'm his best friend as well as his mother, because he's reclusive."
After the hearing, Mr Cleary's solicitor, Karen Todner, issued a statement on behalf of her client saying he was very relieved to be granted bail "and to go home to his mum, his cats and his books".
She continued: "Ryan has last week at court been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, which is a form of high functioning autism.
"He will now be provided with the professional support that he needs. His obvious intelligence can now be channelled into a worthwhile pursuit."
The case is due to be heard again at Southwark Crown Court on 30 August.Malacañang Palace on Friday said Sen. Leila de Lima might only be feeding “misinformation” to divert the public’s attention from her alleged involvement in the illegal narcotics trade and her affair with her former driver Ronnie Dayan.
Communications Assistant Secretary Marie Banaag issued the statement a day after De Lima named Special Assistant to the President Christopher “Bong” Go as the one who called Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Director General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa to reinstate Supt. Marvin Marcos, the police official allegedly involved in the killing of Albuera, Leyte, Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr.
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“Doon sa punto ni Secretary De Lima, hindi natin siya pwedeng sabihan kung anong pwede niyang isipin at kung anong pwede niyang, isipin at sabihin. Kaya kung sa kanyang banda po, kay Senator De Lima, kung gusto niyang sabihin ‘yun, walang problema po sa atin kasi anytime po they can, they can feed any misinformation in order to, para magkagulo ang ranks ng mga nagta-trabaho sa administrasyon (On De Lima’s point, we can’t tell her what to say and think. If in her opinion, that’s what she wants to say, there’s no problem with us, because anytime they can feed any misinformation in order to confuse the ranks of those working in the administration),” Banaag said in a press briefing.
Banaag said De Lima’s allegations could be a tactic to create division and distrust among the Cabinet members and Palace officials.
“Ang sinasabi natin may posibilidad na ’yung mga opinion ni Senator De Lima, ’yung kanyang mga sasabihin ay pwedeng pwede, posibilidad na pwedeng para magulo at para magkawatak-watak at magka may suspicion sa ranks ng mga nasa administrasyon (What we’re saying is there’s a possibility that the opinions of Senator De Lima, her statements were made to cause confusion and division and create suspicion among the ranks of the administration),” she added.
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MOST READMr. Trump has pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.
And while Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism for her failure to hold a news conference for months, she has fielded hundreds of questions from the ultrarich in places like the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.
“It’s the old adage, you go to where the money is,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat.
Mrs. Clinton raised about $143 million in August, the campaign’s best month yet. At a single event on Tuesday in Sagaponack, N.Y., 10 people paid at least $250,000 to meet her, raising $2.5 million.
If Mr. Trump appears to be waging his campaign in rallies and network interviews, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential bid seems to amount to a series of high-dollar fund-raisers with public appearances added to the schedule when they can be fit in. Last week, for example, she diverged just once from her packed fund-raising schedule to deliver a speech.
… To businessmen who complain to Mrs. Clinton that President Obama has been unfriendly to their interests, she says she would approach business leaders more like Mr. Clinton did during his administration, which was widely considered amicable to the private sector.
When financiers complain about the regulations implemented by theDodd-Frank financial overhaul, Mrs. Clinton reaffirms her support for strong Wall Street regulation, but adds that she is open to listening to anyone’s ideas and at times notes that she represented the banking industry as a senator.
The wealthy contributors who host Mrs. Clinton often complain about her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and express concerns that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont pushed her to the left on trade and other issues. Mrs. Clinton reminds them she has both opposed and supported trade deals in the past.
… Another advantage to choosing private fund-raisers over town halls or other public events is that Mrs. Clinton can bask in an affectionate embrace as hosts try to limit confrontational engagements
… “The Hamptons is full of powerful, wealthy people who are bored and go to constant social events to see who else got invited and to show your status,” said Ken Sunshine, a veteran Democratic activist and public relations executive with a home in Remsenburg, N.Y. “This year,” he added, “going to a Clinton event is at the very top of the list.”Centrelink: Debt-recovery'monumental mess' to be investigated by Senate committee
Updated
Centrelink's controversial debt-recovery program will be investigated by a Senate committee to determine why thousands of Australians were incorrectly told they needed to repay money.
Key points: Centrelink's debt-recovery system was automated in 2016
Greens Senator Rachel Siewert called program "a monumental mess"
Bill Shorten called on Human Services Minister to apologise during Question Time
The Department of Human Services has cross-referenced Australian Tax Office and Centrelink data to determine overpayments for years, but the system was automated in mid-2016 to save money.
With human oversight greatly reduced, some Australians were contacted by debt collectors before they realised they needed to correct their records.
The Senate inquiry was moved by Greens Senator Rachel Siewert and passed with the support of Labor and the Nick Xenophon team.
Senator Siewert said the program was a "monumental mess" and accused the Government of not providing answers or a guarantee they would improve the program.
"The automated debt-recovery system, which started trying to collect debts without human oversight, has caused anguish for thousands of Australians, many of which do not even have a debt at all," she said.
"These people are now having to rake through records from years ago to prove they don't have debts — they need and deserve answers.
"It is clear that the automated debt-recovery system must be investigated by a Senate inquiry so we can drill down and begin providing answers to the community that the Government won't."
Labor attacked the Government during Question Time on Wednesday, asking why a 67-year-old pensioner was erroneously told she owed the Government money.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said Human Services Minister Alan Tudge should have stood up in Question Time to say "I'm sorry, we made a mistake".
Coalition Ministers have continued to defend the program, claiming welfare should only be given to those who are entitled to it.
The Government introduced changes to the program last month, despite insisting it was working and dismissing calls for its suspension.
Labor's human services spokeswoman Linda Burney said last month the program was a disaster and further investigation was needed.
"We need an inquiry to get to the bottom of how the Government got this so wrong, how people have been impacted and what can be done to fix this mess," she said.
The Senate inquiry has been welcomed by the main public sector union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), which is preparing to launch strike action over the program next week.
"Our members working in Centrelink are looking forward to this inquiry so they can shine a light on what's caused this shameful crisis and what should be done from here," CPSU national secretary Nadine Flood said.
A cost-benefit analysis of the debt-recovery program found more than 860,000 clients had discrepancies in their accounts between 2010 and 2013.
The debt-recovery program had human oversight during these years but more than 1 million discrepancies were found, with an average debt value of $1,400 per person.
Topics: welfare, government-and-politics, federal-parliament, australia
First postedPhoto: Rayzone Brochure
Ever heard of an "app interception system"?
So-called app interception or cloud interception systems are small physical boxes that steal social media passwords, emails, Dropbox contents and more from smartphones of passers-by, all with no interaction from the target.
Now, in response to Freedom of Information requests from Motherboard, the FBI has refused to neither confirm nor deny whether the agency has any contracts with two of the main companies selling such devices.
"The mere acknowledgment of whether or not the FBI has any such records in and of itself would disclose techniques, procedures, and/or guidelines that could reasonably be expected to risk of circumvention of the law. Thus, the FBI neither confirms nor denies the existence of any records," the responses to two requests read.
The device requires "minimal training," and "no technical skills" are necessary
In January, Motherboard requested copies of contracts between the agency and three companies: Magen 100, Rayzone Group, and Wintego, which all market their technology to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
One of Rayzone Group's products is InterApp, which, according to a company brochure, can siphon passwords, emails, previous location information, contact lists, photos, internet browsing history and technical information such as the target phone's MAC address.
The device requires "minimal training," and "no technical skills" are necessary, the brochure continues. (The company also sells IMSI catchers, used to track mobile phones by their unique identifier; malware for computers and mobiles; and social media monitoring technology).
Magen 100 sells very much the same thing, and point specifically to Gmail users being vulnerable. A brochure indicates the company also sells a more portable version that can fit into a backpack.
Motherboard's request regarding Wintego, that sells a similar product, is yet to receive a response.
When sent similar requests, the Drug Enforcement Administration said that it held no responsive documents for all three companies.
The FBI surrounds its use of surveillance technology in extreme secrecy, whether that's tools such as Stingrays, or computer exploits to identify suspected criminals on the dark web. If the FBI ever does start buying boxes that can steal your Gmail password, the agency is probably going to keep tight-lipped about them as well for some time.Mission statement Nothing in politics is inevitable. Brexit can be stopped, but only through the Labour Party.
Remain Labour is a grassroots campaign founded with two clear objectives.
To campaign for the Labour Party to adopt a policy of supporting full British membership of the European Union, before Article 50 expires. For that policy to be put to the British people, through either: A manifesto commitment in any General Election that takes place before the expiry of Article 50
A referendum on the terms of an ‘exit deal’, with the referendum question including the option to remain full members of the European Union
To this end, Remain Labour members across the country proposed and passed motions in their local branches calling on the Labour Leadership support a People’s Vote on the Withdrawal Agreement and to campaign to Remain in the EU in that referendum. In total, we passed over 50 motions, taking 35 contemporary motions to conference, where many of our delegates were instrumental in the compositing process.
Britain does not have to leave the European Union in March 2019. Brexit can be stopped by enacting the Labour Party policy, unanimously agreed at party conference, to support a People’s Vote:
If we cannot get a general election Labour must support all options remaining on the table, including campaigning for a public vote. If the Government is confident in negotiating a deal that working people, our economy and communities will benefit from they should not be afraid to put that deal to the public.
From Labour’s Composite Motion, Agreed at Conference
Remain-Labour does not exist to help promote ‘Soft Brexit’ or any other exit deal which might be proposed. Soft Brexit is an exercise in damage limitation; understandable, but not desirable. We passionately believe the interests of our country today and in the future will be best served through full membership of the European Union. The debate about our future must not be framed between competing visions of Brexit, but between Brexit and remaining at the core of the European Union.
To begin, we are asking supporters to please take 10 seconds to join the Remain-Labour campaign mailing list on our homepage here.
Once you’re signed up, we’ll be able to get in touch with further campaign actions and events in your constituency or region. But if you’re feeling energised and want to get involved now, here are several ways you can help enact Labour’s Brexit policy:
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HILLCREST, Queens — A college student was allegedly shoved into a van, threatened and robbed by three masked men.
The victim told police the trio hurled racial epithets at him.
The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force is now investigating |
Mortal Kombat X players can purchase optional downloadable content that makes it easier to execute the often complex series of stick movements and button presses required by the game's signature fatalities.
Two "Easy Fatalities" packs are available, which give players "access to Fatalities with simplified inputs," according to their description on the PlayStation Store. Players can buy five simplified moves for $0.99 and 30 for $4.99. Equivalents are also available for Xbox. As of this writing, no listing for Easy Fatalities appears on Steam.
Clarification: Mortal Kombat X also includes tokens that players can earn in the main game for free. The consumable tokens turn fatalities into two-button presses. They're also on sale in platform stores at the prices shown above.
Must Read Mortal Kombat's gross fatalities are created with slime and a plunger
The DLC is priced in addition to Mortal Kombat X, which launched today starting at $59.99 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions will follow sometime this summer.
Since the first Mortal Kombat was released in 1992, fatalities have served as a capstone for victorious players — or kombatants, in Mortal Kombat parlance — when the announcer commands the winner to "Finish him!" Those who memorize the movements required to execute fatalities within a window of a few seconds can obliterate enemies in particularly gruesome fashion, like ripping off their heads with spines attached, ripping out their still-beating hearts or burning them down to their skeletons.
Mortal Kombat X keeps the tradition of fatalities alive, and you can see a couple of examples below, courtesy of Ermac (top) and Scorpion (bottom).
For more on the fighting game be sure to read Polygon's Mortal Kombat X review, which described it as "friendly both to casual players who want to experience its rich suite of single-player content and knock around with some friends, but deep enough for competitive players who want to plumb its roster and variations."
ERMAC
SCORPION
★★★The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has formally charged and settled with serial bitcoin entrepreneur Erik Voorhees for the public offering of securities without registering with the federal government.
The settlement bans Voorhees from making a bitcoin security offering for the next five years, according to an official SEC release. He must also relinquish profits totalling $15,843.98, as well as pay a penalty of $35,000.
The case stems from Voorhees’ solicitation of shares in two of his bitcoin-related ventures, SatoshiDICE and FeedZeBirds, which according to the SEC took place between 2012 and 2013. The SEC began investigating SatoshiDICE earlier this year.
SEC Division of Enforcement director Andrew Ceresney reiterated that entrepreneurs need to remember that the agency’s regulations still apply to bitcoin-related ventures, saying:
“All issuers selling securities to the public must comply with the registration provisions of the securities laws, including issuers who seek to raise funds using bitcoin.”
Ceresney added that the SEC will “continue to focus” on targeting companies that illegally offer securities for bitcoin investments.
Findings point to unsanctioned securities offering
According to the SEC, Voorhees was found to have violated sections of the Securities Act of 1933. He was accused of using online forums and social media platforms like Facebook to solicit investors between 2012 and 2013.
Voorhees raised more than 50,000 bitcoins from investors, although he later conducted a buy-back transaction in July 2013 which returned 45,500 bitcoins to investors.
It was during this period, the SEC reported, that Voorhees actively engaged in unlawful securities activity without federal approval.
The SEC findings noted:
“The first unregistered offering was explicitly referred to as the ‘FeedZeBirds IPO’. Despite these general solicitations, no registration statement was filed for the FeedZeBirds or SatoshiDICE offerings, and no exemption from registration was applicable to these transactions.”
Notably, Voorhees agreed to cease and desist without conceding or denying the SEC’s findings. He later released a statement on reddit, saying that he plans on continuing his work in bitcoin:
“As you may have seen, it was announced today that I have entered into a settlement agreement with the SEC. With this matter resolved, I look forward to helping to build the bitcoin industry and the future of finance.”
SEC sharpening tone against bitcoin?
The SEC charges against Voorhees represent one of the most high-profile cases against a bitcoin entrepreneur for securities violations to date.
Previously, the SEC had hinted that it was only investigating bitcoin and companies in the ecosystem in a bid to warn investors about the dangers of investing in digital currencies.
In May, the federal agency released an investor alert, citing the high risk of investment fraud and the prevalence of bitcoin-related scams that target unsuspecting consumers, saying:
“Potential investors can be easily enticed with the promise of high returns in a new investment space and also may be less skeptical when assessing something novel, new and cutting-edge.”
Image via WikipediaThe National Football Leagues' planned tweaks to commercial breaks will not affect CBS's bottom line this season, CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves told CNBC on Thursday.
"We are not going to reduce ads. They're just going to reconfigure in a different way. So, perhaps instead of there being five breaks, there are four breaks that are slightly longer," Moonves said on "Squawk on the Street."
Moonves spoke with CNBC in a wide-ranging interview at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference in Idaho. In March, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league is considering changes to speed up game play, including fewer interruptions from ads.
The change came after the league reported average TV viewership for the regular season was down from the previous year.
In the interview, Moonves said he expects this season, including Thursday nights, to have better viewership. The league is experimenting with streaming services like Amazon and Verizon, he said, opening up the possibilities for a wider audience.
Moonves said lately he's been watching more deregulation and tax reform from the Trump administration.
"There are lot of big business things that are on the table that will help all businesses," he said. "And the Trump administration, while adding to business, obviously has posed some challenges to our news division."
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.Image caption The UK is about to launch Europe's first satellite dedicated to the delivery of broadband services
UK space companies have defied the recession, growing by an average of 10% a year from 2007.
So says a report from the Oxford Economics consultancy, which predicts the growth will continue in 2010.
The space business is now said to have a turnover worth some £7.5bn, with employment rising at about 15% a year.
The best performing areas are in so-called downstream activities - services such as satellite broadcasting and telecommunications.
But even the upstream sector - such as satellite manufacturing - recorded a very healthy performance, averaging annual growth of 3% over the period 2006/07 to 2008/09.
The latest "Size and Health" report was commissioned by the UK Space Agency and is based on a survey of the activities of 260 leading companies.
UK SPACE SECTOR - 'SIZE AND HEALTH' SURVEY 2010 Total space-related turnover reached over £7.5bn in 2008/09
Downstream sector dominates; it accounted for £6.6bn of total
Represents real growth of 8% between 2007/08 and 2008/09
Average annual growth in sector since 2006/07 is 10.2%
"We had good anecdotal evidence through the recession that we were doing well but now we have the hard numbers; and it's very positive," said Richard Peckham from EADS Astrium and chair of UK Space, an umbrella group representing the industry.
And as if to emphasise the point on Monday, London-based satellite communications operator Inmarsat announced an 18.4% rise in its third-quarter earnings. The company is the world's biggest provider of comms on the move.
"Satellites go where terrestrial services don't, and what we're doing now with satellites is providing broadband - or internet access - or e-mail coverage in remote environments," CEO Andrew Sukawaty said.
"And because we're extending this service to an under-served market, we're now in a position to expand even in the middle of a recession."
The space sector recently set out a 20-year vision for itself called the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy (S-IGS).
It identified what it thought were the emerging market trends and the approaches that needed to be adopted to exploit them.
It covered areas as diverse as space tourism and the delivery of broadband internet by satellite.
The vision called on industry to intensify its R&D spending, but also for government to increase its investment.
UPSTREAM AND DOWNSTREAM Upstream provides space technology - satellites, their components, ground control systems; research, etc
provides space technology - satellites, their components, ground control systems; research, etc Downstream uses space technology - satellite TV, satellite telecommunications, sat-nav devices, etc
uses space technology - satellite TV, satellite telecommunications, sat-nav devices, etc Major players include companies such as BSkyB, Inmarsat, Pace, EADS Astrium, Qinetiq, Logica, SciSys, Fugro, Vega, Arqiva
If that happened, the S-IGS said, the UK space sector could create up to 100,000 new UK jobs in space-related activity and grow revenues to £40bn a year.
Mr Peckham said the government could help underpin the success story.
The space sector is currently championing the potential of a privately financed, national Earth-observation (EO) service to acquire imagery for the MoD and other government departments, while selling other data on the open market.
The satellites would be built and operated by the private sector, but to stand a chance of success the project would need a long-term commitment from the government to purchase its products.
"Government has a huge influence through procurement; it's what they buy," Mr Peckham told BBC News.
"We think one of the biggest markets going forward is Earth observation. We're not asking for hundreds of millions of pounds from government, but if they will just aggregate all their requirements then we can build something and go and export it."
Other examples of smart government investments include the Hylas-1 spacecraft. Due to launch on 25 November, it will become Europe's first broadband dedicated satellite, providing internet connections to rural areas poorly served by terrestrial technology.
Hylas will be operated by start-up Avanti Communications, but the spacecraft's core technology came out of a European Space Agency R&D programme funded by the British government.
A close look at the figures published by Oxford Economics reveals they are dominated by a few large companies, and by the earnings of the satellite TV provider BSkyB in particular.
In fact, broadcast services accounted for 68% of UK space sector turnover in 2008/2009.
Asked whether this distorted the general picture somewhat, science minister David Willetts responded: "It is true that the downstream revenues are shaped by BSkyB - at the moment. But one of the strengths of this sector is that we have a really good mix of some big companies and a lot of SMEs.
"We can expect this sector to grow and diversify," he told BBC News.
UK SPACE SECTOR - 'SIZE AND HEALTH' SURVEY 2010 Over 70% of employees in the sector are degree-qualified or better
Some 80,000 UK jobs may now be dependent on space in some form
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.ukWriter’s Block Challenge #1: September/October 2012
UPDATE 9/24/12 6:44PM: Only 2 spots remaining! Enter while you still can! Deadline is Oct. 1st! Follow us on twitter – @TheWBChallenge – for updates!
Welcome to the first Writer’s Block Challenge! This is a contest designed to inspire all you aspiring creative writers out there!
Here’s what the plan is: We accept the first 20 short stories submitted to writersblockchallenge@gmail.com before Oct. 1, 2012. The Winner is scheduled to be announced the last week of October.
We will read them and choose our top three and then put it to a vote who the top story belongs to.
You’ll win a little “Winner” image for online use and some free publicity as we tout the winner on WordPress, Reddit, and twitter. This is mostly just for fun and bragging rights.
The main goal of this challenge is to give aspiring writers a chance to flex their minds and work on their craft.
Now, here are the rules of Challenge #1:
1. You must write about the topic we give you. Beyond that, take it anywhere creatively you wish.
2. For this challenege, there is no specific genre, so you can write in whatever style you wish and have any kind of tone you desire, be funny or serious or weird, go nuts.
3. While we do encourage freedom in your writing, these will be available for all ages to read, so please don’t be too vulgar. While it won’t necessarily disqualify you, your entry will more than likely be removed from contention if there is a large amount of cussing, violent imagery, or vulgar sexuality. You can still write about these, just try to keep it PG-13.
4. The topic for this contest is asking for a true story. While we do desire a true story, you are more than welcome to add some flourish to a true story or even creative a fictional one. The main goal is to write something believable, something that could actually happen in real life.
5. Your story can be as short as you wish, but please limit the length of your story to 2000 words or less.
6. Please proofread your stuff a couple times before you submit it. Submissions with a bunch of typos and/or errors will be disqualified.
7. Realize that, even though you are the author, by submitting your story, you are giving us permission to post your story and to use your story in anyway that we see fit, as long as we attribute credit to the author. (We don’t plan on doing anything bad with it, just covering our butts.) However, you still retain ownership of the story. You may also do with it whatever you wish, including publishing, without any approval from us.
8. The top 3 stories will be published on our blog.
So, here is the Challenge: Describe your first brush with danger.
Once you are ready to submit your story, email it to the address above in either “.doc” or “.docx” format (“.txt” will do if it’s all you’ve got). In the “Subject” line, please write “WBC1” and in the “Body” section, please write your name (and pen-name, if desired), your e-mail address, your twitter handle (if you have one) and the title of your story!
The challenge starts NOW! Happy writing!
Questions? Ask below.
AdvertisementsCan Blockchain break Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, eBay and the like? The answer we want to give for the currently discussed Blockchain interpretation is ‘so far, no’ – contrary to common opinion.
The reason being is that for none of the Blockchain technology specifica is there is a clear path to attract users to the platform.
They are just like banks
What is it that triggers the communities fantasy on disrupting data monopolists such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and ebay?
Foremost, there is an obvious analogy to banks. There are two parties, who want to work together (send money, chat, have a ride, rent a flat, trade an item) but need a middleman to facilitate this. Usually, this entity takes too much of a slice of the cake. In the case of banks, it is even worse.
How Blockchain could disrupt data monopolists
Blockchains can be extended beyond the database paradigm towards a general application platform. These platforms work very differently. For example, they have shared virtualized databases, micropayments and consensus mechanisms, from common on-premise or on-cloud platforms that they have the potential to re-implement the named examples while not allowing one party to monopolize the platform.
The main Blockchains like Bitcoin are an example for a distributed autonomous organization.
These are organizations centered around code as their ‘constitution’ and have as its main players users, developers, miners (those that render the infrastructure) and evangelists. They are rewarded by tokens (e.g. Bitcoin) and sometimes in softer currencies such as reputation, career opportunities and even fame.
Usually there is a board and a foundation at the heart of the organization, who can also grant permanent salaries for a small core team. Decisions on directions of the system have to be made in a democratic way between all parties involved, even though there may not be a formalized consensus.
Ethereum and smart contracts
One example for the first paradigm would be Ethereum, other similar examples would be tendermint or fermat.
The most prominent Blockchain application platform Ethereum has at its core the idea to extend the Bitcoin model to a turing complete application platform, on which so-called smart contracts in languages such as solidity, a javascript dialect, could be defined.
Smart Contracts are an interesting concept with use cases, which so far are not common use cases in the industry. They often incorporate payments, here in ether, and usually they are paid based on the fulfilment of certain conditions. If such conditions can be determined inside the Blockchain (someone else paid or transferred a digital asset) the concept is straightforward.
If one needs an external datastream (stock values on day xyz), the challenge is to incorporate the data stream in order for it to be trusted by all sites.
Re-doing the middleman
Now, how could such Blockchain application platforms serve to ‘re-do’ the above listed ‘middleman’. Possible answers are often a combination of the following:
There is a shared, virtual infrastructure which cannot be dominated by one central vendor, rendered by Miners. Data in the underlying Blockchain is publicly shared (secured by cryptography) and cannot be changed because of Blockchain immutability features. The application code running on such platforms is publicly available and execution cannot be tempered with based on Blockchain immutability features. The distributed autonomous organization running the platform cannot be dominated by one vendor as its nature is that of a decentralized organization arranged around code with checks and balances between individuals, organizations and roles (users, miners, merchants, developers etc. … ) Ownerships & Incentives to contribute to such a platform can naturally be rewarded in tokens of the system expressed in a virtual currency. One advantage here is that payments can be executed peer2peer, directly between the two parties without a ‘man in the middle’.
Plus Technology, minus Marketing
Sometimes one can see what one might euphemistically call a ‘metaphorical argumentation’ which uses concepts like consensus (associating democratic votings), shared and distributed (implying there is no central monopolist) and community or movement, referring to the network of individuals, communities around a technology like Bitcoin.
For our purposes, we want to simply discard such metaphors as marketing.
All layers of this technology stack (Infrastructure, Database, Application Server, Organization, Incentive structure) clearly differ from on-premise or cloud traditional models, which tend to be dominated by a few technology vendors. This promises some exciting possibilities and interesting opportunities to write applications.
For the case of a ‘man in the middle’ facilitating data exchange between two parties who want to engage in business conversations – our claim is that none of this matters. Hence, if that is so, there should be no expectation that a Blockchain-Facebook, Blockchain-Uber, Blockchain-Airbnb or Blockchain-eBay would per se, just based on technology, be a serious competitor.
How about professionality?
Undoubtedly, one can build such systems. Potentially there are benefits in such systems for parties and the position of the middleman might be weaker if we move more towards a DAO running of such a system. However, distributed autonomous organizations or net-communities exist but we don’t see them maturing to the level of professionality that would be necessary to compete.
The different incentive structure, payments by cryptocurrency could let serious and professional efforts grow – we haven’t seen it so far, which doesn’t imply that it is impossible. But so far it seems for most developers conventional payment forms like fixed salaries or fees in the store of a large dominating vendor, seem more attractive.
Some might hope that verifiable code could attract clients as the platforms inherently might be more apt at creating trust. Many, including the author, would doubt the technical implementation layer matters for a user.
Making Blockchain successful
If none of these points matters, what would matter to make Blockchain technology successful in that space?
It is the same ingredient that makes such platforms successful for any Technology. It’s the data shared by users, the amount and type of users engaging in conversations or trade over the platforms.
Users go where users are, this is a given fact, and Blockchains won’t change that.
All other factors being equal (conditions and fees to trade, user experience and so on), the one factor that matters the most and that no platform can just solve via ‘throwing money at the problem’ (you can get a better user experience by throwing money to the best design teams) is to have the right user base to engage in trade.
Technology trust platform?
Now, if any of the Blockchains players would want to claim that Blockchains could ‘break’ one of the big data monopolists, there would need to be an explanation of how the Blockchain features could incentivise users to come to the platform.
Maybe there are sophisticated micro payments which incentivise users to engage and developer to develop, maybe there are users who are interested in a ‘technology trust platform’ and prefer that over the backings of the legal systems.
Such scenarios could give Blockchains the necessary advantage in that field.
This is not a ‘mission impossible.’ Conventional platforms also have their ways to incentivise users and developers, but sometimes differences do not have be so much in kind, but rather by degree.
If Blockchains just work ‘so much smoother’ in creating trust, they could have the necessary leverage based on their technology specifics.
By Benedikt HerudekLIVE STREAM VIDEO=> MASSIVE CROWD Turns Out at DONALD TRUMP’S North Carolina Victory Rally
It’s rainy and cold but that didn’t stop Trump supporters from lining up early to see Donald Trump in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Line outside of Crown Coliseum waiting for President-elect Donald #Trump to arrive #fayetteville pic.twitter.com/VpKTjce1m6 — Amy Elliott (@AmyTWCNews) December 6, 2016
Donald Trump is holding a Victory Rally tonight at 7 PM Eastern at the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Trump is bringing his Secretary of Defense nominee retired General James “Mad Dog” Mattis with him to his North Carolina rally.
Departing New York with General James 'Mad Dog' Mattis for tonight's rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina! See you soon! #ThankYouTour2016 pic.twitter.com/gvRkQkwblE — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016
It’s going to be a huge rally tonight!
Le Crown Coliseum en Caroline du Nord et ses 10.000 places attendent Donald Trump est ses supporters pour son #victorytour. pic.twitter.com/rRvuytdGcW — Gilles Clarenne (@gclarenne) December 6, 2016
UPDATE—-
Right Side Broadcasting has the live stream video–A strangely vivid purple flower was recently found in the forested area at Brackenridge Field Lab, located on Lake Austin Boulevard.
The purple species, Hexalectris grandiflora, is a native orchid species of Texas that has not been spotted in over 50 years. The species was thought to be restricted to Mexico and the
Trans-Pecos region of West Texas.
Dr. Rob Plowes, an ecology research scientist at Brackenridge, said this important find was followed by the discovery of a second rare orchid called Hexalectris arizonica about 50 yards away from the first orchid. Plowes has been studying these orchids, which are both coral root orchids, since their discovery.
Both of these plants appear to live most of their lives underground and only sprout above ground when it is time for their seeds to be pollinated. Plowes said that H. grandiflora seems to be pollinated by a particular type of bee but that H. arizonica appears not to have any specific pollinator.
“That is another mystery that we’re trying to solve,” Plowes said. “We don’t know what species of bee even pollinates [H. grandiflora].”
Five different species of coral root orchid species have been found in the lab field area since 1996. According to Dr. Lawrence Gilbert, an integrative biology professor and Director of the Brackenridge field stations, these rare coral orchids are different than any other known orchid species.
“Coral root orchids represent a lifestyle that has evolved independently over 20 times across more than 25,000 species worldwide,” Gilbert said. “They not only lack leaves, but have lost any ability to carry out photosynthesis. Instead, they depend entirely on fungal symbionts for nutrients.”
These “mycoheterotrophic” orchids have a symbiotic relationship with an ectomycorrhizal fungi found in the soil. The fungi connect the orchids to roots of trees. Gilbert said that studies indicate that these orchids obtain nutrients from the trees through this fungi.
Each of the six H. grandiflora plants in the field had six to eight flowers that open over a period of six weeks. Plowes said his current hypothesis is that the plant flowers over a certain period of time to train pollinators to know when to pollinate. H. grandiflora uses a pollinator to carry its pollen to other flowers and distribute them for reproduction.
The second orchid, H. arizonica, is a creamy red flower and is even more rare than H. grandiflora. Only two H. arizonica plants with six flowers each were found. Plowes said that an interesting fact about H. arizonica is that its flowers don’t fully open, limiting pollinators’ access to the pollen inside. Instead, the plant self-pollinates and feeds off of ectomycorrhizal fungi in the soil.
“If you think about it, it’s not surprising that a flower as rare as this would adapt to self-pollination as we have not found a species that pollinates it,” Plowes said.
Plowes said that these species may be growing in the Austin area for the first time because of surplus rainfall over the past two years.
“The El Niño event may have provided sufficient moisture and resources that caused the plant to flower,” Plowes said. “It’s not uncommon in nature for other plants and insects to have these long periods of 15 to 20 years between their reproductive events.”
Because these orchid species survive severe droughts by adapting to seek out moist conditions under rocks, it makes sense that they were found at the Brackenridge Field Lab, which was previously a limestone quarry. Gilbert said that coral root orchids appear to associate with plants and trees found in limestone areas. However, the native environment of these rare orchids is
currently unknown.
Plowes intends to use these specific plants to learn more information about how and where these species grow, pollinate and disperse, and how they manage to survive in a way not documented in other orchid populations.
“That way we will understand a little more about why they are where they are, how they manage to live, and why they flower so erratically over long periods,” Plowes said. “We don’t understand the basis of what they do.”by
Bible Readings for Monday, October 3rd, 2011
– The Week of The 16th Sunday After Pentecost *Click on each bible passage to expand the text. Psalm 144 1. [Of David.] Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle;
2. my rock and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues the peoples under me.
3. O LORD, what are human beings that you regard them, or mortals that you think of them?
4. They are like a breath; their days are like a passing shadow.
5. Bow your heavens, O LORD, and come down; touch the mountains so that they smoke.
6. Make the lightning flash and scatter them; send out your arrows and rout them.
7. Stretch out your hand from on high; set me free and rescue me from the mighty waters, from the hand of aliens,
8. whose mouths speak lies, and whose right hands are false.
9. I will sing a new song to you, O God; upon a ten-stringed harp I will play to you,
10. the one who gives victory to kings, who rescues his servant David.
11. Rescue me from the cruel sword, and deliver me from the hand of aliens, whose mouths speak lies, and whose right hands are false.
12. May our sons in their youth be like plants full grown, our daughters like corner pillars, cut for the building of a palace.
13. May our barns be filled, with produce of every kind; may our sheep increase by thousands, by tens of thousands in our fields,
14. and may our cattle be heavy with young. May there be no breach in the walls, no exile, and no cry of distress in our streets.
15. Happy are the people to whom such blessings fall; happy are the people whose God is the LORD. Ezekiel 19:10-14 10. Your mother was like a vine in a vineyard transplanted by the water, fruitful and full of branches from abundant water.
11. Its strongest stem became a ruler’s scepter; it towered aloft among the thick boughs; it stood out in its height with its mass of branches.
12. But it was plucked up in fury, cast down to the ground; the east wind dried it up; its fruit was stripped off, its strong stem was withered; the fire consumed it.
13. Now it is transplanted into the wilderness, into a dry and thirsty land.
14. And fire has gone out from its stem, has consumed its branches and fruit, so that there remains in it no strong stem, no scepter for ruling. This is a lamentation, and it is used as a lamentation. 1 Peter 2:4-10 4. Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and
5. like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
6. For it stands in scripture: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
7. To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner,”
8. and “A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.
9. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
10. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
O LORD, what are human beings that you regard them, or mortals that you think of them? They are like a breath; their days are like a passing shadow. -Psalm 144:3-4
…like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. – 1 Peter 2:5
Like living stones…
1 Peter 2 4. Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and
5. like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
How are stones used in buildings? Rough and rude, and simply mortared into place without consideration of figure or form? Sometimes, but those buildings do not last.
No, the best projects do not use rough stones. The finest structures ever built by human hands which have weathered the test of time have used precisely hewn, chiseled and shaped stones. From the monolithic stones of the Great Pyramid to the mind boggling precision of Incan architecture (all held in place without mortar or cement), it is from this ancient real-world practice, that we can form a spiritual allegory of today’s readings.
If we are “like living stones” rough and rude, in what ways might “the builder” shape us to better fit the builder’s uses? Operative masonry teaches us that this forming and shaping requires blows of a hammer and chisel, which could be misconstrued as a violent act to some.
Many of us, including myself, have a natural revulsion to anything that any semblance to a violent act. However, we forget that some of the most beautiful moments in life are (in a sense) violent and passionate acts – such as the act of making love, or giving birth to a child. But since the results of such struggle and violence can be so positive, we do not view these things as inherently violent, or negative. It is in such a fashion that I recommend we view the blows of the mason’s hammer and chisel to the rough and rude stone being shaped.
These blows are not being done to hurt the stone, to belittle the stone, nor to destroy the stone, but to perfect the stone.
In the same way, I think we would be much benefited to view the trials and struggles of human life in the same light. There are countless tales of rough and broken souls, often times the victims of true violence (such as molestation or abuse), who have become better and stronger people because of their betrayal. However, there are countless more who remain shattered and broken because of the violence and betrayal committed against them. It is in these cases that we must realize our neglected responsibility not only as the living stones of God’s spiritual house, but also as the laborers assembling it.
An efficient workforce of laborers would find a proper use for every stone sent from the quarry, and it would be unthinkable to let a stone lie broken and unused; ignored and neglected by the stone-workers. Rather, it is much more likely that when a stone would be broken and shattered that the overseers of the work would re-purpose and reshape the stone to still serve an equally vital role in the structure. Yet this is not what we do in our modern society with the “broken stones”. Often times we simply let them pile up, and as we step over them on our way to our next building project, we are even known to say to some of those stones, “Get up and put yourself in place worthless stone.”
But how is a broken stone supposed to move itself? This is akin to those that demanded of the Son of Man, “Physician heal thyself!” (lk 4:23)
How absurd.
This is our failed responsibility as Christians. Those of us who are lucky enough to be whole stones need to realize we also bear the responsibility of the laborers (or the “holy priesthood” from 1 Peter 2:5) to whom it now falls to pick up those broken stones and give them purpose in that sacred temple not built with hands.
Acts 7 48“However, the Most High does not live in houses made by men. As the prophet says:
49“‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me? says the Lord. Or where will my resting place be?
50Has not my hand made all these things?’
Acts 17 24. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 27. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
1 Corinthians 3 16. Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? 17. If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.
For you see, this is not simply an allegory to illustrate our responsibility to our fellow “stones” but to clarify a once deeply held truth: we are not only stones, we are not only laborers, we are the temple of God itself.
We are the temple, not made of stone or wood.
We are that house of living stone not made with human hands, eternal in the cosmos.
We are all the children of God, beloved and holy, and all are meant to serve as stones in the living house of God.
But in our rough and rude state, this reality is hard to believe for most, impossible for many.
But our very survival as a species depends on it.Fat Beats: The End Of A Hip-Hop Era
Enlarge this image toggle caption Corey Takahashi Corey Takahashi
Fat Beats, a world-renowned hip-hop record shop specializing in vinyl releases, will shut its last retail outlet on Sunday. The closing of the Los Angeles store follows the closing of a New York location earlier this month, and some are calling it the end of an era.
"The DJ is the backbone of hip-hop, and they play vinyl. We were catering to the DJs and any hip-hop aficionados," says Nazareth Nirza, a hip-hop DJ who goes by the name Rhettmatic. He's worked at Fat Beats in Los Angeles for the past 15 years, along with other luminary DJs and producers.
Vinyl matters much more in hip-hop compared to classical or country music, for example. The foundational sound of hip-hop originates with DJs who dug through tons of records to come up with a montage. The audio archeology of crate-digging still lives on among the hip-hop faithful, but Nirza says a successful independent hip-hop artist today might be lucky to sell 500 |
headed for some small cycles,” he told his audience. He cited various evidence related to the Sun’s polar fields — which appear to be decreasing in strength, A index trends, and cosmic ray data to support his assertion. Luetzelschwab cautioned, however, that past performance does not necessarily predict future performance.
“There seems to be a good correlation between how long a solar minimum is and the next solar cycle,” said Luetzelschwab. “The longer you spend at solar minimum, the smaller the next cycle.”
He observed that hams active since the 1950s and 1960s have experienced short inter-cycle solar minimums of approximately 2 years, until the one between Cycle 23 and Cycle 24, which lasted about 4 years. He also allowed that the science is not fully understood, and that some things appearing to be patterns may just be coincidences.
On the other hand, he said, it looks like the downward trend of disappearing sunspots has leveled off, suggesting that Cycle 25 may see a lower smoothed sunspot number as opposed to zero or near-zero sunspots.
Counting those sunspots can be a subjective business. “That’s a tough job,” he said of the task, noting that it appears observer bias also has been a factor over the years, affecting historical sunspot data. “We now have new corrected data that are believed to be more accurate.”
Luetzelschwab’s article “The New Sunspot Numbers,” appearing in the October issue of QST, will discuss the new sunspot numbers.
Luetzelschwab cited historical sunspot cycle data going back centuries — including the “Maunder Minimum” of zero and near-zero sunspots between the years 1645 and 1715 and a later, less-drastic “Dalton Minimum.” He pointed out that over the last 11,000 years, 19 notable grand maximums — including Cycle 19 and the cycles around it — and 27 notable grand minimums were recorded. “We’re likely to have more of both grand maximums and grand minimums in the future,” he predicted. The current system of numbering sunspot cycles begins with Cycle 1 in the mid-18th century.
“We don’t fully understand the process inside the Sun that makes solar cycles,” Luetzelschwab said. “Thus, you should exercise caution with statements seen in the news.”Illegal migrants must be deported and Europe’s borders sealed shut, following the “unprecedented” attack in Berlin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said.
“It is unprecedented that in the heart of Europe, Christians were murdered at Christmas”, Orbán said in an interview published Saturday, speaking about the terror attack in Berlin, in which a Tunisian migrant ploughed a truck into a crowd of people at a Christmas market on Monday.
“It’s clear that, in the case of migration, nothing can remain the way it was before. Brussels needs to change, migrants who entered Europe illegally must be deported, the borders need to be protected and the inflow of migrants has to be eliminated,” the Fidesz statesman told Veszprém online newspaper.
Reflecting on the year, Orbán hailed it as one in which a democratic “revolt” took place in the West against political leaders “who refused to listen to the people”.
“Rebellion actually took place in the world’s two model democracies” Orbán said, noting, “A year ago no one would have believed that the UK would withdraw from the European Union (EU), or that Americans would reject the Clinton clan.
“This will continue in 2017, which will be the year of revolt for European democracy” the Hungarian leader predicted, echoing his remarks last week.
Hungary and other countries in Central Europe “have had the opportunity to learn from Western Europe’s mistakes”, Orbán stated, and promised to defend his country from “life-threatening, irresponsible” diktats from Brussels including “mass immigration”.
“Hungary is a stable island in the turbulent western world because the people were consulted on their opinions here, and we defended the country against illegal immigration.”
The Prime Minister said Western Europe’s attempts at integrating non-European migrants have “obviously been a failure” despite it being decades since the policy of importing foreigners en masse began.
The result, he lamented, is that “in many cities in Western Europe people now have no peace of mind, crimes against women rapidly multiply and the terror threat skyrockets.
“This shakes the confidence and self-esteem of the Western world. The economic slowdown, crime, terrorism, migration, indecision and insincere speech all adds up, and Western leaders won’t provide the answers.”
This will have serious consequences,” Orbán warned.
A far cry from the rhetoric of leaders in Western Europe, the Prime Minister’s Christmas message was patriotic. He reflected on his government’s incredible economic successes in the past year but, outlining goals for 2017, the Hungarian leader said: “The most difficult task is to awaken the people’s sense of pride, because they themselves are responsible for the successes we have achieved.”It was the defining moment of the 20th Century - the scientific, technological, military, and political gamble of the first atomic attack. This drama-documentary attempts to do what no other film has done before - to show what it is like to live through a nuclear explosion.
Set in the three weeks from the test explosion in New Mexico to the dropping of the bomb, the action takes viewers into the room where the crucial political decisions are made; on board the Enola Gay; inside the bomb as it explodes; and on the streets of Hiroshima.
For six months, the United States had made use of intense strategic fire-bombing of 67 Japanese cities. Together with the United Kingdom, and the Republic of China the United States called for a surrender of Japan in the Potsdam Declaration.
The Japanese government ignored this ultimatum. By executive order of President Harry S. Truman, the U.S. dropped the nuclear weapon Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed by the detonation of Fat Man over Nagasaki on August 9.
These two events are the only active deployments of nuclear weapons in war. The target of Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance, containing Japan’s Second Army Headquarters, as well as being a communications center and storage depot.
Part 2Sie_Sayoka has a history of making compelling Hideouts and we've showcased them in the past. Check out their video for
We also love to see the creativity with which people decorate their hideouts. If you'd like to share yours with the community, just post it in the We recently stumbled upon a player's hideout that impressed us so much that we decided to make a video to showcase this work. The hideout includes a large map of Wraeclast, the Atlas and even a sculpture of The Shaper!Sie_Sayoka has a history of making compelling Hideouts and we've showcased them in the past. Check out their video for The Eastern Temple and their own walk-through of the Cartographorium.We also love to see the creativity with which people decorate their hideouts. If you'd like to share yours with the community, just post it in the Hideouts forum!DRAPER — They sit forgotten and dusty in a storage room on the top floor of the Utah Department of Corrections' administration building that overlooks the state prison.
Once on display in the lobby of the nearby Fred House Academy, the three shadowbox frames contain rows of pins earned by Corrections staff over the years for "service beyond their ordinary daily duties."
One pin recognizes those who developed the prison's medical master plan. Others acknowledge those who helped apprehend escaped inmates, transferred prisoners from Utah to Texas or quelled a prison riot.
And then there are the pins that represent participation in the execution of a condemned man.
But no pin will be issued to commemorate Ronnie Lee Gardner's execution, which is scheduled to occur June 18.
Instead, Corrections spokesman Steve Gehrke said, officials will create a special coin that will be presented to staff members who play any role in carrying out the execution.
"The staff preferred something a little more modern than the ribbons," Gehrke said. "Since people don't walk around displaying those anyway, we're switching to a coin."
Third District Judge Robin Reese issued an execution warrant for Gardner Friday. Gardner, 49, has been sentenced to die for killing attorney Michael Burdell and severely wounding Salt Lake County sheriff's bailiff George "Nick" Kirk while trying to escape from the old Salt Lake County courthouse in 1985.
Recognizing the extraordinary efforts of staff members with metal pins began when Gary DeLand served as executive director of Corrections.
"There's nothing unusual about them," said DeLand, who held the top Corrections post from 1985 to 1992. "We did them for every special assignment people were put in."
During his tenure, DeLand oversaw the lethal-injection executions of Dale Pierre Selby and Gary Arthur Bishop. Pins denoting those executions, and the executions of William Andrews and John Albert Taylor, are all in the shadowboxes that are now relegated to the storage room.
Richard Billings, whose law enforcement and corrections career spans nearly 40 years, participated in the executions of Selby, Bishop, Andrews and Taylor during his time as a member and later commander of the Department of Corrections SWAT team. He has a pin from each execution.
"It wasn't something I sought out or pursued," Billings told the Deseret News. "I think (the pins were) just Mr. DeLand's way of showing his appreciation and acknowledgment for these particular tasks."
"Just because somebody has one doesn't mean that they were a (firing squad) shooter," he added. "They could have simply been on duty providing extra security."
For three of the executions, Billings' chief job with the SWAT teams was to provide that "extra security."
But in Taylor's case, Billings said it was his team that developed the blank cartridge used by members of the firing squad that executed Taylor on Jan. 26, 1996, for the 1988 rape and strangulation of 11-year-old Charla King. The round, he said, was designed to have a report and recoil consistent with a real cartridge so firing squad members couldn't tell who fired the fatal shot.
"We tested them and nobody was able to determine was this a live round or the blank round," he said. "That was part of the entire process."
Billings, a supporter of capital punishment, said he viewed each execution he participated in as an extension of his duty as an officer to "obey a lawful court's order of execution." He also decried society's unwillingness to impose the death penalty in cases where he believes it is warranted and its concern over whether condemned prisoners suffer when they are executed.
"Nobody thinks about what they inflicted on their victims," Billings said. "It's sad. People can't even name the victims, but they can name these guys."
Asked when he last thought about the pins he was given for helping to execute four men, Billings said he couldn't recall.
"I keep them in a box," he said. "I've never really worn them. They're more of a memento, I think."You. Yes, you over there with the anti-Trump t-shirt: Put down the champagne and turn off the celebration music. I know you're excited that Donald Trump Jr. was stupid enough to save an email explicitly detailing criminal activity. I know this proves the Trump campaign did, in fact, collude with the Russians to steal the election and that changes everything. I know you're over the moon that Special Counsel Robert Mueller just had a smoking gun, complete with fingerprints and a handwritten confession, dropped in his lap. I know you think this means Trump will be out of the White House lickety split and maybe, just maybe, we can put the rightful president in the Oval Office (and you don't mean Mike "Mommy" Pence).
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Ain't none of that going to happen.
If you weren't paying attention, you probably didn't notice that Republicans, Fox News, AM Hate Radio, and Breitbart have been quietly reprogramming their followers to accept Trump working with the Russians as legal and legitimate. Kieth Olbermann started talking about it in late June on his podcast and he called it "The Doomsday Defense"; the last ditch play for when Trump was inevitably caught doing what he's been denying for almost a year now.
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And it worked, of course. Republican voters are nothing if not human Etch-a-Sketches. That's how they went from 8 years of hurling the most abusive behavior towards a president in modern times to being deeply shocked and appalled at how Donald Trump is being treated. They've been told that Obama was treated with respect and they now absolutely believe it to be true. Can anyone really be surprised that a crime they would have considered an impeachable offense worthy of riots in the streets one year ago is now not only legal but commendable? Hell, they framed Don Jr. posting the incriminating email on Twitter as a "victory" against the evil liberal media:
Among Trump’s online base, however, the emails meant basically one thing: that the mainstream media got owned again.“
BOOM! Donald Trump Jr. Beats #FakeNews and Releases Entire Email Chain on Meeting Russian Lawyer,” read a headline on Gateway Pundit shortly after Trump Jr.’s tweets. The pro-Trump site was picking up on an insta-reaction from Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA and campaigned with Trump.
Take a moment and ponder the distorted worldview required here. The right is celebrating what amounts to a confession of criminality that confirms reporting from the press. Why? Because in their minds, this somehow delegitimizes the story. How? That's impossible to explain but this is how far out of touch with reality conservatives are. They've become so consumed with hatred of the left that they will accept any and all behavior from their "team." It's not a crime if a Republican does it because something something "libtards."
Republicans, consumed with their lust for power, are just as bad if not worse. Republican voters are blank slates awaiting orders on how to think but Republicans know Trump is a treasonous and illegitimate president and they simply do not care. Rachel Maddow's A-block last night discussed how Republicans are already gearing up to muddy the waters and bury the crimes of the Trump family under a mountain of bullshit. The idea is to throw Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Russia, the Christopher Steele "Pee-Pee" Dossier, collusion and maybe a few other names like Susan Rice and Loretta Lynch into a blender and whip up a nonsense conspiracy to compete with the now-proven Trump-Russia conspiracy. And when the media refuses to pick up the transparently phony story, that will be used as "proof" the press is out to get Trump so everyone ignore the Russia story, thank you very much.
We are in the center of a perfect storm of corruption and hyperpartisan politics. Republican voters literally do not care what crimes Trump and the Republicans commit as long as they're on "their side." Republicans, knowing they will never be punished by their base for violating every tradition, ethical standard and constitutional mandate imaginable, continue to cling to stolen power. Trump, enabled by power-mad Republicans, continues to erode our democracy, tilting us ever further towards authoritarian rule.
If, as expected, Republicans turn a blind eye to Junior's literal confession and their voters cheer them on, that's a sign that we've turned a dangerous corner in American history. One entire side of the political spectrum will have given itself over to lawlessness and we can no longer consider them a functioning part of our democracy anymore than we consider cancer to be a functioning part of the human body. No matter what stories they tell themselves in order to sleep at night, the bottom line is that the America right wing has abandoned everything they once claimed to believe in to pursue power and hate.
We can either rise up and reclaim the democracy the right is intent on destroying by crushing them at the ballot next year and every year after that or we can bicker over Bernie and Hillary until the Brown Shirts show up at our door and take us away. That's your choice and it's time to make it.
There are 482 days left to the 2018 elections.
- This article kills fascists
Please consider becoming a paid member of The Daily Banter and supporting us in holding the Trump administration to account. Your help is needed more than ever, and is greatly appreciated.December 22, 2011
2011-12-22T08:34:50-05:00
https://images.c-span.org/Files/b7f/303344-04-m.jpg
Barry Lynn talked about what his group, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, considers an “encroachment” of religion in the 2012 election and in public policy in general, and he responded to telephone calls and electronic communications. He reacted to clips of a previous day “Washington Journal” discussion between Richard Land and Jim Wallis on religion and politics, and remarks and campaign ads by several of the 2012 presidential candidates. In the interview Mr. Lynn stressed his belief in the need for a secular government that “is strictly neutral on matters of religion.” He also responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.
C-SPAN Radio’s Nancy Calo read news headlines at the end of the program.
Barry Lynn talked about what his group, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, considers an “encroachment” of religion in the 2012 election and in public… read moreBALTIMORE, MD — Police said a man was in grave condition after a shooting Friday morning at Red Emma's.
At 11:18 a.m., officials responded the shop at 30 West North Avenue for a reported shooting.
The victim was sitting in the cafe when someone called him over to the doorway, a dispute occurred and he was shot in the upper body, according to Baltimore Police spokesman Jarron Jackson.
The victim and suspect may have known one another, because "the suspect called the victim over," Jackson said, stating: "At this point, we do not believe this is a random act."
The 37-year-old victim was in grave condition undergoing treatment at an area hospital, police reported Friday afternoon.
Red Emma's announced that it would be closed for the duration of the day on Friday, Feb. 3, "due to unforeseen circumstances." The bookstore has relocated its evening program to 2640 St. Paul Street.
Police ask anyone who may have been taking video or pictures nearby to share them with detectives to help identify the shooter, whose only description was a man wearing dark clothing and possibly a mask.
Text tips and video to the following tip line: 443-902-4824. Anyone with information may also contact homicide detectives at 410-396-2100. Those who would like to remain anonymous can call Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7LOCKUP.
[<a href="//storify.com/MarylandPatch/red-emma-s-shooting-in-baltimore" target="_blank">View the story "Red Emma's Shooting in Baltimore" on Storify</a>]
Image via Shutterstock.Following a recent report that the Federal Government had concluded arrangements take a loan of $2.5 billion from the World Bank and $1 billion, the African Development Bank we wrote to the Administration requested to jettison the plan. In our letter dated February 12, 2016, addressed to your good self we urged the Federal Government to explore alternative sources of raising revenue to fund the 2016 budget instead of increasing the nation's external debt of $64 billion. In particular, we requested the federal government to embark on the recovery of the revenue of $42 billion withheld from the Federation Account from 1999-2012 by some transnational oil companies, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and other agencies of the federal government.
In your reply dated March 17, 2016, you assured us that the issues raised in our letter were receiving the attention of the Federal Government. We were therefore surprised to learn that the Administration had applied to the Chinese Government for another loan of $2 billion. In urging the Federal Government to desist from taking the loan of $2 billion from China or any other country we are compelled to advise the Federal Government to intensify efforts to recover the nation's wealth which has been criminally diverted by a handful of local and foreign looters. The Federal Government may wish to direct the relevant agencies and the anti-graft bodies to collect the stolen wealth including the following:
(a) The National Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative has confirmed that from five cycles of independent audit reports of NEITI covering 1999-2012 the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), some oil companies and certain agencies of the federal government had withheld $20.2 billion for the Federation Account. The indicted oil companies and agencies should be made to remit the said sum of $20.2 billion into the Federation Account.
(b) In 2006, the Central Bank of Nigeria apportioned $7 billion out of the nation's external reserves to 14 Nigerian banks. In 2008, the CBN also gave a bailout of N600 billion ($4 billion) to the banks. The indebted banks should be asked to repay the $11 billion loan.
(c) On September 6, 2016, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) announced that arrangements had been concluded to recover the sum of $9.6 billion in over-deducted tax benefits from joint venture partners on major capital projects and oil swap contracts. Since the NNPC is said to have recovered the said sum of $9.6 billion it should be remitted into the Federation Account.
(d) Sometime in 2009, Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited applied to the federal government for the renewal of three oil blocks. Upon granting the application, the NNPC asked Mobil to pay the sum of $2.5 billion for the renewal of the licences. Curiously, the $600 million paid by the Mobil was accepted by the federal government. One of our clients has requested the EFCC to investigate the circumstances surrounding the fraudulent transaction. The outstanding sum of $1.9 billion ought to be collected from Mobil and paid into the federation account.
(e) From 1998-2014, the Federal Government collected over $4 billion from the over $5 billion stolen from the vaults of the CBN by a former military ruler, the late General Sani Abacha. I have submitted a petition to the Economic and Financial Commission to investigate the alleged criminal diversion of the recovered loot by some former public officers. The governments of the United States and Switzerland have promised to repatriate $458 million and $321 million respectively recovered from the loot.
(f) In 1999, the Abdulsalami Abubakar military junta enacted theDeep Offshore Inland Sharing Contract Decree to give effect to certain fiscal incentives for the oil and gas companies operating in the Deep Offshore and Inland Basin under production sharing contracts. Thus, by virtue of section 5 of the Act, the payment of royalty in respect of the Deep Offshore production sharing contracts shall range from 4 to 12 per cent while no royalty shall be paid whatsoever in areas more than 1000 metres depth! Since the 15-year period of for non-payment of royalties expired in June 2014 the should collect arrears of royalties running to hundreds of million of dollars owed by the oil and gas companies operating in the area.
(g) The $470 million contract awarded to ZTE, (a Chinese company) in 2009 by the federal government for the construction of CCTV cameras in Abuja and Lagos has been abandoned. Hence, the cameras which were installed did not capture the criminals who recently launched bomb attacks in Abuja and killed scores of citizens. Since the contract was not executed the federal government should recover the contract sum of $470 million.
(h) In the Appropriation Act, 2011 the sum of N245 billion was earmarked for fuel subsidy. In violation of the budget law, the federal government fraudulently paid out N2.5 trillion ($16 billion) to a cabal of fuel importers. The investigation conducted into the large-scale fraud by the Police, and the anti-graft agencies were compromised due to pressure from the Jonathan administration. The EFCC should revisit the matter.
(i) On July 6, 2012, the Supreme Court of Nigeria set aside the fraudulent sale of the federal government owned Aluminium Smelting Company of Nigeria (ASCON) located in Akwa Ibom state to RUSAL for $250 million and directed the company be sold BFIG, the winner of the bid for $410 million. The federal government should direct the National Council of Privatisation to comply with the judgment. The federal government stands to realise an additional sum of $160 million from the sale.
(j) For contravention of the law on compulsory registration of all SIM cards, the NCC imposed a fine of $5.2 billion on MTN last year. Based on the plea by the MTN management and the intervention of the Government of South Africa the fine was reduced to $3.9 billion out of which MTN has paid the paltry sum of $250 million. Since MTN has withdrawn the suit challenging the payment of the fine the federal government should take steps to ensure the prompt payment of the outstanding balance of $3.65 billion.
(k) Under the Jonathan administration, it was estimated that the nation was recording oil theft worth $7 billion to criminals annually. An investigation being carried out by a team of lawyers hired by the federal government has so far confirmed that hundreds of millions of barrels of oil were stolen by oil companies and shipped to many countries. According to the lawyers the total amount recoverable by the Nigeria Government from the Sellers and Buyers who stole Nigeria's hydrocarbons and shipped same to the United States from January 2011 to December 2014 stands at US$12.7 billion. Since the verification is programmed to cover 10 years, it is estimated that Nigeria can recover not less that $100 billion from the undeclared millions of barrels of oil shipped to the United States and other countries. The EFCC should collaborate with the lawyers to recover the missing fund and prosecute the transnational oil companies involved in the grand oil theft.
(l) On February 20, 2014, President Goodluck Jonathan fired the then Central Bank Governor, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi for having the temerity to expose the NNPC for not remitting $20 billion to the Federation Account. Following the reconciliation of the accounts of the NNPC by the federal government the missing sum was said to be $10.8 billion. To douse the tension generated by the scandal, the Federal Government appointed a firm of auditors to audit the books of the NNPC. But in a bid to cover up the scandal the Federal Government ensured that the auditors were denied access to vital documents. At the end of the investigation, the auditors indicted the NNPC for withholding $1.8 billion from the Federation Account.
(m) Rising from its monthly meeting at Abuja on September 17, 2015, the National Economic Council accused the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) of failing to remit N3.8 trillion to the Federation Account under the Jonathan administration. The Council set up a committee of 3 state governors to trace the missing fund. Last month, the Auditor-General of the Federation indicted the NNPC for withholding N3.2 trillion from the Federation Account in 2014. The Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission has said that " the total indebtedness of the NNPC to the Federation Account is N4.9 trillion ($32.6)." In its reaction to the allegations, the NNPC has challenged the figures but admitted that it has withheld the sum of N326 billion! The federal government should investigate the conflicting figures to determine the actual amount withheld by the NNPC.
(o) The unprecedented looting of the public treasury via the NNPC took place under the rogue regime of President Goodluck Jonathan has continued unabated under the President Buhari, who is currently waging a war against corruption. Last week, a firm of auditors revealed that out of the sum of $6.4 billion realised from the sale of crude oil and gas by the Federal Government in the first quarter of 2016 the NNPC remitted only $2 billion to the Federation Account and withheld the colossal sum of $4.2 billion. Up till now the NNPC has not explained how much of the sum of $4.2 billion was spent on its operations in 3 months.
(p) The presidential panel instituted by President Buhari to investigate the criminal diversion of the fund earmarked for procurement of weapons for the armed forces from 2007-2015 has established that over $8 billion was stolen by handful of serving and retired military officers and their civilian collaborators via the Office of the National Security Adviser and the Nigerian Air Force. The Panel is currently probing similar fraudulent arms procurement in the Nigerian Army and Nigerian Navy. The EFCC has commenced the recovery of the said sum of $8 billion and prosecution of individuals and corporate bodies implicated in the criminal diversion.
(q) The United States' Government has successfully prosecuted Halliburton and its top officials for bribing Nigerian public officers with $180 million and recovered fines of about $1.3 billion. Although no one was prosecuted in Nigeria, the federal government about $200 million was paid by Halliburton and other indicted companies through a plea bargain.
(r) The sale of the OPM 245 for $1.3 billion otherwise known as Malabu oil deal has continued to generate controversy. Allegations of bribery and money laundering are being investigated by the British Police, the Italian Police, and the EFCC. Apart from the $210 million signature bonus paid to the federal government the sum of $190 million has been frozen in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The Italian Police have also frozen $200 million from the proceed of the transaction. The federal government ought to take a final decision on the matter so as to end the controversy surrounding the sale of the oil block.
In the light of the foregoing, we are compelled to call on the Federal Government to muster the political will and courage to recover those above withheld or stolen wealth of not less than $200 billion belonging to the Nigerian people. However, if you refuse to accede to our request, we shall have no alternative than to initiate legal proceedings at the Federal High Court with a view to restraining the Federal Government from further plunging the nation into external indebtedness.
Femi Falana SAN.david_shankman / Flickr Dawkins wears a red A to symbolize his atheism.
Acclaimed biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins has spent decades talking about evolution. When he visits the U.S., where about half the population doesn’t believe in it, he has to defend it–fiercely.
He barely talks about religious people and doesn’t mention Christians by name, though it’s clear that’s who he is referring to. In between dismissive references to creation accounts and Bible stories, he calls them “ignoramuses,” “scientific know-nothings” and “a tragic waste of life.”
At a sold-out event held by The Progressive Forum last night, Dawkins spoke about the subject of his latest book–the evidence of evolution–to local scientists, intellectuals and secularists who have had to defend it firsthand.
“If you know any creationists, and I’m sure in the state of Texas you don’t know any…,” Dawkins sarcastically joked, “They are taught to say, ‘Well, there are gaps in the fossil record.’ Of course there are gaps in the fossil record! We are lucky to have fossils at all!”
He explained how fossil discovery, the diversity of life and the process of natural selection contradict the biblical creation account and the story of Noah’s ark.
“I am sorry to take a sledge hammer to so small and fragile a lot. We should be able to ignore them, but we cannot,” he said.
Dawkins made reference to evolution’s place in a doubtful U.S. and an even-more doubtful Texas. It’s hard to discuss evolution without thinking about the state’s education system, where politicians, parents and board members debate over intelligent design in textbooks and classrooms.
The audience whooped and laughed at mention of those people who refuse to believe the science behind human origins.
“It all resonated with me, living in the Deep South and dealing with the school board. It’s a frustration that I deal with every day,” said Dan Jordan, a veterinarian and father of two who lives in Magnolia.
Jordan said it was good to be in a room full of intellectuals and away from his Christian neighbors in The Woodlands who home-school their kids or worse, teach his own children creationism in public schools. His older son spent so much time defending evolution in high school, he ended up studying to become an evolutionary biologist in college.
Like a few others in the audience, Dawkins wore his signature red-A lapel pin, a scarlet letter that represents his “coming out” atheist. Dawkins left Christianity at 9 and gave up on God all together at 15 or 16, he said.
Fred Burton, 26, wore a shirt that read, “I’m the Evolutionary Biologist Your Mother Warned You About.”
“Given Texas’ reputation, (religion) is a societal force,” the agnostic said.
He said it would be hard to imagine a Christian, much less one who upholds biblical inerrancy, being a fan of Dawkins’ work. “Religion and science, they each make statements about each other.”
For the crowd at the Progressive Forum event, science was the favored belief system, but the thousand-person crowd at First Baptist Church, where Sarah Palin was speaking on the same night, sees another force in control of their origins and their destiny: God.
At the event, a fundraiser for an anti-abortion charity, Palin said “Every child has purpose and there is destiny in every innocent life and there is support out there and you’re not alone and yes you’re capable of handling this. And God won’t give you something that you can’t handle. That’s what I held onto.”Up until now, all of the posts written on the blog has been about Manchester United. Our present, our past and the future. This one is going to be a bit different, and a more general post. I wanted to write about the big transfers that are going to happen in the summer, much like the Hazard and Kagawa deals in 2012. I wanted to take a look at which players that are looking likely to move on, and why. This is relevant for us in the sense that if we and/or our rivals buy new players, we will be affected by the summer signings. Seeing as there is probably at least 25 signings that can make a huge impact in the summer, I thought I’d narrow it down to ten. I’ll do at least 3 from the Premier League and then a couple other players from different leagues. The idea is, as mentioned, to take a look at the transfers that I think has the potential to really put their mark on the standings in the league. I find this interesting because it effects us in an indirect way if an opponent gets the player, and directly if we do. Here goes.
Gareth Bale, Tottenham
The twenty-three year old welshman and former Southampton left-back and freekick specialist turned into a free role on the left attacking side for Tottenham in the 2011/2012 season by Harry Redknapp. Having struggled to impress much as a LB, going something like 25 games without winning with Bale in the side, the refreshing experience with a fast, technical winger that could shoot hard as a bull kicks, and that already had the crossing part down from being an offensive left back, Villas-Boas has given him an even more offensive role and he is now the focal point of the Tottenham attack. After the sale of Van Der Vaart, and lacking quality strikers, Bale has really stepped his game up and taken responsibility for the goal scoring part for Spurs. Having an amazing season so far, scoring 19 goals and having 4 assists in thirty games, while Spurs is fighting for the champions league spot, he might be off in the summer if they don’t make it. Being a rare player, as a some kind of a mix between the old, classic winger and the more modern type that can both shoot, cross and beat players, he is probably wanted by the whole footballing world. The price? It is going to depend a lot on whether Tottenham qualifies for the champions league or not, but you would probably have to blow the 40-number if not more. If we were to get him, we would be set in the LM/LAM/LF/LW role for ten years, and how suitable wouldn’t a young welsh winger be whenever Giggs retires?
Stevan Jovetic, Fiorentina
Is also 23, and has been rumored to join both Arsenal, Chelsea as well as the big Spanish clubs for a while now. A tall, quick striker which reminds me a bit about Valeri Bojinov before Bojinov got injured and ended up as a player desperate to get his career back on track. The similarity lays in the way the players both move, having a great touch on the ball and an eye for smart passes and a good timing for when to play it simple and when to go crazy with some trickery is something most top clubs would love. Seeing as the financial situation in Italy is rather shitty these days, a good offer would probably force the i Violas to sell. He has not impressed too much with his goal scoring statistics yet, but it is decent. 35 in 111 for Fiorentina playing behind a striker is not bad at all for a 23 year old. Very unlikely signing for Man United seeing as we are already stacked up front, but can make a big impact if he is to come into Arsenal or another premier league team. He is a fun player to watch, and we always welcome artistic, elegant players to the league, right?
Christian Eriksen, Ajax
The Danish 21-year old has been a hot transfer target for two or three seasons already, but has stayed put in Amsterdam where playing time and development has been ensured. He seems like a very down to earth guy, and has been getting praise left and right from media all over the world, as well as the managers he has had for Denmark and Ajax. The article linked is a couple years old, but if you take a look at who he was praised by, Martin Jol, Morten Olsen and Frank De Boer, it is pretty clear that people who know what they are talking about have great expectations for Christian. Interest from both AC Milan, Barcelona and Man City has been expressed throughout the season, and the Dane has already said no to Liverpool and City. He likes the way Barcelona plays and is likely going there.
As for how he plays, he is a very classical number 10, that is brilliant in the space between midfield and attack. Giving Eriksen space is scary, because goals come of that. With 9 goals and 15 assists in 31 games for Ajax this season |
town.
Dorman, who claims he has absolutely no special ability to predict when old people will expire, has been accused of worrying hundreds of pensioners since he expanded his business last month by adding on an extension at the back of his premises. 77-year old retired wrestler Kenny Campbell from Annagher told us of his ordeal:
“I met Dorman outside the butchers on Christmas Eve and he winked at me with a smirk on his face. Then he says ‘I hope ye get time to ate that ok’. He’s trying to scare us into the grave. Some operator.”
81 year old Mary McAleer from Newtownkelly added to the catalogue of complaints:
“That man has me tortured. At the local nativity play in the Primate Dixon school he kept looking over at me and sizing me up and down, like as if he was measuring me. Then he nodded at me and closed his eyes really slowly. I’m not imagining it. I didn’t sleep for days after it and had to get nerve tablets. To be honest I’m still not well.”
Dorman has denied any accusations of skulduggery:
“I’m just a friendly fellow. I’m an ‘Island man to the core and I love my people, alive or dead. And to show no ill feeling towards those on the petition, if any of them die within the next five years, I’ll throw in a free embalming session. Now, you can’t get much better than that.”
Dorman also added he has opened an off-licence at the back of his premises.
Advertisements听不懂 tīng bù dǒng is a useful phrase that every Chinese beginner needs to learn. When you do not understand something, you will default to saying 我听不懂/听不懂 tīng bù dǒng. However, it does not help in all situations. If you say "我听不懂，听不懂"，the native speaker will think you do not understand Mandarin Chinese at all, not like you do not understand the particular thing. But, what if you just do not fully get the meaning of the speaker, like missing one word, concept, or maybe you just didn't hear clearly, what should you say? Today we really encourage you to read below about better ways to say "I don't understand" in Chinese.
Let's go through one by one.
1. wǒ bù mínɡ bɑi ; wǒ bù dǒnɡ; wǒ bù zhī dào
我不明白; 我不懂；我不知道
Sorry, I don't understand/comprehend. This phrase is quite similar to 听不懂, which means I heard what you say, but could not get the meaning of it. 2. bù hǎo yì si, wǒ méi tīnɡ qīnɡ chu
不好意思，我没听清楚
Excuse me. I did not quite hear you right.
This phrase means I may miss that information a bit.
3. duì bù qǐ, wǒ bù dǒnɡ nǐ de yì si
对不起，我不懂你的意思
I'm sorry, I don't understand your meaning
These phrase is perfect for those situations when you understood every word but don't know what the person really means.
4. nǐ ( ɡānɡ cái / ɡānɡ ɡānɡ ) shuō shén me?
你(刚才/刚刚)说什么？
What are you saying just now?
A：nǐ bānɡ wǒ bǎ zhuō shànɡ de běn zi dì ɡuò lái yí xià kě yǐ mɑ
你帮我把桌上的本子递过来一下可以吗？
Could you please help to handle my notebook?
B：nǐ shuō shén me?
你说什么？
What are you saying just now?
When you did not hear what that person's saying or understand what she mean.
5. qǐnɡ zài shuō yī cì
请再说一次
Please say one more time.
You've noticed that we've add some polite words in the beginning, it's just kind of soft tenses to show politeness.
6. nǐ de yì si shì … …
你的意思是……
So you mean…
Sometimes guessing what the person means maybe your best bet.
7. shén me … shén me … shén me …
什么…什么…什么…
A native speaker probably says when do not understand or don't understand properly, especially the speaker says it in a quite fast speed, and you only get some fragment information.
There are many other phrases useful to respond when you do not understand something, and probably they are all better than simply saying "听不懂". Do not be afraid to use some complex vocabulary, that's how you can improve your Mandarin Chinese.
If you stick to saying 听不懂 everytime, maybe they will just switch to English, you will miss the chance to practice your Mandarin Chinese.
Want to learn more useful and native Chinese phrases? Do not be shy, sign up for a free online tailor-made Chinese lesson to try out for yourself.
Learn I don't understand in Chinese with Native Chinese TeacherOklahoma declares day of prayer for oil industry
Oilfield Prayer Day announced by executive proclamation
Prayers are usually reserved for the needy, downtrodden or powerless.
But the US state of Oklahoma has turned that notion on its head, by calling on citizens to pray for the world's biggest industry - the oil sector.
Oil is one of Oklahoma's leading industrial sectors. Photo: Shutterstock
The call to prayer will culminate on October 13 in Oilfield Prayer Day, marked by a special breakfast event in Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin declared the prayer day with an executive proclamation. "Whereas Oklahoma is blessed with an abundance of oil and natural gas... [and] Christians acknowledge such natural resources are created by God," the proclamation read, "Christians are invited to thank God for the blessings created by the oil and natural gas industry and to seek His wisdom and ask for protection."
With oil prices down, the industry - a big player in Oklahoma - is hurting.
“We're asking churches all over Oklahoma to open their doors, put on a pot of coffee and pray for the oil field, and not only for the oil field but the state, because the economy of our state is so connected to the oil field," Reverend Tom Beddow of Ada, who also coordinates the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma's Oil Patch Chaplains ministry, told NewsOK.
Despite lower prices, the sector as a whole remains the biggest in the world, with seven out of the top 10 revenue companies coming from the fossil fuel industry.Cillian Sheridan and Liam Kelly were on target as Kilmarnock won at Celtic Park for the first time since 1955.
Celtic were a shadow of the side that impressed against Barcelona and fell behind as Sheridan capitalised on a defensive lapse late in the first half.
Emilio Izaguirre felled Rory McKenzie on 62 minutes and Kelly smashed the resultant penalty past Fraser Forster.
While the home side were poor, Kilmarnock were well worth their historic victory.
Neil Lennon's side remain on top of the Scottish Premier League but their lead has been cut to two points, while Kilmarnock have leapfrogged Motherwell and Hearts to move into sixth place.
The visitors were a little quicker out the blocks than their hosts, with James Dayton looking lively, though Forster remained untroubled.
Similarly, Cammy Bell was seeing little action, though he would have been grateful for the intervention of Ryan O'Leary who, after 16 minutes, stuck out a leg to deny Miku the opportunity to head in Izaguirre's cross from close range.
Media playback is not supported on this device Interview - Celtic manager Neil Lennon
Ten minutes later, Celtic should undoubtedly have gone in front. Kris Commons swung in a cross from deep, Miku headed it invitingly into the path of Joe Ledley, but the Welshman - from just a few yards out - nudged it wide of Bell's left-hand post.
Killie created a presentable chance of their own just after the half-hour mark when Dayton delivered the ball in from the left towards the front post where Sheridan was lurking, but Forster was alive to the danger and knocked it away.
The first time Bell was called upon to make a save was five minutes before the break, as he beat away a Charlie Mulgrew free kick but the opening goal came at the other end.
Adam Matthews was closed down by Dayton and played a wayward pass to Efe Ambrose who, caught unawares, succeeded only in playing the ball off Sheridan.
The former Celtic striker was aided by a bit of backspin on the ball, which convinced Forster he wouldn't get to it first, and Sheridan calmly went round the keeper before virtually walking the ball over the line.
Celtic top-scorer Gary Hooper was introduced for Beram Kayal at the start of the second half and he almost drew his side level within seven minutes.
Ledley fed Forrest on the right and his low ball was clipped just wide by the striker.
Media playback is not supported on this device Interview - Kilmarnock manager Kenny Shiels
Almost immediately, Dayton raced towards the edge of the Celtic box before unleashing a fierce drive, which was brilliantly turned behind by the diving Forster.
Bell dealt with another Mulgrew free kick moments before Kilmarnock increased their lead.
McKenzie showed great skill on the edge of the Celtic penalty area before being clipped from behind by Izaguirre as he shaped to shoot.
Referee Crawford Allan pointed to the spot and Kelly blasted the ball past Forster to put Kilmarnock within touching distance of a momentous victory.
Izaguirre thought he had made amends with a quarter-of-an-hour remaining, but he was ruled to have been offside as he finished off a pass from Pat McCourt.
Then substitute Tony Watt hammered the ball over the crossbar from six yards after Forrest's cutback fell kindly for him.
Watt's next effort was more threatening, but his powerful drive from inside the box was well parried by Bell.
Celtic Park emptied long before full-time as the home fans registered their displeasure. The opposite was true of the small band of visiting fans, who celebrated the end of one of Scottish football's longest-standing hoodoos.
Live text commentaryFor Chinese user / backer
電腦版中文贊助步驟說明 | 手機版中文贊助步驟說明
ODiN, innovative electro-optical mouse that starts your experience anew.
ODiN Aurora presents you a whole new experience with computer and mouse. The world's first laser projection mouse redefines your daily user habits for designing, gaming, work, and everything. Intuitive and convenient, ODiN Aurora is your must-have gadget for computers and laptops. It’s all designed, for you.
UPDATE: ODiN's New Feature
Dear backers, thank you for staying with us! We’re really humbled by your support, and we can’t wait to share the news with you. ODiN’s new feature, a user-defined application “button,” is here! The triangle runic symbol is now a “button” for you to define, in both Windows and Mac. Be it open a particular software or “back to the desktop”, the button is at your disposal. For the laser button, you can code your own macro and even share it on Serafim’s online forum!
According to an old Norse poem, ODiN the major diety is the originator of the runes. On that note, we believe ODiN is an innovative product that challenges people’s perception of electro-optical applications, and opens up a whole new world of endless possibilities.
The triangle runic symbol is now your self-defined button.
Inspired by Nordic mythology, ODiN Aurora embodies the powerful figure. Laser beams are projected as lightning when the legendary Odin throws his spear. A triangle, innovative and extraordinary in Runic alphabets, is also incorporated in the virtual pad design, projecting strength and courage into our life.
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The gestures of ODiN in use
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Different scenarios when ODiN in use
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Tiny and portable, ODiN Aurora only weighs 40 grams, fits well in your pocket or backpack, and consumes very littler power! This is the best travel companion for business travelers and your office on the go. It's compatible with Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS. We will also continue to update software, so ODiN Aurora never goes outdated. Plug in to USB hub, and you're ready to enjoy!
Privacy has been a concern for some people as they use gesture controllers, such as virtual keyboards, as cameras are integrated in the operation. Well, no worries with ODiN Aurora! With no camera involved, your privacy is ensured. It's good for confidential meetings of course, with doubled response speeds, minimized sensing modules, and smaller package.
Although ODiN Aurora is our debut project under Serafim, our development and design team has already got extensive experiences in optoelectronics industry over ten years, working and taking orders from manufacturers all over the world. We aim to offer affordable, useful and cool devices for your better computing experience, and ODiN Aurora is the result after one year in development.
ODiN Aurora comes in three colors: metal green, bright silver, and charcoal black. We maintain the best coloring process, so what you see is what you get!
Founded in 2010 by a group of experts in optoelectronics industry, Serafim aims to offer affordable, useful and cool consumer electronics for a better computing experience. Team members obtain extensive experiences in local and international vendors, before building a brand of their own.
Serafim is derived from seraphs in Christian theology. It's the highest choir of the angelic hierarchy, representing light, thunder and fire. We aim to reach the highest rank in our professional fields with our passion.
After designing smartphones, tablets and computer accessories for international brands, ODiN Aurora is the debut project of Serafim.
Q1. How do I buy in bulk?
A: Please contact Serafim directly, thank you.
Q2. Can I enlarge or shrink the projection area?
A: The laser projection area is not resizable.
Q3. Does the mouse work on uneven surface?
A: Please avoid using the mouse on uneven surface as it is only suitable for even surface.
Q4. How long is the battery life?
A: Simply connect the mouse to a USB port on your computer/laptop, and you're good to go. No need for battery.
Q5. How will the product be sent to me?
A: We will send the product by Taiwan Post Office's Express Mail.
Q6. What's the size of the product and how much does it weigh?
A: It's 5cm(H)x4cm(W)x2cm(D) and it weighs 40 grams.
Q7. Can I change the color of the projection?
A: Not for now. Currently it can only be red.
Q8. When can I receive the product?
A: Our first shipment will be in June.
Q9. Can I choose models with different colors?
A: Currently, we offer three colors for your choice. We will develop more color options based on feedback given by our customers.
Q10. What OS does the mouse support?
A: It is compatible with both Windows and Mac.
Q11. Does the laser of the product meet laser safety standards?
A: Yes, it meets the regulations of IEC-60825 Class I.~~~Part 1/3 of a commission...gradient-shaded, background, multi-char piece for of her copper dragon sona, Nadra, with her friend's sona, Naomi, enjoying a day at the beach together! ^^ We agreed that the two walking with their feet in the water would be fun, so I went with Naomi being caught off-guard by a wave while Nadra grins. (That Mediterranean Sea can be randomly violent, gotta keep your eye on the water. And the jellyfish. Oh yeah, the jellyfish are clear, nvrmnd.)I wanted to go with the background as a kind of tropical island paradise, with the perfect combo of white-sand beaches and sapphire water, and a lush forest with some ancient volcanic calderas in the background. I'm thinking Hawaii? B)I had a ton of fun on this piece, and feel like I learned a lot artistically too. ^^ I paid more attention to light-source and the overall atmosphere of the piece.Commissions are still open~Thanks Schmen! Hope you and Naomi like!EXCLUSIVE: Tom Cruise has exited as the lead in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the remake of the classic TV series that Guy Ritchie will direct for Warner Bros. Cruise was scheduled to star in the film with Armie Hammer, but he has stepped out of the picture to focus on producing and starring in Mission: Impossible 5. Paramount and Skydance are now planning to begin shooting the latest installment of that franchise before year’s end. Warner Bros has a script they like, and a top director who’s expecting to direct U.N.C.L.E. in the fall. The timing proved too difficult and so Cruise stepped out to focus on M:I5.
Warner Bros will now go hard looking for the lead of this movie, which is inspired by the original TV series ran from 1964-68, with Robert Vaughan and David McCallum playing Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, two agents of the United Network Command for Law Enforcement. With gadgets and their wits and charm, they fought the evil forces of Thrush. Hammer, who’ll be seen shortly alongside Johnny Depp in the Gore Verbinski-directed The Lone Ranger, is still firmly in the film.
This is another temporary setback for a potential franchise that Warner Bros has long been high on, going back to when the studio had Steven Soderbergh ready to direct George Clooney in the lead. The actor dropped out because he needed surgery on his neck and back, and he wasn’t up for a physical role. After Soderbergh departed, the studio turned the project over to Ritchie and his producing partner Lionel Wigram, who is producing with John Davis. Hammer would play a version of the role originated by McCallum.
While it might seem that Cruise could squeeze in the film before moving to M:I5, that’s not the way he has worked on the Paramount franchise. In the last film, Ghost Protocol, he was heavily involved in planning and performing death defying stunts that included running along the glass exterior of a skyscraper in Abu Dhabi, about 124 floors high. He’ll want to do something to top that, so while the script is being written by Drew Pearce for Cruise’s Jack Reacher helmer Christopher McQuarrie to direct, this is an accelerated process and it will become the focus of the rest of the year for Cruise. The actor remains on good terms with Warner Bros, recently completing the Doug Liman-directed science fiction film All You Need Is Kill, which will be released June 6, 2014.Max Loeb of White Plains, with his bag of groceries from Trader Joe’s in Hartsdale. Photo by Tania Savayan/lohud.
A&P’s bankruptcy made it clear. lohud’s readers are passionate about buying food. The closure of a major chain like A&P affected our community — and groceries, without doubt, are a cultural touchstone here in the Lower Hudson Valley.
Indeed, the landscape of food shopping here is a complex one. There are major chains like Stop&Shop, local chains such as DeCicco’s, big-box discount stores, ethnic markets large and small, and corner stores.
With this project, lohud’s team set out to explain and demystify the industry, design, past, present and future of how we feed our families.
People are passionate about groceries in the Lower Hudson Valley. Video by Tania Savayan/lohud
Find a simple guide to “Groceries.” stories below.
Continue reading →This article is about rock music festival. For the field study on tornadoes, see VORTEX projects § VORTEX1
Vortex I: A Biodegradable
Festival of Life Genre Various Dates August 28 – September 3, 1970 Location(s) Milo McIver State Park near Estacada, Oregon Years active 1970 Founded by The Portland Counterculture Community with help from Oregon governor Tom McCall Website (none)
Vortex I: A Biodegradable Festival of Life, more commonly known as just Vortex I, was a week-long rock festival in Oregon in 1970. It was sponsored by the Portland counterculture community, with help from the state of Oregon in Clackamas County near Portland. Held in order to demonstrate the positive side of the anti-War Movement and to prevent violent protests during a planned appearance in the state by President Richard Nixon,[1][2] it remains the only state-sponsored rock festival in United States history.
Background [ edit ]
In 1970, President Nixon scheduled an appearance at the national American Legion convention in Portland, Oregon,[1][3] in order to promote the continuation of the Vietnam War.[4] A coalition of Portland-based anti-Vietnam War groups, called the People's Army Jamboree, planned a series of demonstrations and other anti-war activities, to be held at the same time as the convention. Law enforcement at all levels, expecting massive numbers of protesters on both sides, were concerned about large-scale violence—an FBI report estimated a potential crowd of 25,000 Legionnaires and 50,000 anti-war protestors, and suggested that the result could be worse than the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.[citation needed]
A loose association of Portland counterculture groups banded together to devise a strategy that would highlight the best parts of the newly-evolving peace community. Koinonia House, a peace-activist Christian group hosted a public meeting and from there the idea of a "Biodegradable Festival of Life" called Vortex 1 came into being. Mike Carr, Lee Meier, Kristen Hansen and Nik Hougen were the first to go meet with Ed Westerdahl to discuss this concept, People from the following meetings including Bobby Wehe, Kaushal Yellin, and Glen Swift who went to meet Governor Tom McCall while others began to scout parklands nearby Portland that could accommodate such an event.
In order to keep the peace, McCall acted on a suggestion by staffer Ed Westerdahl who had been meeting with the Vortex volunteers.[5] He made an agreement with representatives of local anti-war factions to permit a rock festival to be held in a state park at the same time as Nixon's scheduled visit, and to turn a blind eye toward behavior that had been widespread at the Woodstock Festival, like nudity and use of marijuana.[5] McCall has been heard to remark that by making this agreement—less than three months before the upcoming November vote, in which he was running for re-election—he had "committed political suicide."
The event [ edit ]
The festival was held from August 28 through September 3, concurrent with the American Legion convention. Between 30,000 and 100,000 attended the event,[2][6] held at Milo McIver State Park, near the city of Estacada. Admission was free of charge, so the gates to the event were not monitored (and accurate attendance figures were not available). On the busiest day of the festival, a line of automobiles ran 18 miles (30 km) from the park gates to southeast Portland.[citation needed]
Per agreement with the governor, the police and the Oregon National Guard largely ignored non-violent offenses[2] such as drug use and public nudity, both of which were present at the festival. The festival became known as "The Governor's Pot Party".[6]
The music at the festival was primarily performed by local acts. Oregon bands featured at the concert included Brown Sugar, with Lloyd Jones, Jacob's Ladder, and concert openers Tutu Band. The media reported that many prominent national acts of the time would appear, including Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and Grateful Dead, but none did. Ginger Baker and Cream came to visit the event but did not play. This did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the attendees.[6]
The Vortex 1 festival was essentially divided in two areas: the first at the higher elevations of McIver Park, held a huge home-built stage made of huge Oregon timbers; and the second, below by the Clackamas River held a sprawling encampment. The Portland community-based activist groups tended collectively to the various needs of the festival. The food co-ops and organic restaurants put together a facility that provided free food for the tens of thousands of attendees. The community free clinics (Outside In and LookingGlass) provided medical care. The motor heads parked the cars. The rock and roll halls from Portland ran the stage. Yoga groups held classes. Peace activist groups sponsored teach-ins and so on. It was truly a community-based, non-commercial event. The early pioneers of the Rainbow Gatherings worked there making an information booth, helping with security, lost children, supply trucks, stage building and that is where they took the name Rainbow Family.
Aftermath [ edit ]
Though no doubt aided by a last-minute cancellation by Nixon, the event had its desired effect. Both the American Legion convention and the anti-war activities of the Jamboree were carried out without any major incident. The concert was considered by many to be an excellent means of preventing violence. Far from committing political suicide, McCall won re-election that November, defeating opponent Robert W. Straub handily.
McCall later told Studs Terkel: "It was the damnedest confrontation you'll ever see. We took a park, twenty miles (32 km) south of Portland, and turned it into an overnight bivouac and disco party.…There was a lot of pot smoking and skinny dipping, but nobody was killed."[7]
Because the event was non-commercial and had no commercial backers and no performers other than local bands, the mainstream press largely ignored it as a music event, focusing instead on the political aspects. It was one of the largest rock and roll festivals of the era.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]This video will make anyone who's ever suffered from a muscle cramp cringe. Rafael Nadal was settling in for a post-match press conference after a straight-set win over David Nalbandian yesterday when he was suddenly hit with the pain of a stiffened calf muscle.
It's a strange injury to watch unfold, simply because there's no awkward moment when a knee or an ankle bends the wrong way—instead it's just one long awkward moment. The end result is like watching someone experience the longest brain freeze in his life.
For some reason, reporters remained in the interview room for over two minutes, as Rafa squirmed in his seat and waited for the pain to subside. They were finally asked to leave after he slipped off his chair and under the table, and he resumed the Q&A about ten minutes later.
Muscle cramps are in no way lasting, and this shouldn't affect Nadal's chances in the long run. They are just momentarily debilitating and kind of awkward to watch live.
"Not to put a dampener on the story, but people cramp after matches when they're cold," realist Andy Roddick said after the episode. "It's just something that happens... It's just unfortunate it happened in front of [the press]."
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Nadal Wins; Then Comes the Hard Part [New York Times]ISIS emerged around the same time Iraq experienced its warmest March-April-May season on record. It may just be an interesting coincidence, but it could mean more.
Photo by Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images
This winter was not a good one for farmers in the Fertile Crescent.
A punishing drought hit most of Syria and northern Iraq during what’s normally the wettest time of the year. In the mountains of eastern Turkey, which form the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, snow and rain were less than half of normal. The region has seen one of the worst droughts in decades.
Drought is becoming a fixture in the parched landscape, due to a drying trend of the Mediterranean and Middle East region fueled by global warming. The last major drought in this region (2006-2010) finished only a few years ago. When taken in combination with other complex drivers, increasing temperatures and drying of agricultural land is widely seen as assisting in the destabilization of Syria under the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Before civil war broke out there, farmers abandoned their desiccated fields and flooded the cities with protests. A series of U.N. reports released earlier this year found that global warming is already destabilizing nation states around the world, and Syria has been no exception.
With the ongoing crisis in Iraq seemingly devolving by the day, it’s not a stretch to think something similar could already be underway just next door.
One of the most devastating droughts in decades hit Syria and Iraq in 2007-2008. Scientists have linked the drought to climate change. Courtesy of NASA
Could there be a connection between climate change and the emerging conflict in Iraq?
The short answer is a qualified yes, according to Frank Femia of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based policy institute advised by senior retired military and national security leaders. He explained in a phone interview:
It’s far too early, considering this is happening in real time, to figure out what is motivating ISIS and its members. Certainly, the natural resource stresses in the region make things worse. Terrorist organizations can try to control those resources and gain significant influence and power. You can’t say climate change is causing ISIS to do what it’s doing, but it [climate change] certainly has a role to play in the region.
Increasing temperatures may also be playing a role in the recent uptick in violence. A study published last year in the journal Science showed a strong connection between high temperatures and political instability, like civil wars, riots, and ethnic violence, though the cause is not well known. A previous study has linked dehydration with decreased cognitive performance and increased levels of anxiety.
Sure enough, this year has been unusually hot so far in Iraq with the March-April-May season ranking as the warmest on record across much of the country. (Reliable records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration date back to 1880.) The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria around the same time may just be an interesting coincidence, but the implications are important enough for us to consider a broader connection.
It’s getting hot in Iraq. Courtesy of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center*
The United Nations lists Iraq as “one of the Arab region’s most vulnerable countries to climate change.” In 2004, just after the American-led regime change, a Congressional Research Service report cited “rapid population growth coupled with limited arable land” and “a general stagnation of agricultural productivity” after decades of conflict and mismanagement during the final Saddam years as the main reasons Iraq grew more reliant on imports of food amid international sanctions and the oil-for-food program. A major drought from 1999-2001 also hampered the country’s ability to feed itself. Since then, conflict has raged and the climate has grown even more extreme, with alternating severe droughts and heavy rainstorms. From the United Nations Development Programme in 2009:
Iraq’s wheat production this year was down 45 percent from a normal harvest, with similar reductions expected in the coming year. As a result, the country has experienced a massive loss of seed reserves for future planting, forcing the country to significantly increase food imports at great cost to the economy.
Meanwhile, farmers are abandoning their fields en masse and moving to urban centres, a trend that has placed more stress on cities in Iraq that are already struggling to provide basic social services and economic opportunities to growing urban populations. As a result, social tensions and the risk of crime have increased.
Sound familiar? As in neighboring Syria, it’s increasingly clear that Iraq is drying out, an effect that’s long been predicted as a result of the human-caused build up of heat-trapping gases like CO 2. Since 1973, Femia says, parts of Iraq and Syria have seen “some of the most dramatic precipitation declines in the world.” Citing projected stark declines in rainfall and continued population pressure and upstream dam building, a study released earlier this year made the case that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers may no longer reach the sea by 2040.
Much of Iraq’s climate is similar to California’s Central Valley, with a long summer dry season and a rainier, more productive winter. That’s helped Iraq serve as the breadbasket of the region for millennia, but no longer. Like Bakersfield, Baghdad is intensely dependent on river water from upstream for irrigation of most of its crops. After decades of war, not nearly as much water is getting through.
This year’s major drought has coincided with the rise of ISIS, which has already used dams as a weapon of war, threatening downstream agriculture and electricity production during its march to gain control of vast swaths of territory in Syria and northern Iraq. From Al Arabiya:
In Iraq, ISIS, reportedly in control of the strategic Mosul dam, has declared its intention to deprive Shiite regions from water. Further electricity shortages hit Southern Iraq, where the consecutive governments have failed in restoring basic services since 2003.
The declines in rainfall already seen in Syria and Iraq are on the order of scientists’ predictions but have generally come faster than climate models anticipated. According to retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, the combination of worsening drought and violent conflict now spreading across the region “is a classic case of unintended and unforeseen consequences.”
For all the debate over climate change, those in the national security realm are moving surprisingly full-speed ahead. In this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon listed the impacts of climate change, like drought, as “threat multipliers.” As Femia put it, “the U.S. military doesn’t have the luxury of planning for the short term.” Now that the Department of Defense has listed climate change as a national security threat, Femia says, “they have an obligation and duty to address those issues.”
For Femia, the way forward in Iraq and other parts of the region is by working at reducing one of the root drivers of Middle East conflict: water scarcity.
In post conflict situations, issues of disarmament and new political foundations and the relationship between various ethnic groups, those are all critical and need to be part of any solution. But if conflict resolution doesn’t involve natural resource management, you’re setting the stage for future instability.
Correction, June 27, 2014: Due to an editing error, the credit for the map of land and ocean temperature percentiles misspelled the name of the National Climatic Data Center.
This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.Abstract: The Heartland Institute sent an email that inaccurately reported the results of a study into the scientific consensus about the nature of global warming. The American Meteorological Society objected to the deceptive nature of the email, and so Heartland’s President Joseph Bast defended the email. Instead of accurately reporting the study’s results, both the email and Bast chose instead to distort the study’s findings, quote mine, and ignore inconvenient results in the service of an admitted desire to fool the public into disbelieving that climate change is real, human caused, and likely to be harmful.
On November 26, the Heartland Institute sent a direct marketing email that distorted the results of a study investigating the level and strength of scientific consensus about industrial climate disruption among members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). In addition to the spam-like tracking features embedded in the email, it also prominently featured the seal of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and was only identified as coming from Heartland in the footer. Following a public complaint by Keith L. Seitter, the Executive Director of the AMS, Heartland President Joseph Bast published a defense of the email in which Bast claimed that everything in the email was true, that Heartland had done nothing wrong, and more or less told Seitter to quit complaining.
Given Heartland’s long history of deception, dishonesty, and hypocrisy with respect to industrial climate disruption, S&R compared the claims made in the email and by Bast in his defense with the actual study (“Meteorologists’s views about global warming: A survey of American Meteorological Society professional members,” hereafter Stenhouse et al 2013). S&R found that the email and Bast’s blog both fail to accurately describe the results of Stenhouse et al 2013 in multiple ways. Both distort the study’s finding on the scientific consensus among AMS members, both caricature the study’s findings on how political ideology is related to thinking that global warming is happening, the email excises a critical part of a quote and Bast defends the quote mining, and both fail to mention that Stenhouse et al 2013 replicates another study into the scientific consensus.
In addition, Bast’s defense of the email provided a peek behind the curtain and some new insight into Heartland’s long term goal with the email, with a Forbes blog published on November 20 by Heartland Senior Fellow James M. Taylor, and with Heartland’s other industrial climate disruption-denying actions over the past few years – to fool the public into disbelieving that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that climate is changing, that human activity is the dominant cause of those changes, and that the changes will be disruptive to both global ecosystems and human society.
Heartland sends deceptive marketing email
S&R acquired a copy of the email that Heartland |
there is no team. If it’s two or three years away, this will run out in 2017 and the whole thing will have to start over again.’’
Silver reinforced that, adding that despite reports about struggles getting a new Milwaukee arena built, he’s confident the Bucks are staying put.
“We have complete confidence they’re going to get the deal done in Milwaukee,’’ he said, adding he met with owners and community leaders and only “a bit” of negotiating remains.
Silver reiterated his top priority is increasing competitiveness and solidifying the league economically so that “we have 30 viable franchises.’’
The new TV deal begins in 2016-17, and Silver expects it “will make a huge difference” in league profitability and shoring up weaker markets.
“I just wanted to make very clear to the mayor (Murray) that I didn’t want to create any false expectations,” Silver said.
In other words, no expansion discussions before the 2017-18 season.
Silver was asked about rumored expansion clauses in the TV deal that increase its value if new clubs are added. “It is not true,’’ Silver said.In May of 2014 the Florida ACLU filed a FOIA request to Sarasota PD for their documents on Stingrays. However, just days before the ACLU was due to inspect the documents, the United States Marshals Service swooped into Sarasota and rushed off with almost all of SPD’s Stingray records.
Their legal argument for doing this? An SPD detective that had worked with the USMS on a case in which Stingrays were used had been deputized by the Marshals, which according to them made the documents the possession of the Marshal Service.
While this is, of course, legally dubious at best, and downright illegal by some interpretations, it also helps explain the strange collection of records that SPD gave us, which evidently is everything the Marshals missed.
These documents are the result of Joint Law Enforcement Operations Task Forces (JLEOs) that the SPD participated in from the years 2008 to 2014 with various local departments in their area, and also the DEA and the Marshals. Considering that South Florida has been designated as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA, it’s not surprising that they are engaged in high level operations with federal law enforcement agencies.
What is surprising is how often they resorted to pen register and trap and trace court orders to be officially permitted to use their Stingray. Referring to cell site simulators as “trap and trace devices” is common, even by the DOJ. A quick glance at the documents released by SPD will show you just how much this technique was used.
This controversial practice has spurred action in 11 states (though not Florida as of yet). Critics of this practice demand more rigorous warrant applications that specify that law enforcement must be very clear about what devices they intend to use. This of course makes it much harder to do what Sarasota and the DEA did, concealing their Stingray use by telling judges they simply wanted to use typical Pen registers and phone company records’ court orders.
Keep in mind, the vast majority of these documents were spirited away by the Marshals.
Pen registers and phone company data dumps can be their own investigation tactic. In conjunction with a Stingray however, they serve to inform police about who the IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) codes and phone numbers belong to that they are intercepting with their cell site sim, in real time. Telephone company data can also be used to identify key phone numbers and IMSI codes that they are planning to surveil with the Stingray.
Thanks to the Marshals though, it is impossible to get a clearer view of how law enforcement use all of these devices in conjunction, but these documents help give us some clues about just how deep police can dig into our phones data.
Aside from emails featuring SPD officers and DEA special agents discussing strategy for arresting drug dealers and getting court orders, the docs also feature Sarasota cops carping about the Marshals not reimbursing them for fuel and overtime. In light of the Marshals numerous problems, this isn’t terribly surprising, and honestly, pretty amusing.
We couldn’t confirm with either SPD or the Sarasota city attorney’s office whether or not the Stingray used in these operations was owned by Sarasota or a federal agency, but an important clue can be gleaned from an email sent from DEA agent Ronald Satterwhite to United States Attorney Christopher Murray.
While this seems to indicate that the equipment being used for the operation was owned by Sarasota, we may never know for sure due to the Marshals.
Read the first segment of release embedded below, or on the request page.
Image via Sarasota Police FacebookThe video will start in 8 Cancel
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Arsenal maybe forced to sell Liverpool transfer target Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain after he rejected their offer of a new contract.
The England international has told the Gunners he has no intention of penning an extension and is prepared to sit out the final year of his deal before leaving on a free transfer next summer.
Oxlade-Chamberlain believes he needs to quit the Emirates in order to advance his career and the ECHO understands he’s keen on a move to Anfield.
Arsenal snubbed Liverpool’s initial approach for Oxlade-Chamberlain as they still hoped he would pen a new contract.
However, with those hopes now in tatters, the Gunners may have to listen to offers for the £25million rated midfielder.
(Image: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Oxlade-Chamberlain has scored 20 goals in 194 games for Arsenal since joining from Southampton for an initial fee of £12million in 2011.
Manchester City and Chelsea have also been linked with him but they have yet to make an approach.
Oxlade-Chamberlain’s pace, power and versatility appeals to Jurgen Klopp. However, one potential stumbling block is playing time.
With Liverpool’s wealth of midfield options, it’s unlikely that Klopp would be able to provide any guarantees about a regular starting role in the season leading up to the 2018 World Cup in Russia.We're terribly excited to announce and launch our late spring/early summer publishing lineup. As you may know, we've been publishing quality independent comics since 2009, and in that time we've produced 26 comics, three prints, and a feature-length documentary.
Our goal is to help new(er) cartoonists reach a wider audience by ensuring their books stay in print, they get royalties in advance, and they get hooked up with new distribution paths. We tend to specialize in literary and humor comics, though anything that catches our eye is fair game.
Our comics have won Ignatz and DINKY Awards, been nominated for Eisner Awards, and been included in the "Best American Comics" series. We're extremely proud of the talented artists we work with, and we hope you'll give our new line a shot. If you do, here's what you'll get:
Reign of Crumbs - Glynnis Fawkes, 76 pages, perfect bound b/w w/color covers.
Glynnis' comics have been some of our favorites for many years now. Whether she's detailing the joys and hardships of parenting in Vermont or the Middle East, adventuring in Greece, or re-telling ancient myths, she is a joy to read, with strong and clear line. She has a unique and uncanny ability to pull the critical thread out of a story and show it to the world.
Unicorns of Planet Earth - Lauren Barnett, 28 pages, saddle stitched, full color throughout.
Donning her unicorn-expert cap, Lauren takes you on a hilarious trip through the lives of the common unicorn. Their dating rituals, their food, and some of the lies people would have you believe about them.
Kilgore Quarterly #7 - various, 64 pages, perfect bound, b/w with color covers
We're insanely proud of this issue, which focuses on longer short works from artists who have orphaned stories. Some of these appeared elsewhere, have gone out of print, and need to be read by more people, some are from forthcoming works, and some just needed a home. Included are:
Dappled Light
Dappled Light by Summer Pierre - In this story, Summer delivers five pages of nostalgia that is touching and sad without getting overly sweet. If you are unfamiliar with her, please check her out. She makes autobiographical comics that are actually interesting, and her artwork will pull you in.
Steve McQueen has Vanished
Steve McQueen has Vanished by Tim Lane. In this 18-page excerpt from his forthcoming book on McQueen, Tim shows that his book will not simply be an autobiography. Instead, he takes facts and fiction and melds them all with his own psyche, making this a semi-fictional, autobiographical, biography.
I Told You So
I Told You So by Joseph Remnant. This 16-page story originally appeared in a 2D Cloud collection, and is worth repeating. It's a story of obsession, of art, and of love, and not at all in the hackneyed way we're used to seeing those three elements woven together. As always, Joseph's drawing is warm and inviting and we're excited to put out another fine Remnant piece.
The Desk
The Desk by Leslie Stein - This twelve pager originally appeared as an Oily $1 minicomic. It's a delightful story of a young girl playing, and the tension that comes about. It's not sappy, it's really funny, and we love it.
K. Trout Makes a Move
K. Trout Makes a Move - Ending this issue is this great four-pager from Sam Spina. We've worked with Sam a lot, and we've always said he's one of the nicest guys in comics. Well, he's also one of the funniest, and his time at the Cartoon Networks, 'The Regular Show' has really helped him fine-tune his gag writing ability.
Grace Slick flatters Dan
Also included in this issue are two hand-written interviews conducted with the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, and the American rock star Grace Slick, who used to front Jefferson Airplane. Jason did the covers, which are based on a classic Margritte painting, and the incredible Herb Greene let us use one of his 1967 pictures of Grace for the interview, which we really appreciate.
Wrapping up our late spring releases are three books from Noah Van Sciver - one new comic, and two reprints.
Slow Graffiti #3
Slow Graffiti #3 is a 20 page sketchbook diary comic Noah is putting out solely for his Patreon supporters, and backers of this Kickstarter. You will not be able to get this comic elsewhere. It's b/w throughout and is classic Noah. It is funny, sad, introspective, confident, under-confident and everything else you can fit into a 20-page mini comic.
Blammo #9
We are reprinting Blammo #9 which won a DINKY Award, has been nominated for an Eisner Award, and which has been getting rave reviews since we released it in September of 2016. If you missed out, here's your chance to pick up what is one of the best comics of the last year. Everyone who reads this is blown away, and Noah has referred to as one of the best things he's ever made. It contains a number of short stand-alone stories, so if you haven't read Blammo 1-8.5, you're fine.
My Hot Date
Lastly, we are reprinting the Ignatz-winning My Hot Date. This story recounts Noah's first date in the late 90's, which was set up in an AOL chat room. This book brilliantly shows that time in adolescence when the way you see yourself in the world, and the way the world sees you, crash head-on into each other.
Signed/Numbered Noah Print
In addition to these fine releases, we have set award levels to include the 16x20 print we did of our favorite page from Blammo #9. This is a giclee print which has been signed and numbered in an edition of 50. We're about 1/2 sold out, so these are the last of the bunch. And you can get a frame from IKEA that perfectly fits this print for $10, so it's a relatively economical way to class up your house, apartment, dorm room, car, hallway or closet.
We are also offering discounts on our back-stock, which includes more work from Noah, Sam Spina, Joseph Remnant, Amara Leipzig, Box Brown, Jake Roth, Matias San Juan, Alex Graham, Lauren Barnett, and many others.
SHIRTS!! (Noah design)
And, we're doing more t-shirts! These are all hand screen printed by Dan and his 4-year old son. They're done to order (unless we have it in stock) and some even have glow in the dark ink! You can select from a Jeffrey Brown or Noah Van Sciver design.
We hope you'll back our work - we think it's solid, and we're proud to do it.
And, for those of you curious about the money breakdown, here you go!
$4600 - Printing (57.5%) $1300 - Shipping (16%) $1250 - Royalties (16%) $650 - Fees (8%) $200 - Wiggle Room (2.5%)
And, if you feel like those royalties should be higher, don't worry, they are! We give ~20% of every print run back to the artist, which they can sell and keep every penny of -- and in that way, Kilgore makes sure that all 'profits' are split equally. Thanks for your support.Yuli Gurriel rounds the bases ater homering off Yu Darvish in Game 3. (Matt Slocum/AP)
Columnist
Shocking acts of civility, common sense, accountability and generosity have broken out at the World Series. Please, someone put a stop to this before it spreads.
On Saturday, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred suspended Yuli Gurriel of the Houston Astros without pay for five games at the beginning of next season for making a racially insensitive gesture and yelling an anti-Asian insult at Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish during Game 3 of the World Series on Friday night. It is not expected that the players' union will contest the discipline.
Gurriel's immediate expression of remorse after the game, as well as a full apology and a desire to meet Darvish personally to apologize, may have helped the Astros first baseman avoid being suspended during this World Series.
Just as pertinent, Darvish, after saying that Gurriel's acts were "disrespectful" to Asians around the world, wrote in a tweet that, "I believe we should put our effort into learning rather than to accuse him.... Let's stay positive and move forward instead of focusing on anger. I'm counting on everyone's big love."
What is the world coming to?
First, an apology for ugly acts that appears sincere and without strings attached. Then, generosity from the victim toward the man who has insulted him. And the next day, in a situation in which there probably is no perfect discipline, a punishment to which everyone involved appears to have agreed to agree.
Gurriel, who went 0 for 3 and grounded into a double play Saturday in the Astros' 6-2 loss in Game 4, will have to live with whatever damage he has done to his reputation both by his acts and by his honesty in admitting to them. But his team will not be punished during the World Series. And the Dodgers, who had the family of Jackie Robinson involved in pregame ceremonies earlier this month, appear to agree with Darvish that this is a moment for education and conciliation, not outrage.
In this incident, the devil — but also the instant disgust, apparently followed by dignity and decency — truly is in the details. Let's go through them.
The Cuban-born Gurriel was brushed back Friday night by a 93-mph fastball thrown in the second inning by Darvish, who is of Japanese-Iranian descent. Gurriel retaliated, as hitters have always tried to do, by hitting a homer on the next pitch.
When Gurriel returned to the Houston dugout, he did what countless hitters have done in such emotional competitive moments. He made a disparaging comment directed at the pitcher and added an insulting gesture.
If Gurriel had yelled that Darvish was a gutless cheap-shot artist and added the universal gesture for "choker" by grabbing his throat, then no big deal — just hardball. Maybe the Dodgers or Darvish see it and Gurriel or some Astro gets drilled.
But instead, in a split-second of self-destructive glee, Gurriel made the universal insulting gesture, seen all over the world for generations, of using his fingers to pull his eyes until they looked slanted. And he yelled "Chinito," which translates as "little Chinese boy."
Yuli Gurriel under fire after gesture made in dugout after homering off Yu Darvish: https://t.co/CoY4gEYRDG pic.twitter.com/TmF1HJNUTo — Deadspin (@Deadspin) October 28, 2017
At this point, because the moment was captured on video, American social media erupted with predictable racial vitriol, packed with anonymous insults that would make anything Gurriel did seem mild.
Then a remarkable thing happened. After the game, won by the Astros, Houston Manager A.J. Hinch praised the 33-year-old Gurriel for his slugging, a homer and double. But when asked about the racially charged incident, Hinch faced it immediately. "I am aware of it," Hinch said. "He's remorseful. He's going to have a statement."
Not just sorry but "remorseful," a stronger choice of word.
Gurriel answered questions afterward at his locker. In one answer, he seemed to duck behind the excuse that he was simply telling teammates that he had had bad luck in the past against Asians. In the end, far from trying to gloss over what he had done, he volunteered that he had played for a year in Japan and knew that "Chinito" was an insult.
"In Cuba and in other places, we call all Asian people Chinese," Gurriel said through team interpreter Alex Cintron. "But I played in Japan, and I know [that is] offensive, so I apologize for that."
Gurriel did not say that his word had been misunderstood by dugout lip-readers or that it had been taken out of context or that he did not consider the term an insult. Gurriel had used a race-based disparaging word, and he simply said, "I apologize for that." He did not excuse himself by citing the heat of the moment or the proximity of the previous fastball.
"I didn't want to offend anybody," Gurriel added. "I don't want to offend him or anybody in Japan. I have a lot of respect. I played in Japan."
Clearly, at least for a couple of seconds, Gurriel intended to offend Darvish, just as generations of hitters have yelled baseball's magic twelve-letter word at pitchers after an apparent brushback, followed by a home run. But I will give Gurriel the benefit of the doubt that he really does respect people in Japan, is familiar with their culture and wishes he could stuff that "Chinito" back in his lungs, not simply because he was caught — on camera — but because he really feels shame.
Because Gurriel answered several similar questions, he did, at least in translation, appear to fall into the fashionable dodge of apologizing to anybody who was offended — the backhanded non-apology apology. But to me, these are the words that count: "Of course, I want to talk to him because I don't have anything against him," Gurriel said. "I want to apologize to him."
That's an apology-apology. No hairsplitting. No blame-ducking. But Gurriel also did not accuse himself of being a racist, either. In the direct way of many athletes, he stepped up, faced the hard moment and did his best to apologize.
As for the slant-eyed gesture, that requires as much interpretation as a raised middle finger. It means what it means. Those who deny it merely self-identify as sympathizers with those who use racially derogatory gestures, words and symbols. Thanks. That's always useful information.
Darvish, the "victim" in current parlance, gave a distinguished account of his own character in his balanced but forgiving response.
Immediately after the game, Darvish said, through an interpreter: "Of course, Houston has Asian fans and Japanese fans. Acting like that is disrespectful to people around the world and the Houston organization."
Later, in a tweet, Davish wrote, "No one is perfect. That includes both you and I. What he [did] today isn't right, but I believe we should put our effort into learning rather than to accuse him. If we can take something from this, this is a giant step for mankind."
Both my cynicism barometer and my irony meter just broke.
In recent times, American culture has become addicted to the adrenaline rush of outrage. Each day, we awake as a nation looking for something to disagree with and get angry about. We don't even realize what is most obvious: This is sickness. If a family acted this way, it would destroy itself and maximize its own misery. Yet we not only excuse deliberate divisiveness in politics, we ignore it by the gross.
Perhaps we can look to a Cuban, in this country for less than two years, for an example of the ability to make both an ugly mistake and a direct apology.
And to someone of Japanese-Iranian descent who grew up in Osaka, Japan, and came to America only five years ago, to hear a voice that says we should "count on everyone's big love" and "put our effort into learning rather than to accuse."
MLB's ability to impose discipline quickly was helped by Hinch's appropriate response. Balanced against that, Darvish's broad-minded response laid the ground for discipline that, MLB hopes, was proportional to the act.
If only, on larger scales, our opportunities for minimizing our divisions could be handled as well as Gurriel and Darvish handled theirs. Gurriel acknowledged that he shamed his own decency and will have to live with the consequences. That's hard to do. Darvish saw an ancient ugliness raise its head again but chose to view it as a moment for education and understanding. That's mighty tough, too.
For more by Thomas Boswell, visit washingtonpost.com/boswell.The news director at the UK arm of broadcaster RT repeatedly made Islamophobic comments on social media in which he said Islam was "rotten from the inside", retweeted an image suggesting Muslims are inclined to shoot their own daughters, and shared an image saying "there is no difference between the Nazis and Islam". In a series of messages obtained by BuzzFeed News, Andrew Rigney also said Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – a known fan of the Russian government-backed TV channel – is a "fucking communist IRA supporter" and "millionaire leftard" while suggesting "dumb liberal lefties" welcoming refugees to the UK will be "the first slaughtered by jihad".
A spokesperson for RT, formerly known as Russia Today, said the channel did not tolerate "hate speech" and had told Rigney to delete his social media accounts after it was alerted to the messages by staff, although it was unclear whether any further action was taken.
Facebook
Rigney, whose LinkedIn profile described himself as "launch director for RT international [UK] news channel" also appeared to suggest people with left-wing views should be killed as they "are worth the least", said he wanted to "punch out" the face of London mayor Sadiq Khan, and implied Khan had approved the construction of a new cycle superhighway partly to give money to his "rich Muslim mates".
The Twitter and Facebook posts were independently forwarded to BuzzFeed News in confidence by multiple staff at RT UK after the employees read a previous report on concerns that the channel's politics have become more right-wing during the last year. The concerns were raised after the channel considered hiring right-wing commentator and Trump supporter Katie Hopkins as a new host, while other staff members talk of deep divisions in the newsroom between left-wing staff members and management who are more willing to embrace populist movements such as Donald Trump and Brexit.
"RT does not tolerate hate speech of any kind," the channel said in a statement on Wednesday. "The employee in question was duly reprimanded as soon as the issue was brought to the attention of the management, and his social media accounts were taken down."
However, multiple RT employees told BuzzFeed News they were unhappy with the internal response. One person said Rigney's posts had raised deep concerns among the channel's employees: "Something that has been concerning to staff for a while is the extremist and Islamophobic views of the news director Andy Rigney. There have been several complaints made against him (particularly from Muslim staff) but nothing is ever done by management. The fact that these views are tolerated is extremely worrying." "Staff have tried to confront it but not really got anywhere," they added. "I have also been increasingly worried about the turn that the channel is taking recently." A second RT UK employee confirmed that staff had confronted Rigney but he remained in his position.
In one particularly bizarre tweet, Rigney responded to a picture of a puppy by suggesting Muslims would hang it and throw it from a building and concluded with the hashtag "#evil".
Rigney also responded to a controversy over an animated version of children's character Fireman Sam supposedly – though inconclusively – burning a page of the Qur'an by retweeting an image saying "Let it burn!".
According to his IMDB profile Rigney has previously worked on The Bill and in children's programming for the BBC, and became launch director for RT UK before it started broadcasting in 2014.Ty Vickery is helped from the field during Sunday's match against Port Adelaide
Richmond tall forward Ty Vickery has escaped serious injury stemming from an incident in last Sunday’s victory over Port Adelaide at Adelaide Oval.
Vickery left the field in the second quarter after falling awkwardly in a tackle and was subsequently subbed out of the game.
He sustained minor damage to his ankle and slight bone bruising in his knee, but is expected to be on the sidelines for only 1-2 weeks.
Get your tickets for the Round 9 Dreamtime at the 'G blockbuster against Essendon
The same luck wasn’t afforded to Richmond midfielder Reece Conca, who injured his hamstring while playing for the Tigers’ VFL team in last Saturday’s loss to Casey.
It is the second time this season that Conca has damaged his hamstring, with the latest setback expected to see him out of action for 4-6 weeks.
In the same game, emerging tall Liam McBean sustained minor damage to his thumb. He will face a fitness test later this week.
Meanwhile, veteran Chris Newman will need another 1-2 weeks to overcome a groin complaint, which has kept him out of the past two games.
See Richmond’s latest injury listDeeni doll photo via Twitter user Hussain Master
Yesterday a woman in England's Lancashire County drew local media attention after she launched an "Islamic doll" with no facial features. Dubbed Romeisa, the doll's face is entirely flat, cushy, and eerie, draped in a hijab. Ridhwana B., the doll's creator, designed it as the first model of a larger Deeni (Arabic for faith) Doll collection, which seeks to comply with what some interpret as Islamic religious law's prohibition on the depiction of distinct features on any children's toy.
"I came up with the idea from scratch after speaking to some parents who were a little concerned about dolls with facial features," Ridhwana, a former teacher at a Lancashire Muslim school, told the Lancashire Telegraph. "I spoke to a religious scholar in Leicester who guided me through what was and was not permissible when producing the product," she said.
The doll, after four years in development, is manufactured in China and undergoing limited distribution (via inquiries to info@deenidolls.com) for about $40 a pop. Believing the selection of toys for observant, strictly orthodox Muslim children is quite limited now, Ridhwana claims she is considering launching a wider range of products and writing a book on Islamic child rearing.
Although it's attracted a good deal of local interest, Ridhwana's doll is not the first faceless model in the world. In the thriving niche of Islamic toys, there are actually several dedicated faceless doll makers, but the Lancashire Telegraph reports that Ridhwana's dolls are unique for their high-quality production.
Faceless dolls derive from Islamic religious texts that prohibit the depiction of humans and animals in any medium (although encountering faces on things like coins is accepted as unavoidable). This stems from the belief, familiar to Christians and Jews, that one ought not to create or worship idols and the fear that depictions of man or beast will lead to false worship, or at least distract people from their focus on Allah.
Creating dolls in human and animal form is explicitly exempted form these rules, so long as they have no facial features, based on stories that the Prophet Muhammad's wife, Aisha, played with dolls and the belief that they can teach young girls how to show affection and care for children. In the past this has led religious authorities to suggest that observant Muslims burn the faces off of their children's mainstream dolls for lack of accessible faceless alternatives.
Muslim attitudes on depictions of humans and animals in art have varied over time. Often such images have appeared in religious texts, justified as useful visual aids and indicating the historic, although not universal, acceptance of human images by devout Muslims. Even depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, quite controversial in recent years, were fairly common until the 17th century and tolerated into the modern era. (For those in New York, there's a pretty good one from medieval Afghanistan on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
This acceptance of human forms continues in much of the Muslim world. For example, many of the numerous toys aimed at Muslim children—like Iran's Sarah and Dara (local competitors with Barbie, who herself has donned a burqa in a bid at inclusiveness) or the globally marketed Amina, Little Farah, or Razanne dolls—convey religious and cultural values but carry human features.
For those who do observe the taboos on doll faces, many small-to-large producers, like Aisha Dolls, Faatimah's Dolls, Rainbow Dolls, and Smart Ark, have offered a wide range of featureless editions in many shapes, sizes, colors, and types of clothing for years.
Many wish to purchase such dolls for more than just religious observance or the inculcation of traditional female and maternal values. Some Amish communities continue to produce and use faceless dolls to avoid idolatry, to endanger a sense of equality, and to avoid vanity. And the Waldorf educational system, with its focus on self-directed learning, values and makes faceless dolls as a tool for undirected, imaginative play.
Despite their niche market and possible cross-cultural appeal or re-appropriation, the fact that Ridhwana's dolls originated and are sold in Britain has raised some hackles among Brits who see them as yet another sign of a foreign culture usurping their own. One headline on the dolls' release reads, " Britain surrenders to Islam again."
It's a bad time for Ridhwana to receive that kind of press. Riding a wave of xenophobic nationalism, fueled by accusations that Islamists recently tried to take over a Birmingham school district, hate crimes against Muslims increased by 65 percent over the past year in parts of the UK. Any perceived provocation may, now more than ever, result in atrocious backlashes.
But for the vast majority of humanity not convinced that some cloth and stuffing can bring down their culture, the Romeisa is just a toy. It's a bit of a creepy toy that will make some think more of a horror movie than of playtime session—granted, even Ridhwana acknowledges that some will find it strange. And some may not agree with the traditional or religious values it relates to. But as the Waldorf folks will tell you, children love to make up their own narratives for their playthings. And a faceless doll can truly be anything they want it to be. It's conceivable Ridhwana could, for this very reason, garner a fair market outside of the Muslim world. Although for now we'll have to wait and see how her Deeni Dolls stack up to the surprisingly robust faceless competition.
Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.Facebook is more than doubling the speed of its Wedge open-source network switch, which is good news both for Facebook users and for anyone who may want to build a 100-gigabit switch.
The Wedge sits at the top of a rack of servers to connect them to Facebook's network. It was announced in June 2014, and thousands are already deployed in the company. Plus, the social network made the design of the Wedge open source so other manufacturers could build switches like it.
However, less than two years later, the 40-Gigabit Ethernet ports in the original Wedge are proving no match for the fast-growing traffic on Facebook's network. To keep up, the company is now developing a version of the switch with 100-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. It gave more details in a blog post but hasn't said when the new switches will be ready.
Much of the traffic in Facebook's data centers is just among the company's own switches. But it's growing along with much more bandwidth-intensive content on the social network, including big video files and virtual-reality content like 360-degree videos that Facebook recently introduced.
"Whenever there is capacity, people will build stuff to consume it," said Jay Parikh, vice president of global engineering and infrastructure, at the Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday. Facebook says it has more powerful servers, and more of them, than it did when the first Wedge was introduced. As many as four servers can be hooked up to each port of the Wedge.
The Wedge 100 will have 32 100G ports, the same maximum number as on today's Wedge but all at the higher speed. Like the current switch, it has a non-blocking design, meaning that it can fully feed all of its ports at the same time if necessary. Thus the total capacity of the Wedge 100 is 3.2Tbps.
Facebook designs its own switches and writes its own software for them because it wants the flexibility to meet its own rapidly developing needs. In addition to the Wedge, earlier this year it introduced the 6-pack, a modular switch for connecting server racks to each other. The 6-pack is based on the Wedge and can have as many as 128 40-gigabit ports. Facebook has also developed its own data-center network design.
What Facebook invents in network hardware, it makes available for others to use. At least one vendor, Accton, already sells a customizable top-of-rack switch based on the 40-gigabit Wedge. The design has been accepted by the Open Compute Project, which Facebook founded in 2011 to share open-source hardware designs. It also plans to share the Wedge 100's design.
The company uses an internally developed OS, called FBOSS, on its own switches. But it has also joined up with Big Switch Networks to offer an open-source network operating system called Open Network Linux for others to use.
The advent of so-called "white box" networking gear based on open hardware and software could trickle down from giant IT shops like Facebook to provide enterprises with an alternative to traditional systems from companies like Cisco Systems. But Cisco says its overall architecture costs customers less in the long run.The Registration of Civil Partnerships | Same Sex Marriage. This is accompanied by a Today, the Scottish Government launched its anticipated consultation on. This is accompanied by a fifty page paper which identifies two primary issues Scottish Ministers are interested in, soliciting...
"... views on the possibility of allowing religious ceremonies for civil partnerships and the possible introduction of same sex marriage."
Interestingly, as Nicola Sturgeon makes plain in the ministerial foreword - and interesting but not unexpected too that she is writing it, rather than Kenny MacAskill or his Justice deputy, Roseanna Cunningham - quite apart from the reticence some folk purported to identify over the summer, the Scottish Government has declared itself basically in favour of same-sex marriage. Sturgeon writes:
"The Scottish Government is choosing to make its initial views clear at the outset of this consultation. We tend towards the view that religious ceremonies for civil partnerships should no longer be prohibited and that same sex marriage should be introduced so that same sex couples have the option of getting married if that is how they wish to demonstrate their commitment to each other. We also believe that no religious body or its celebrants should be required to carry out same sex marriages or civil partnership ceremonies."
"although we have expressed our initial view, we give an assurance that all views will be listened to. No final views have been reached and no decisions have been taken." The detailed consultation questions and some helpful background detail is given in the albeit very brief) account of why they are minded to support a move towards same-sex marriage in Scotland: Peppery stuff, even if Scottish Ministers continue to insist thatThe detailed consultation questions and some helpful background detail is given in the subsequent sections of the document. Since it is the aspect of the consultation which has recently dominated discussions of this in the media, it is worth quoting Ministers' () account of why they are minded to support a move towards same-sex marriage in Scotland:
3.11 The Government’s initial view is that marriage should be open to both same sex couples and opposite sex couples. This view is grounded in our commitment to equality, and our support for stable and committed relationships. Same sex couples, like opposite sex couples, can and do establish loving relationships which they wish to formalise in a manner recognised by the state, and in some cases by the religious body to which they belong.
3.12 While civil partnerships are available for same sex couples, and provide similar responsibilities, rights and status to marriage, the two are not identical. It is clear that some same sex couples would prefer marriage to a civil partnership, as the appropriate way to declare and formalise their commitment to each other.
This prompts several more detailed questions. Should same-sex marriage only be civil, or should religious same-sex marriages by willing celebrants have the force of law? Should civil partnerships be retained at all, if marriage is equalised? Alternatively, should they be capable of civil and religious form, as preferences of those involved and their pieties dictate? I note, by the by, that the document doesn't discuss reform of civil partnerships, to remove the requirement that they can only involve two folk of the same sex. As is becoming typical and typically knotty in these devolved days, any marriage reforms will |
is on track to be completed at or before the owners' Dec. 13 meetings in Dallas.
Jones threatened to sue the league if the committee approves an extension, saying it should be reviewed and approved by all owners. Goodell's current deal as commissioner is set to expire after the 2018 season.
Blank removed Jones as an ad hoc, non-voting member of the committee earlier this month after Jones brought up the possibility of legal action against the league. Blank also announced last week that the committee was still working toward an extension for Goodell and disputed Jones' assertion that owners have been misled regarding "critical facts" about the negotiations.
Jones also has been upset with how the league handled Ezekiel Elliott's six-game suspension for violating the personal conduct policy, even though the Cowboys running back was not charged by authorities in Columbus, Ohio, who investigated allegations of domestic violence by a former girlfriend.(Photo by Flickr user christina rutz)
In the United States, nearly a quarter of employed mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth, according to a new report from In These Times, a nonprofit magazine, which analyzed data from the Department of Labor and collected stories from mothers who kept working through pain and grief.
It's not because they recover at a supernatural pace. Or because they value their jobs over their babies.
Some simply can’t afford the pay cut. Buying groceries for many American women trumps resting for as long as the doctor advises. So, they go back to the office — even if the C-section cuts haven’t yet healed or a premature baby remains in the hospital.
National data points to a probable culprit: Only 13 percent of workers in the U.S. have access to any paid leave, according to the BLS. Forty percent of U.S. households with children under 18, meanwhile, rely heavily on a mother’s income, Pew data shows.
A 2012 survey commissioned by DOL polled all workers who had taken family or medical leave. In These Times dug into the data further to learn what happened to new moms. They found 23 percent of women who had left work to care for an infant took less than two weeks off.
Less educated workers appeared to have it much worse: Eighty percent of college graduates took at least six weeks off to care for a new baby, and only 54 percent of women without degrees did so.
And about 43 million American workers have no paid sick leave, or time off for parents to care for sick kids. Access depends on occupation. Those with the highest salaries often enjoy the most generous benefits: 88-percent of private sector managers and financial workers enjoy paid time off, more than double the rate among service workers (40-percent) and construction workers (38-percent).
[The stark disparities of paid leave: The rich get to heal. The poor get fired.]
One mother interviewed by investigative reporter Sharon Lerner fell through the cracks of the Family Medical Leave Act, which guarantees at least 12 weeks of unpaid leave to 1) new parents at companies with more than 50 employees and 2) who have worked there for at least a year.
The woman, a counselor at a small college with a Master's degree, saved up vacation days and purchased disability insurance to prepare for two months with no income. She tried to time her baby to qualify for job-protected leave. As the story describes:
She had started her job in February 2014, which meant that she wouldn’t qualify until the following February. She counted back nine months from then and got to May, but then, to be safe, tacked on another two months in case the baby came early, so: July. That’s when she and Rachid would start trying for a second.
But the woman went into premature labor, which wrecked her plan. According to the story, she gave birth by C-section on Christmas Eve, too soon to qualify for leave or support from disability insurance.
She returned to work two weeks later, Lerner reported, worrying about her son, who remained under medical supervision.Someone rearranged mannequins in apparent Nazi Salutes on Sunday at Belk at Cary Towne Center.
Racial and anti-Semitic symbolism appeared to rear its ugly head Sunday in the Triangle when rows of mannequins at Belk department store in Cary were rearranged with outstretched arms reminiscent of Nazi salutes.The incident happened at Cary Towne Center. A customer inside the store took the photo and posted it to social media, and said in part, "How many people walked by this and didn't notice, oblivious, or saw it and did nothing? Awestruck, I watched about twenty before I couldn't take it. It's about action, and when it comes to racism and inequality, no act of defending love and equality is small."The arms have since been reset to their normal positions.Belk told ABC11 it was reviewing security camera footage. Belk said the cameras, which pan, tilt and zoom, scan around and aren't fixed to one spot.The footage shows the mannequins' arms were down at 4:27 p.m. At 5:16 p.m., cameras showed a customer taking photos of the mannequins and then lowering one of the arms.Belk is not releasing video at this time but store officials said there is no video of the arms being raised.Store associates who worked Sunday are being interviewed and Belk told ABC11 it takes this incident "very seriously."The incident comes on the heels of the weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist group clashed with counter-protesters.One of those protesters, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, was killed after a car rammed into a group protesting the presence of white supremacists who had gathered for a rally in the normally quiet college town.In Raleigh,for 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Martin Luther King Memorial Gardens at 1500 Martin Luther King Boulevard for victims of this weekend's violence. A protest is in the works for Durham as well.Also on Monday, President Donald Trumpand declared that "racism is evil" in a far more forceful statement than he'd made initially after the deadly, race-fueled clashes in Charlottesville.Belk plans to release a statement once its investigation is complete.Schmeichel denies applying for Sheffield United job
The 49-year-old, who completed his Uefa A coaching badge this summer, admits he is flattered to be linked with a move to the League One club
Former Manchester United goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel insists he has not applied for the vacant manager's job at Sheffield United.
The 49-year-old is reportedly interested in the role after the League One club sacked David Weir after 13 games in charge.
The former Denmark international, who completed his Uefa A coaching badge this summer, admits he is flattered to be linked with a move to Bramall Lane.
“I can see that I've been linked with the vacant manager’s job at Sheffield United,” Schmeichel posted on Twitter.
“This is not my doing, I have not applied for any jobs, but it's great to be associated with such a great football club.”The following afternoon, the 27-year-old is back to work, rehearsing for a performance of “Q.U.E.E.N.”, her Electric Lady duet with Erykah Badu, at this year's BET Awards. She has to cram because her appearance on the show was booked at the last minute, only after Prince himself phoned BET President of Programming Stephen Hill directly and demanded Monáe be added to the lineup. Hill placed her as the closing act. Prince, who makes a rare guest appearance on the new album, has been a supporter since Monáe's debut Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) EP in 2007: After her first show in L.A., he circled the venue in his car and asked her to hop in when she came outside. Monáe is someone who inspires this kind of loyalty from fellow artists. Especially fellow secret-headquarters types: In June, Star Wars mastermind George Lucas flew Monáe out to his Skywalker Ranch in California to give an intimate performance on the property.
But even with untouchable power players in her corner, Monáe's position in the music industry at the moment is a curious one. On one hand, she’s got Prince making the case that she should be on stage at the biggest annual televised celebration of black music. On the other hand, she kind of needs Prince to make the case that she should be on stage at the biggest annual televised celebration of black music. It is sometimes easier to like the idea of her—a whirling, twirling, fantastical funk robot in a tux, a firecracker of a live performer, a young woman who runs her own tight creative ship—than it is to forge a natural connection with her music and persona. With The Electric Lady, she has a chance to change that.
Before the rehearsals, Monáe and company are sitting around with iPads in Wondaland's basement recording studio, reeling off a whirlwind of tasks. (Someone has what looks like a Gmail account pulled up on a large computer monitor, but there’s a “W” where the “G” should be. The team uses WondaMail.) Most of the effort is currently going into the editing of a minute-and-a half promotional teaser for The Electric Lady. They fiddle with the length of the clip in increments of seconds.
“It’s too long! Don’t give all that away, they need to wait until the album,” Monáe protests, in reference to a new track being used in the background of the teaser, which pictures her perched on a couch, explaining the concept of the new album: “The Electric Lady was inspired by paintings. Every night I would perform, I would paint on a canvas while I would sing… this image of a female body, a silhouette, every single night.” The soliloquy sounds familiar—the night before, she’d stood in the middle of the party and addressed her friends with the same speech, but with an extra little nugget of information. “I came up with the title in therapy, actually,” she blurted out, seemingly by accident.
Therapy, she tells me, has become an important part of her life since the release of her debut album, 2010's The ArchAndroid. “It was like I had a computer virus in my brain and it needed to be fixed,” she says.
“I didn’t like the idea of therapy at first,” she continues. “In the black community, nobody goes to therapy. You go to your pastor or you go to the Bible. There’s a stigma.” Monáe, who grew up in a devout Christian family, still says grace before meals. “But I think God blesses us with brains to find medicine, to find cures, and I don’t believe in not using that. Therapists are there to listen.” She also talks about grappling with a split from a boyfriend in between albums, offering a rare revelation about her love life (she’s been known to tell interviewers that she dates cyborgs). “I really wanted to grow into this person who could handle everything,” she says, “and I didn’t know that that’s just kind of impossible.”
Sometimes the struggle to regulate her own controlling impulses can wind up breeding different sorts of controlling impulses. At the teaser meeting, and at other points during our time together, she's constantly walking that line. After a long deliberation over the length of the video, the crew decides to split the difference. “Let’s move on,” Monáe concedes. She’s perched quietly in the corner, slouched over her white iPhone 5 with furrowed brows, appearing distracted but piping up decisively at key moments to offer the final word on the topics at hand.
Later on, Chuck and Nate lead me into a small guest room to screen a rough cut of the video for the slyly doomsaying single “Dance Apocalyptic”, which finds Monáe shedding her standard tuxedo getup for an all-white ensemble and loose hair. There are a couple of stray wine glasses in the room, and the bed is unmade. Monáe, they confess, might be upset if she knew I was in here—she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see the mess.A vampire-fanged truck driver is accused of cruising across the country for months at a time while he had girls kept as sex slaves stashed in his semitrailer -- a vehicle he called the “Twilight Express.”
Timothy Jay Vafeades would allegedly file down the girls’ teeth to change their appearances as well as physically and sexually abuse them. Authorities also reportedly found hard drives in Vafeades' truck containing hundreds of photos and videos of child pornography.
According to his arrest warrant, the 54-year-old brought a 19-year-old female relative to work with him on his truck in May 2013 and forced her to stay with him for six months.
While they made their way through states including Texas, Tennessee, Washington and Nevada, Vafeades allegedly forced the girl to have sex with him more than 100 times.
When he was arrested in Minnesota on Nov. 26, a second woman came forward and told law enforcement officials she had been forced to stay in Vafeades’ truck against her will.
He is so far charged with kidnapping, transportation for illegal sexual activity and possession of child pornography. Vafeades appeared in court North Dakota on Wednesday and will shortly be on his way to Utah for another court appearance. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in jail.
[Salt Lake Tribune] [Orlando Sentinel]In Cue & A, music supervisors guide us through the record collections of our favorite television shows.
Since the dissolution of his excellent post-hardcore band Shudder To Think, Craig Wedren—the songwriter-composer for Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp—has primarily focused on creating original songs and score for film and television, including work on Hung, United States Of Tara, and Don’t Trust The B—— In Apartment 23. His film credits include the original Wet Hot American Summer, for which he wrote the soaring rock anthem “Higher And Higher,” making him a shoo-in for the eight-part prequel series. Creators Michael Showalter and David Wain needed a jukebox worth of pop music for their ’80s-set camp movie spoof, but with a pinched music licensing budget, Wedren opted to write and record 30 period-specific originals with a team that included composer Jefferson Friedman. The interview covers the music from the entire TV series, and it discusses major plot points in detail.
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The A.V. Club: You’ve been working with David Wain and Michael Showalter for some time now. What’s your standard protocol for working with them?
Craig Wedren: At this point I’ve been making things with David since we were 2 years old, and we’ve been professionally making things together since our early 20s. I’ve been working with Showalter and David since our late teens. So at this point, it’s almost psychic. They’ll give me ideas and we’ll talk about them, or maybe we won’t. They’ll give me a name, a color, a reference… there’s really no set, formal way we work. But in the case of the Wet Hot series, I don’t remember if it started with a conversation or it started with scripts, but I would imagine it was scripts. So it was very clear from those where they needed on-camera music.
AVC: Is the scoring for the series all new, or did you recycle part of the score from the film?
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CW: We knew we wanted to use some score and some of the songs from the original movie. I knew that I wanted my team—this was very much a team effort because it’s such a massive amount of very varied music in such a short amount of time, so it was all hands on deck. We knew we wanted to use some of the original score. We wanted there to be new score that had the feel of the original score, and in certain instances, like the Gene/Jonas (Christopher Meloni) scenes, we incorporated bits of the original score. But we knew we were going to need whole new worlds like with The Falcon (Jon Hamm) and a lot of the action stuff in the show that was something completely different.
AVC: Did you do anything to prepare?
CW: I put together a Spotify playlist way at the beginning of the creative process, as soon as I read the scripts. I was thinking back to all of the cassettes we used to listen to at camp. David and I went to a Jewish summer camp in Maine from 1980 through 1985, so that’s very much in our DNA. Everything you see in the show is the truth filtered through this kind of absurdist, surrealist, ridiculous sensibility. So I put together a Spotify playlist of things that were really popular at the time, like Queen or The Cars or Blondie. But there was also this sort of smoosh of hard rock, heavy metal, new wave, and top 40 music that was happening right around then. People hadn’t quite defined their territory so it was this kind of awkward in between moment. It was before MTV started, but after punk, and before new wave had become pop music.
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I put everything I could remember and everything I could think of. A lot of those songs wound up being temped into the rough cuts of the show, and the ones that were really working became templates for songs that me and my team worked out. It was a very fun, very natural flow. In the same way that Stripes, or Meatballs, or The Jerk is in our DNA in terms of comic sensibility, the first Pretenders record or “Fox On The Run” by The Sweet is in our DNA too.
The song: “Brass Muscles”
The scene: The characters and conflicts of Camp Firewood are reintroduced and a potent new threat emerges in a musical montage that closes the first episode and features Garbage’s Shirley Manson in a pitch-perfect tribute to The Pretenders.
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AVC: Was this consciously intended to be Pretenders homage?
CW: Absolutely. The first two Pretenders records, before half the band died, and to a certain extent the third one, Learning To Crawl, were the most influential, inspiring music to David and I. The Pretenders were me and David’s favorite band, and I’d still put early Pretenders in my top five bands ever. So it was a very conscious tribute to the Pretenders as well as Nick Lowe, who produced a lot of those Stiff Records. I loved Stiff Records and thought about Stiff a lot while writing songs and score for the series because I love the production on those records and that in between moment before things had kind of found their glossy-mag identities. So it was pub rock from the early and mid-’70s in England combining with punk rock or new wave, and Nick Lowe is the king of those things. He’s a truly great songwriter on par with Elvis Costello, but he was more of a producer and a behind-the-scenes writer. So I was thinking about all of those things for “Brass Muscles.”
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AVC: How did Shirley Manson get involved?
CW: I sang the demo, but I knew I wanted a female voice. Shirley happens to live up the street from me, and my kid goes to school with Butch Vig’s kid. Butch, his wife, and I have been friends since the ’90s. I didn’t know Shirley, but I know her husband [record producer Billy Bush] and Butch, and they all play music together. I said to Butch one day—literally in the courtyard of primary school—“Do you think Shirley would be into doing this?” She has this kind of tough public persona, so I thought she would be perfect. I thought she would either be really into it, or say, “Get away from me with your dumb knockoff stuff.” He said, “Oh my God, she’ll be so psyched. Give her a call.”
I called her, she and her husband came over and we had the best time. She knocked it out of the park. She’s one of the foremost Pretenders fans in the world and is friends with Chrissie Hynde. I was a little worried when I started writing these songs because I took great care to make sure they were distinct, excellent, well-crafted songs that stood on their own. I didn’t want any knockoffs. There was no reason to spend time doing knockoffs of songs that already exist. But I think there’s something wonderful, when it’s appropriate, to pay tribute to your heroes in an overt way. I’m not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. “Down In The Subway” is a Gary Numan tribute and “Brass Muscles” is The Pretenders. I was a little worried like, “I hope people take this as it was intended,” which is why it was even important to make the songs strong on their own, so if you sat down and played any one of those songs on a guitar, you wouldn’t make the connection to it being a Pretenders song or a Gary Numan song.
The song: Donnie Iris, “Ah! Leah!”
The scene: Undercover rock journalist Lindsay (Elizabeth Banks) from Rock & Roll World magazine arrives at Camp Firewood to get the real story of “what the kids are doing when the parents aren’t around.”
CW: That was one of David’s and my favorite songs growing up. We lived in Cleveland, Ohio and it was very popular there when we were about 12. I think it might have just been a regional hit. I’m not sure if it was huge anywhere else. But it’s one of those songs I’ve been wanting to place in a movie or TV show forever because I’ve never heard it. It feels like there are fewer and fewer stones unturned in terms of great pop songs to license that haven’t been done to death, and that’s one of them. When we put it over Lindsay’s entrance, it was just gangbusters. It was perfect, so that became a top priority.
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The song: Baby, “Until Summer”
The scene: As Beth (Janeane Garofalo) and Greg (Jason Schwartzman) are escaping the murderous Falcon, “Until Summer” plays when the episode smash cuts to the closing credits.
AVC: You recorded this song with your band Baby years ago. What made you decide to reuse it here?
CW: We had to make this TV show extraordinarily fast, and we hadn’t totally figured out if there was going to be a thematic concept for end credits until the third episode, maybe, and we were sort of trying to relate all of the end theme songs with something that has happened either musically or thematically in the episode. That’s why in the “Auditions” episode you get everybody auditioning with “Heart Attack Love,” and then you get the “radio” version in the end credits. So we were rushing so fast to write all this music that we hadn’t even really thought about end credits, and when we were mixing the second one, we were like, “Oh crap, we need an end credits song.”
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I had included “Until Summer” in the Spotify playlist I put together. Production-wise, it’s certainly not of the era. But melodically and feeling-wise, it draws from that moment in all of our lives. It’s got some Blondie and some New Order and some The Cars in there. I thought it was a good chorus and bridge, and it’s a song that never really saw the light of day. I threw it up against the picture and it worked, so we went with it. In a subsequent episode we sort of dialed in the end theme concepts a little bit more, but I was happy that song got grandfathered in.
The song: “Turn It Up (Easy Love)”
The scene: J.J. (Zak Orth) tells Lindsay the mysterious tale of Eric (Chris Pine), Camp Firewood’s guitar god and the lead singer of The Rockin’ Knights Of Summer. In a flashback, the Rockin’ Knights strike a chord with “Turn It Up,” but when they attempt to follow it up, Eric’s perfectionist tendencies lead to a band split and a nervous breakdown.
AVC: How did you approach the creation of an Eric song that would represent how his songs sounded prior to “Higher And Higher?”
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CW: My friend Isaac Carpenter, who is a great drummer, was over that day. He actually had a hand in writing “I Am A Wolf, You Are The Moon.” David and I had been talking about The Rockin’ Knights Of Summer, which is the name of a real band David had with the original guitar player for my first band in 7th grade, which was called The Immoral Minority. The Immoral Minority had two original songs. One was called “Something Girl,” and the other one was called “Code Red.”
“Code Red,” the riff went [Hums the riff.], and I thought it would be so great if we could find a tape of “Code Red” and use it as Eric’s pre-”Higher And Higher” song. We had made a recording of “Code Red” in David’s basement when we were like 13 years old. We couldn’t find any original recordings, but that was the starting point. So it was like “Code Red,” mixed with this band Rainbow. It’s like that weird sort of awkward top 40/heavy metal moment with a little bit of early Def Leppard thrown in. Like “Let It Go” from High ’N’ Dry, which was their pre-Pyromania record. Even though that’s technically later than the era Eric would have been in the band, we were just like whatever. Isaac and I banged it out in an hour.
The song: “Heart Attack Love”
The scene: After a series of underwhelming auditions, Katie (Marguerite Moreau) blows everyone away with her rendition of this pop-rock kiss-off, landing her the female lead in the Electro-City musical.
CW: Everybody’s singing this in the audition sequence, so the conversation was “What is this song? Something that was popular in the past year—late 1980 or early 1981—that all the kids would know.” So Jefferson and I wrote “Heart Attack Love,” which is a very Pat Benatar, Kim Carnes, Meat Loaf kind of thing, which is what we were all listening to when we were 11 or 12 years old.
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AVC: Who contributed the vocal?
CW: Amy Miles, who is one of my best friends. We were in Baby years ago, and I produced one of her records. We met on the set of the original Wet Hot film because she was married to A.D. Miles (who plays Gary in the series) at the time, and we became great friends and got to make music together. Jefferson and I wrote “Heart Attack Love,” and originally Marguerite sang it on camera and she was great. She’s got a really, really great voice. But we knew we had to have a little more of that radio rock sound. So I called Amy who just kills at that kind of stuff. She’s so good. She did this Pat Benatar vocal and just knocked it out while she was feeding her 3-year-old.
AVC: So many of those ’80s anthems have the word “heart” in them. Did you think about the lyrical tropes of the era when you were working on these songs?
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CW: It depended on the song, but I was generally just thinking about the era. And because it’s so much part of my musical DNA and my first impressions of music, it was just there already. I was precocious musically, so from about age 5 to age 17, everything was absorbed and became a part of the stuff I would do later. Something like “heart attack love,” it means something but doesn’t mean anything. A lot of the lyrics Ric Ocasek wrote for The Cars are kind of meaningless and free-associative but they feel right for the song. But I’m also referring back to Marc Bolan & T. Rex glam lyrics, which also normally say nothing but feel so right for the song. “Heart Attack Love” came fairly easily and it was a joy when it popped out.
The song: “Champagne Eyes”
The scene: Super-slacker Andy (Paul Rudd) plays an original song in his audition for Electro-City, the musical Andy hopes will grant him the chance to woo Katie away from her boyfriend, Camp Tiger Claw snob Blake (Josh Charles).
CW: Michael’s note was that he wanted it to be like that song “The Piano Has Been Drinking” by Tom Waits, which is this early Tom Waits song that sounds kind of like he wrote it on absinthe. The lyrics twist and turn and they’re a little bit surreal, and Michael wanted our song to sound like that. He wanted it to feel like Andy might be making it up on the spot, or might have written it five minutes before, or it might be that Andy turns out to the cool guy who is secretly a poet.
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AVC: That note gave you a very specific, narrow target. How did you approach that?
CW: I was in Hawaii over Christmas vacation, and I was pissed that I had to write all these songs for Wet Hot, even though I totally wanted to write them, but what I wanted more was a nice vacation with my family. There was a nice rainstorm and everybody was out, and I was just sitting there feeling kind of mopey on the porch. The rain was dripping down and that just kind of popped out. I don’t know, I mean that’s what I do. It’s kind of like an acting job. When people hire me to compose score or songs for something, I have to put on the mask and say “Who is this character?” Having said that, writing surrealist, absurd lyrics with a lot of melody is kind of my thing, what I did with my original band, Shudder To Think. So that was certainly not the hardest or newest assignment. It was like an old, warm leather sofa. It was like, “Oh, this is nice, I remember how to do this.”
“Electro/City” (episode six)
The songs: “Zoot Suit” and the music of Electro-City
The scenes: After hours of painstaking rehearsal, Camp Firewood’s premieres its production of the smash Broadway pop musical about legal injustice in a cruel place to live. Andy and Katie grow closer, as do Ben (Bradley Cooper) and McKinley (Michael Ian Black), who realize their love for each other after their number, “Zoot Suit.”
AVC: Did you create the Electro-City songs from scratch or was that a hands-on collaboration with David and Michael?
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CW: They had some of the lyrics written into the script, and I would develop them, edit them, or just leave them as is because in certain cases they were perfect. Then Jefferson and I would write the music for them.
AVC: How much of the “Zoot Suit” lyric did you write?
I think the original script had “Zoot suit / Zoot suit / Z-O-O-T / S-U-I-T,” and then I wrote all those other lyrics. David and Showalter wrote the shape, and I filled in the lyrics, then Jefferson and I wrote the music for it.
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AVC: You talked about “putting on the mask” when you’re writing. Was the musical mask the most difficult to wear?
CW: I don’t know if it was the most difficult, because it actually came fairly easily, but the musical stuff was definitely new territory for Jefferson and me. Electro-City is a pop musical, like a 1980s Starlight Express or Xanadu, but it was still new. It took a little bit of taking apart the watch, listening to different musicals and figuring out the rules. Musicals do stuff compositionally and lyrically that are totally forbidden in pop music or anything that was ever considered “cool.” So it’s more like progressive rock or art rock mixed with opera, in a way. You can do crazy hairpin turns in style, tempo, modulation, and lyrical content depending on what the scene calls for. In a way, it’s like a hybrid of pop music writing and film scoring. Depending on the scene, you can make what would be considered crazy choices in a pop song. That was flexing a new muscle. And also the fact that it was limited to these short, in some cases snippets of material, there wasn’t the burden of having to create two hours’ worth of it.
The song: REO Speedwagon, “Keep On Loving You”
The scene: Andy and Katie bring the house down when their characters kiss after a crucial moment in the Electro-City climax, and they realize they might not be acting after all.
AVC: Of the temp songs used, why did this one have to stay given the limited licensing budget?
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CW: For me, the best Wet Hot moments and one of the things that distinguishes Wet Hot from other absurdist, modern comedies is that it achieves this combination of being ridiculous, hilarious, and making you cry at the same time. They temped in “Keep On Loving You,” and when we watched it, it was one of those moments where everyone in the room gasped for breath. There wasn’t time for me to try beating “Keep On Loving You.” It was perfect, so we had to find the money for it.
“Staff Party” (episode seven)
The song: “I Am A Wolf, You Are The Moon”
The scene: Andy leads the Camp Firewood counselors in a rousing sing-along.
CW: I knew they needed an acoustic sing-along song all the kids would know. I had started working on this song that wasn’t finished, but that sort of wouldn’t let me go. It just kept popping back into my head. When I read that scene, I thought about it. A lot of times that’s what it takes. There’s always music and ideas floating around that need the right-shaped hole to adapt itself to. So this scene wound up being the right hole for the spirit of “I Am A Wolf,” though I could never exactly figure out what the source material would be. It’s not obviously a Cat Stevens kind of song or a James Taylor kind of song, but having gone to camp in the ’80s, there was still this ’60s and ’70s folk thing happening where everybody knew all the same songs. “You’ve Got A Friend,” “Leaving On A Jet Plane,” that kind of stuff.
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So I finished the song and sent it out as a possibility and everybody just really responded to it overwhelmingly. It’s got that sort of bittersweet youth anthem thing. That was kind of why it made so much sense to me, this idea of wanting the world and wanting it now. It kind of works from the vantage point of being young, but also through the looking-glass of us at age 46 reflecting back on being young. Everyone loved it and I didn’t question it until it was time to record it for the end credits, like we did with “Heart Attack Love,” but I couldn’t figure out what the studio version would sound like. I knew it should be a late ’60s, early ’70s thing, which we hadn’t done yet. Jherek Bischoff, who is a member of my team, suggested a kind of Simon And Garfunkel, sort of Roy Orbison thing. I don’t know if that was quite the right choice, but I love it, and it made sense to me as something these kids might know from their parents’ record collections. We talked about these things a lot because we wanted the music to make sense.
AVC: Yeah, that comes through. Before I knew they were originals I tried to Shazam a few of the songs and came up short.
CW: That makes me really happy. That was one of the first things I started hearing. People were tweeting that their Shazam wasn’t working on the songs and they wanted to know where to get them. My first reaction was like, “Yes! It’s totally working.” My second reaction was like, “Oh shit, people will never know me and my friends did all these songs.” [Laughs.]
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“Day Is Done” (Episode eight)
The song: “Let’s Rock”
The scene: Blake, furious after Katie stands him up at the Camp Tiger Claw formal, leads an angry mob to Camp Firewood to find Andy and his crew all too eager to rumble.
AVC: This was a moment that clearly needed a specific type of song.
CW: Yeah, definitely. Originally they had temped in “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy” by Bad Company, so we knew that was going to be a song moment. And I knew I wanted the score to flow seamlessly into it, so it would be like a rock opera moment. I personally did not think “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy” was enhancing the scene enough to push for it as one of the important songs to license. I thought I could beat it—not as a song, but as a dramatic moment. Jefferson and I were sitting around with another member of my team, Matt Novack, who is the composer for Childrens Hospital. We were writing that whole huge climax section, which is wall-to-wall score and pretty big orchestral score surrounding “Let’s Rock” and “Higher And Higher” in the finale. We knew we wanted it to be this big rock opera moment.
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If I knew a moment wanted a song, but I didn’t know what it wanted, I would just click play on whatever song popped into my mind on Spotify or iTunes. So I played “We Will Rock You,” which obviously worked because it’s “We Will Rock You.” I played “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac, which worked really well in a totally different way. I wanted to capture this sort of dread in it. I didn’t want it to be, like, a triumphant anthem. “We Will Rock You” and “Tusk,” they’re songs that were scary to me as a kid, but also totally anthemic and they transcend the era in which they were made. I wanted the song to have the word “rock” in it, like so many of those classic rock-anthem songs. Lyrically we hadn’t done that yet, and it seemed very era-appropriate. Jefferson had this chord progression he was working on, but he was frustrated with it, so I took the parts he thought were good and started from there. It has my favorite lyric from the Wet Hot songs, which is “School’s through / What you wanna do / Let’s rock,” and the next line is “Kids rule / Ridin’ with the deuce / Let’s rock.”
AVC: That’s awesome.
CW: I love it. “Ridin’ with the deuce” is, to me, the perfect Wet Hot lyric, because it sounds exactly correct for that moment, and it makes absolutely no sense. I might get “Ridin’ with the deuce” |
look at us'
According to CAIR, Trump and Huckabee are among more than a dozen presidential hopefuls for the 2016 elections who have employed Islamophobic rhetoric during their campaigns.
While only 1,500 Syrians have been resettled in the US to date, the Obama administration announced earlier this year that 10,000 more will be accepted throughout a one-year span.
Speaking of the governors' declarations, Human Rights Watch said Syrian refugees were being used as a "scapegoat".
"Resettled refugees from Syria have fled persecution and violence, and undergone rigorous security screening by the US government," Alison Parker, codirector of HRW's US programme, said in a statement.
"The governors' announcements amount to fearmongering attempts to block Syrians from joining the generous religious groups and communities who step forward to welcome them."
Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_I actually bought Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life book last year when it was published, but I didn't get around to reading it until I bought an extra copy for my brother at Matthew's book signing on the Upper West Side just a few days ago. It was an awesome time, and Matthew is even cooler in person than he is in his in his column, podcasts, on television, etc.
But what you're really here for is a John Maine story. There are a lot of fun stories in Fantasy Life, but the one about Maine should be especially amusing to Mets fans who suffered through the bitter end of the 2007 season.
On September 29 of that year, the Mets had lost five games in a row and were one game behind the Phillies for first place in the National League East. Although it seemed like the decimation of the Mets was complete, they still had two more days to catch the Phillies and save their season.
What happened next was incredible. Maine pitched the game of his life, striking out 14 Marlins and walking just a pair in 7⅔ innings. He had a no-hitter going with two out in the eighth inning, but Florida catcher Paul Hoover rolled a weak ground ball down the third-base line for an infield single. The Phillies lost to Washington that day to create a tie for first in the division, and the Mets controlled their own destiny again.
Was the outstanding pitching all Maine's doing, though? According to Fantasy Life, the Mets may have had some help from an unlikely ally that day. Berry relays a story about a fellow fantasy baseball player, "Zac," who was working for the Marlins that season.
The night in question was Friday, September 28, 2007 and all Zac need for his title was one last great starting pitching performance along with a win. From John Maine of the Mets. Who was pitching the next afternoon at 1:00 PM versus the Marlins. It was against this backdrop that Zac and his buddy arrived that Friday night at a bar with some of the team and shared a drink with a few Marlins players. And after they all hoisted a few, an interesting, if not exactly kosher, idea occurred to Zac. "All we need to do is get a few more of them drunk and my boy Maine should cruise through the lineup." Fast-forward to midnight that night. "Some front-office staff, a lot of players, a couple of female sales interns, and myself meet up at a trendy bar called Whiskey Park. Drinks were flowing. The bullpen was buying... but I was buying more to make sure they got extra rowdy."
Back at the hotel room...
"We proceeded to play 'Mexican Shotgun,' which was a game I made up on the spot. It consisted of shotgunning a beer and chasing it with tequila... The next morning I felt like shit, but I also felt confident in unleashing Maine as my last starter to grab a title. I also called all my compulsive gambler friends and let them know that the Mets' money line was the play of the century."
The rest, as we know, is history. Maine defeated the apparently hungover Marlins to give Mets fans hope that the 2007 season wouldn't be a total bust. Even if this story is of questionable authenticity, I'm still disappointed (but not devastated!) that "Zac" couldn't find it in himself to go out one more night for some drinks with the team. Tom Glavine could have used some help on September 30.EU minister photographed during vote-counting: CHP official
ANTALYA - Doğan News Agency
CHP’s Antalya provincial office, shared the photograph showing Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu during the vote count with journalists at the Antalya courthouse. DHA Photo
Turkey’s EU Minister and Chief Negotiator Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu was photographed alongside a police chief and election official counting votes after the March 30 local elections, an official from the main opposition official Republican People’s Party (CHP) said April 1.Devrim Kök, the head of the CHP’s Antalya provincial office, shared the photograph with journalists at the Antalya courthouse, after both his party and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) filed official complaints regarding the controversial vote counting in Antalya.“Is it ethical that there is a minister here? We can’t crack the secret of a minister who comes to the courthouse and stands over the votes during counting,” Kök said, adding that “the CHP has lost the election on the table after winning it in the ballot box.”He claimed that what happened after the local polls in Ankara went beyond “simple irregularities.” “But we won’t permit it. We believe in justice. We filed our complaints and they’ll respond in 48 hours. We’re sure that we will be ahead after the recount,” he added.Join us on Friday, July 22nd at 8 pm as we travel from bar to bar across the land, searching far and wide to become elite trainers and gym owners. Will you take the challenge? Who will prevail? #RochesterGo
Catch a buzz while catching them all!
*Attendees must be 21 or older*
Check-in starts at 6:30 pm
The base cost for everyone who wants to attend will be $20.
This fee will include the following:
- Drink discounts and access to special Pokemon themed drinks at all nine bars along the crawl
- Cover charges for every bar on the crawl (when required)
- Entry into our Gym Battle contest (three gyms throughout the night, more info on the way soon)
- Entry into giveaways at each of the nine bars
- Complimentary lures at each Pokestop along the route
- Entry into a final surprise giveaway at the end of the night
We are currently working to acquire Mystic, Instinct, and Valor t-shirts for the bar crawl as well, which will be available for $5 on top of the $20 entry fee.
Make sure you follow our Facebook event here so that you always have up-to-date information.
For those just wanting to tag along and catch some Pokemon, the bar crawl is free, you just won't have access to any of the awesome stuff mentioned above (except the lures, those are for everyone!).
*Free attendees must still be 21 or over.
*All sales are final. Due to the staffing needs of bars and overhead we cannot offer refunds. We apologize for the inconvenience and we appreciate your understanding.
To catch them all is our real test, to train them is our cause...Until recently, 10-year-old Danny Franklin lived a normal life. He liked playing soccer, hanging out with his friends, and reading comic books. But then something happened that changed everything. He hasn’t been diagnosed with any sort of terminal disease yet, but Chris Pratt has been standing outside of his room for three days straight.
Well, that can’t be good.
Danny is the biggest Guardians Of The Galaxy fan you’ll ever meet. His room is filled with figurines of all the characters, and he’s seen the movie countless times. So when Chris Pratt showed up outside of his window three days ago dressed as Star-Lord, it really seemed like his days were probably numbered. Danny might feel healthy enough to run around and play with his friends for now, but let’s face it—Chris Pratt brought him a bunch of awesome Guardians Of The Galaxy merchandise and even deputized him co-captain of The Milano, his character’s spaceship in the movie.
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This does not bode well for Danny.
Although by all accounts the 10-year-old superfan hasn’t displayed any symptoms of an illness, it’s hard to be optimistic about his future when you consider that Chris Pratt took time out of his busy schedule just to pay him a visit. And we’re not talking about a quick little photo op. Pratt is giving Danny the full Star-Lord experience, standing outside his window and staring at him night and day, occasionally nodding. Even more damning? The big-hearted movie star told Danny the ending of the new Guardians Of The Galaxy movie, which has a release date of May 2017.
That’s less than a year away.
Wow, what a truly amazing story of a movie star spending time with one of his biggest fans. Chris Pratt is officially the nicest guy in the world, and this kid is a fucking goner.Eleanor Roosevelt's pistol permit application. (Photo: Courtesy/FDR Presidential Library)
First lady. Icon of liberalism. Gun owner?
Yes, Eleanor Roosevelt, known for traveling the country to highlight the plight of the poor and marginalized, also was packing heat.
The mother of five had a.22 caliber Smith & Wesson pistol with a 6-inch barrel, front sight and a round top frame with an adjustable rear sight.
Her application for a pistol permit in Dutchess County was added in June to the extensive materials on Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park.
Bob Clark, acting director of the library and museum, said the pistol permit application is extremely important from a historical perspective.
“This is an example of a record that is out there — it was intended for an administrative purpose, but it has long-term, historical implications,” Clark said. “It’s very important that it has a permanent home here at the library.”
With debate raging in New York and around the nation about gun control and Second Amendment rights, the fact that one of the greats of the Democratic Party not only owned a gun, but carried it for protection, may seem hard to believe, but it was a different time, some say. Eleanor Roosevelt received death threats and her husband, Franklin Roosevelt, had survived an assassination attempt in Miami while awaiting his first presidential inauguration.
The Roosevelts had been in the political spotlight for years. For example, FDR was governor of New York from 1928-32. But the spotlight would only get brighter. Franklin Roosevelt had won his first presidential election in 1932 and he would win three more terms as president.
That assassination attempt in February 1933 prompted FDR to suggest to his wife that she let the Secret Service protect her. She declined.
According to Clark, Eleanor Roosevelt did not like to have a large entourage and preferred to travel alone.
But in October 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt received a gift or her 49th birthday from her bodyguard, Earl Miller.
“Her bodyguard, Earl Miller, wanted to teach her how to shoot a gun so she would have that skill, if necessary,” Clark said. “He worked with her to show her the proper way to shoot a pistol and that was really the beginning of Mrs. Roosevelt’s interest with handguns.”
According to James D. Julia Auctioneers in Maine, Eleanor Roosevelt’s pistol was sold at auction in October 2014 to a private collector for $50,600.
“I think it's fascinating,” said Jeremy Levenbach, 33, of Brooklyn, who on Friday visited the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park.
Political divide
Eleanor Roosevelt is considered a 20th century icon of the Democratic Party and someone whose liberal politics established an enduring benchmark that continues to shape politics today. The fact that she owned a gun offers yet another dimension to the historic legacy of a president and first lady who were based in Dutchess County but shaped national and global events.
Viewed from the perspective of 21st century politics, where Republicans and Democrats largely have lined up on opposing sides of the gun control debate, Eleanor Roosevelt’s pistol offers a fresh take on the ongoing debate over the rights of gun owners, the Democrats who want to curtail them and the Republicans who want to expand them.
“I think that having an icon in the political arena and, truly, someone who was a world leader, having a true understanding of what your Second Amendment rights are, as an American, is just incredibly enlightening,” said Mike McCormack, chairman of the Dutchess County Republican Committee. “She got it.”
Dutchess County Democratic Committee Chairwoman Elisa Sumner had a very different opinion.
“I don’t think you can compare what she did in 1957 with 2015,” Sumner said. “At the time, you weren’t having mass shootings. You didn’t have Sandy Hook (elementary school shootings). You didn’t have people walking around with semi-automatic weapons, Uzis and Kalishnikovs. I don’t think there is a comparison at all. You’re talking about two different time periods.
“She needed protection because of her liberal, civil rights circumstances. She needed protection,” Sumner said.
Levenbach shared Sumner’s opinion.
“I think it was such a different time,” he said.
Eleanor's travels
In 1937, Eleanor Roosevelt traveled to New Orleans and was provided with security, Clark said. She didn’t feel the security was necessary when she traveled in New York or Washington, because people knew who she was.
“She made a comment at that event,” Clark said. “She made an off-handed comment that she sometimes did carry a gun when she traveled and she knew how to use it. She also made the comment, ‘I hate guns.’”
Eleanor Roosevelt carried the unloaded gun in the locked glove compartment of her car.
Clark said the story picks up again in 1957. That’s the year Eleanor Roosevelt applied for and received a pistol permit in Dutchess County. She was 72.
The permit was among the items in Eleanor Roosevelt’s wallet when she died on Nov. 7, 1962. The date on the pistol permit was Aug. 5, 1957. Her address on the permit is listed as “ValKill Cottage, Hyde Park.” Her occupation is listed as “Writer & Lecturer.” She wrote that she was employed by “Self.” The permit is on display at the library.
Dutchess County Clerk Brad Kendall, 51 years after the permit was issued, was attending the annual meeting of the New York State Association of County Clerks. As was customary, a representative of the state police addressed those gathered. In 2008, the discussion turned to pistol permits and how the deaths of permit holders can make the the accuracy of the state’s database difficult to maintain.
The speaker, as an example, cited how Eleanor Roosevelt’s pistol permit, in 2008, remained active.
Kendall returned home and found the application.
“Sure enough, we had it,” he said. “It had never been noted she was deceased. Technically, it was still active.”
Eleanor Roosevelt’s pistol application indicated that she had previously been granted a pistol license in 1933. No further information was available.
But along with the application Kendall found was a document with Eleanor Roosevelt’s fingerprints.
Eleanor Roosevelt's fingerprints, from her 1957 pistol application. (Photo: Courtesy/FDR Presidential Library)
The application had been processed by the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office and signed by then-Sheriff C. Fred Close. It included a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt wearing a hat, fur stole and double strand of pearls. The reason for the pistol, according to Eleanor Roosevelt’s application, was “protection.”
Clark said the timing of the pistol permit coincided with Eleanor Roosevelt’s travels throughout the South — by herself — in advocacy of civil rights. Those trips prompted death threats.
The photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt that accompanied her 1957 pistol permit application. (Photo: Courtesy photo/FDR Presidential Library)
After the application was discovered at the county clerk’s office, it was returned to long-term storage, Kendall said. Earlier this year, older pistol permits were purged and, after consulting with the county historian and New York State Archives, Kendall turned the application over to the FDR Library.
The formal transfer took place in June during a naturalization ceremony that Kendall conducted at the FDR Library’s Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center. The pistol permit application is not on display, but available for review by researchers.
John W. Barry:jobarry@poughkeepsiejournal.com, 845-437-4822; Twitter: @JohnBarryPoJo
Eleanor Roosevelt
1884: Born
1905: Marries Franklin D. Roosevelt
1962: Dies
The Secret Service and the first lady
1865 - The U.S. Secret Service is created.
1917 – The Secret Service begins protecting the immediate family of a sitting president.
1963 – Congress passes legislation authorizing the Secret Service to protect Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of President John F. Kennedy, and her children, for two years.
1965 – Congress authorizes the Secret Service to protect a former president and his wife, during his lifetime.
1968 – Congress authorizes the Secret Service to protect the widow of a president until her death.
Source: U.S. Secret Service
Did you know
There are roughly 40,000 active pistol permits in Dutchess County, according to the Sheriff’s Office. Dutchess County is home to about 300,000 people.
Eleanor Roosevelt's pistol. (Photo: Courtesy photo/James D. Julia Auctioneers)
Eleanor Roosevelt practicing with her pistol at Chazy Lake, N.Y., in 1934. (Photo: Courtesy photo/FDR Presidential Library)
Read or Share this story: http://pojonews.co/1IUgiCfBookArc allows you to run a full desktop setup with your MacBook. Did you know your MacBook was designed for this? Apple experts suggest utilizing a little-known feature called closed-clamshell mode. Add a large external monitor, extended keyboard, and mouse, for a more comfortable work station. Enjoy a bright 27-inch display for super-sized photo editing, gain a dedicated number keypad and reclaim vital desk real estate with your MacBook upright and tucked out of the way in BookArc.
Using two screens? Just for fun...try one.
Use a dual-screen MacBook setup? Close your MacBook and try working on a single monitor. According to experts, this type of setup increases focus, minimizes workspace clutter and even speeds up display performance by dedicating 100% video memory to a single display. When using BookArc, you have a newfound laser focus on the work before you.For one glorious month, Win Min Htut's wife and kids were free.
After years of physical, verbal and mental abuse, Thida Myint filed for a protection-of-abuse order and the family had one month away from Htut, their daughter wrote in a letter read today in Lehigh County Court.
"I wish that moment could have lasted longer," Wint Thu wrote.
The day the PFA was extended on Dec. 17, Htut killed his wife, shooting her in the head in front of their three children in the street near their Bethlehem home, prosecutors said. Myint was 37.
In court today, Htut pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for killing his wife and he waived his appeal rights, in exchange for prosecutors dropping the death penalty. Htut was sentenced to life behind bars without parole.
Htut, who came to America in 2004 from Myanmar, denied the abuse claims. He broke down in court when he said he came to the United States for "a better life for my family." Htut had only finished ninth grade in Myanmar, the Southeast Asia country also known as Burma. He was a day trader and worked as a sushi chef at Wegmans on Route 512.
"When they got here, I never hurt them. Not physically," Htut said in Burmese, later saying in English he told his wife, "I take care of the business, you take care of the kids."
"That's all I said to her," the 38-year-old Htut said.
Htut claimed "all of this wouldn't have happened" if his wife hadn't "lied" to get the PFA.
"I would never hurt my kids. Ever," Htut said.
The couple's three children were not in the courtroom, but Htut's words drew anger from Myint's sister, who stomped her foot on the floor and yelled at him in Burmese. At one point, Htut, who was in shackles, turned to look at her before sheriff's deputies stopped him.
When Htut was led out of the courtroom, the sister, who is named The The, angled between people in the audience to point her finger at him and yell at him again until family members calmed her down.
"You terrorized your family, you murdered your wife and I don't see here much remorse for your actions," Judge Robert Steinberg told Htut before sentencing him.
A life of abuse
First Assistant District Attorney Steven Luksa said Htut's behavior was the textbook example of domestic violence.
Letters from Htut's eldest daughter, read by Kimberly Silvestri, the county's victim and witness coordinator, detailed a controlling and abusive home life where the family felt like Htut's prisoners.
"I've always wanted to be free from your abuse and oppression but this is not the way I wanted it to go," the 17-year-old Thu's letter began.
The teenage girl said her father was physically, verbally and mentally abusive to the family for years and when the physical abuse stopped, the verbal and mental abuse continued. Htut would call his wife, eldest daughter and son "whore," "retard" or "slut," the girl wrote.
The girl said her mother told her of Htut's previous abuse when the girl was 8 years old.
"I know everything you did," the daughter wrote.
The girl said at one point she helped her mother "escape" in Thailand and Myint's sister said Myint ran to the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok after Htut tried to kill her.
Myint was considering divorce when Htut's father convinced her to move to America with the kids for their education and promised her she could get a divorce, the family said.
Instead, the daughter wrote, Htut and his family tried to isolate Myint from her family in Myanmar. Myint was allowed a phone call with her mother once every few months, and it had to be done on speaker so Htut could listen to the conversation, the family wrote.
"You gave us a home, but in return we couldn't leave," the daughter wrote.
While Htut accused his wife of cheating on him, becoming angry if an unrecognized number was on her cellphone, he cheated on his wife and fathered a child with the other woman, the daughter wrote. The statement drew gasps from people in the courtroom audience.
"Mom didn't deserve this. You didn't deserve her," the girl wrote. "Your sentencing will be closure and I hope I never see you again."
A new chapter
"The commonwealth got everything it wanted," Luksa said of today's plea deal.
The plea helped avoid a trial where the children may have had to testify against their father about their mother's murder, Luksa said. The life sentence keeps Htut away from his kids and the appeals waiver lets them close this chapter of their lives without worrying about new court opinions and hearings, Luksa said.
Luksa said county Children and Youth Services are involved with the children; Htut's parental rights have to be extinguished.
Myint's family came from Myanmar and the kids have tremendous support from family and the community, Luksa said. The eldest daughter became a U.S. citizen and The The promised to fulfill Myint's wishes that her children be educated.
"They have a chance to achieve all the things their mom wanted them to achieve," Luksa said.
Contact lead Lehigh County digital reporter Sarah Cassi at 484-894-0411 or scassi@express-times.com.
Follow @SarahCassi
Like Lehigh County on lehighvalleylive.com on FacebookPep Guardiola has been very successful implementing his style at Manchester City so far, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular: 10 games, 10 wins, most of them featuring amazing football, and a clear sign that Pep Ball does work in England.
It is very easy to get carried away by City's incredible start and think everything is perfect, the team will never lose again and will lift every trophy as long as Guardiola is in charge. Everyone who knows any little thing about football knows this is a lie, and it's impossible to be at your best and win every game.
And Guardiola, one of the guys who know the most about football today, thinks the Citizens actually need a setback, a bad result and a bad performance in order to improve.
"I hear many many things about the coaches just to lose one game but people have to understand we are not going to win absolutely everything, we are going to lose a game. "And losing is necessary to improve, to get better. For the players it’s the same, the players today with the social media, what we try with Raz (Raheem Sterling) and with the other ones is to [make them] feel that we love them. "I would like to be in May with one game left to finish the season, but we are in September. In September you play six games, six games is 18 points, so we have a lot a lot of games to play. Tough, tough games."
While City have looked very good so far under Guardiola, he's only been in charge for under three months, and the Catalan says there are plenty of things to improve on until the team is playing at a level he thinks it's good enough to compete for titles:OG Maco is recovering from some very serious injuries. Though it's still unclear what exactly happened to him, the Quality Control MC posted a pic of himself in the hospital over the weekend (July 23) and gave a status update on the extent of his injuries with a few tweets. Judging from Maco quoting Kanye West's famous lyric, "Thank God I ain't too cool for that safe belt," the incident might have been some type of car accident.
"Multiple skull fractures, broken orbital (surgery next week), cracked vertebrae (surgery next week) and heart palpations. I feel ALIVE!!!," wrote the Atlanta rhymer on Saturday. "On the bright side, my plastic surgeon says I can't get any uglier so fixing my face should be easy," he joked. Maco also had time to post a swollen-eyed selfie from his hospital bed, but then again he's not the first rapper to share one of those.
The line in his tweet, "I feel alive," is a reference to Maco's recently dropped single "Alive" featuring BJ The Chicago Kid. It's pretty stealthy marketing to promote a song while simultaneously updating fans on his condition. Though he's been relatively quiet this year musically, the "U Guessed It" rapper is slated to drop is album, Children of the Rage in the fall and seemed to be gearing up for it. Just hours before this incident, the former XXL Freshman was inviting fans to be extras in his upcoming pool party video shoot.
XXL has reached out to Maco's camp for comment. In the meantime, check out Maco's tweets below.
9 Rappers in the Hospital Over the Years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t972gcqI0IIIt’ll likely be 2016 before another vehicle drives across London’s historic-but-timeworn Blackfriars Bridge.
But after Coun. Judy Bryant successfully pushed another short-term fix, the 138-year-old span will be open again to pedestrians and cyclists within weeks.
Once again closed amid ongoing structural concerns, city staff will start the process of doing an environmental assessment to chart future options — including a full overhaul or tearing it down. That “EA” process will take as long as two years.
Once complete, the repairs (or replacement) it recommends would take another year.
So the beautiful wrought-iron landmark — it’s the logo for London native Paul Haggis’s Hollywood production firm — is closed for the foreseeable future to drivers, though Bryant managed to keep it from closing to all.
Tuesday, she pushed an option that had been rejected by the civic works committee to spend about $250,000 repairing the structure enough that bikes and pedestrians could use it. Council approved that, 12-3.
“This is a very important piece of London,” Coun. Harold Usher said. “We need to keep it open.”
City hall has spent roughly $750,000 over the past decade on short-term fixes for the old bridge, which had its last real structural overhaul in 1950.
It’s possible another overhaul, likely costing a few million dollars, will be recommended once the environmental assessment is done. If so, it’s reasonable Blackfriars could live on for another 60 or 70 years.
But in the meantime, the estimated 1,000 people who walk and cycle across it daily will retain access. Those now driving across it may find a way to park elsewhere, politicians suggested, and go across on foot.
Staff had offered another, costlier option — spending about $400,000 now to allow vehicle traffic during the EA process — but politicians turned that down.
Patrick.maloney@sunmedia.ca
Twitter.com/patatLFPressThere are few things more frustrating than being in the middle of working on a project and realizing that you are missing some crucial component that ties the whole thing together. According to Murphy’s Law, this sort of thing will only happen when parts are completely impossible to procure.
If you’re ever hunting for a touch sensor but can’t get your hands on one, [Alan Chatham’s] tutorial on simple DIY capacitive touch sensors might be just what you need to keep things moving along.
[Alan’s] sensors rely on the conductive properties of graphite, which is easily found in just about any pencil on the market. The sensors are created by simply drawing on a piece of paper with a pencil, then wiring the images or text up to your favorite microcontroller via some paperclips and a couple of resistors.
Paper and pencil might not make for the most durable means of input, but we’re pretty sure that [Alan’s] capacitive touch sensors would be very helpful in a pinch. He doesn’t have video of the sensors in action just yet, though he says he’ll put something together here shortly.“Homo Homini Homo Est“, proclaimed one of the many signs at Krakow’s LGBTQI Equality March (Marsz Równości) Saturday. It could be translated as “Man is man to another man”, or, more aptly tongue-in-cheek, “Man is a homo[sexual] to another man.”
It plays off the ancient, more cynical Latin proverb “Homo homini lupus”: “Man is a wolf to another man.” And many of the thousands of marchers may have felt they were battling wolves yesterday: wolves of the rainy gray May weather, at least, or of the perennial gaggle of black-clad counter-protesters representing a significant percentage of the largely conservative Catholic country. Nevertheless, the atmosphere was friendly, cheerful, and cloaked in a rainbow of color.
In fact, Poland is rare in Europe for having never criminalized homosexuality in its history. In 2017, however, gay and lesbian couples here still lack rights such as civil partnership and adoption, and it is common for them and other sexual and gender minorities in Poland to face everyday discrimination in their lives. [Read more on this.]
Thus, the annual Equality March for, in their words, “everyone who believes in dignity and mutual respect.” The event aims to highlight these issues. promote greater acceptance, and to provide a sense of solidarity for the community.
You can click through our gallery of photos by Giorgi Zautaszwili from this year’s march below, and photos from last year’s here.
—Ed.
UPDATE 15 May:
A reader, Christopher Walker, was kind enough to share some of his photos from the counter-protest.The trend of residents placing surveillance cameras not only outside but inside their houses may pay off for a Sunnyvale homeowner who captured remarkably clear video of two burglars rifling through her home.
KRON-TV got a copy of the video, which purportedly shows the burglars meticulously going through the woman’s bedroom Friday in a home on the 900 block of East Duane Avenue before making off with personal items including clothing and electronics.
After reviewing the video, Sunnyvale police were able to identify the suspects — who remain at large. The woman in the video is 36-year-old Carrisa Barreto, and the man is 34-year-old Fernando Ricardo Angeles, both of Sunnyvale, police said.
Dressed in absurdly cliche ensembles — Barreto in tight black leather, Angeles wearing an Oakland Raiders shirt reading “money takers” — the burglars walk within inches of the camera mid-pillage, revealing their faces in immaculate detail, police said.
On Monday, Sunnyvale police said both suspects are on probation and have active warrants out for their arrests.
The video, though, is only the latest footage to hit the Internet by homeowners who willingly place cameras in their homes, many of which are hooked up to a computer and can be viewed remotely via a cloud-based server.
Last month, a Palo Alto resident’s surveillance system caught two burglars breaking into her home as her pet cats looked on.
The video — a troubling twist on the cat-video sensation — shows one of the woman’s pets watching nervously from the top of a staircase as burglars looted the home and even stole the camera as it was uploading the video.
The Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius had a different kind of run-in with a home surveillance camera. In a September column, he recounted spotting a camera at a Stinson Beach home his family rented though Airbnb for a vacation.
Nevius — who was not fully dressed at the time — noticed the camera after spotting a glowing green light in the home’s kitchen when he got up in the middle of the night for a quaff of OJ.
Follow @evansernoffskyISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 14 -- Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail in southern Afghanistan on Friday after Taliban fighters blew off the gates in a suicide attack that killed several police officers, according to a U.S. military official. Many of those freed were apparently Taliban suspects.
The attack occurred in the evening in the southern city of Kandahar, a longtime stronghold of the Taliban insurgency, when attackers drove an explosives-laden vehicle toward the city jail, according to a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Prisoners breached the walls of the prison when a barrage of rocket and gunfire followed the initial attack.
A prison official at the scene said the bloody skirmish at the jail had left it nearly empty. Soldiers with NATO forces in the region were working with members of the Afghan national police to cordon off the area.
Government officials declared a state of emergency in Kandahar early Saturday.
Officials said that as many as 1,000 prisoners had been housed at the facility. Wali Karzai, president of Kandahar's provincial council, told the Associated Press that about 350 of the prisoners were suspected Taliban fighters.
Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said that "all" the prisoners had escaped but that he did not have a specific number.
"There is no one left," he said.
The prison is under the control of Afghan police, who are badly trained and underpaid, and the Interior Ministry, which is notoriously corrupt. The prison assault is another blow to the performance of the police force, which had lagged far behind the Afghan army in international aid and training despite playing a major role in security, especially in rural areas.
Last month, about 200 Taliban suspects held at the prison ended a week-long hunger strike after a parliamentary delegation promised their cases would be reviewed, the AP said. Some of the protesting prisoners had sewn their mouths shut.
Kandahar was the religious and ethnic birthplace of the Taliban movement, and its fighters have made a strong comeback in the surrounding province in the past two years despite aggressive attempts by U.S., Canadian and British forces to drive them out.
A former defense intelligence analyst this month predicted a Taliban effort to seize Kandahar city as the major urban center in the ethnic Pashtun heartland. The report also cited a growing number of attacks around Kabul, the capital, as signifying efforts to spread the insurgency in and around large cities.
The United States provides about 26,000 of the roughly 54,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan and has the leading combat role in the eastern part of the country, while U.S. Special Operations forces operate in all regions. British, Canadian, Australian and Dutch forces play key combat roles in southern Afghanistan, where violence has surged in the past year, particularly suicide and roadside bombings.Airbnb, which is facing a lawsuit for racial discrimination, removed a host over a year after she was reported for denying a trans woman a room on the platform.
Nurphoto / Getty Images
Shadi Petosky, a trans woman, was denied a room on Airbnb after she informed her would-be host that she is trans. As of today, that host has been removed from the Airbnb platform, BuzzFeed News has learned.
After Petosky told the host in question that she is trans, the host canceled her reservation out of what she described as concern for the discomfort of her teenaged son.
I was denied @Airbnb because I disclosed that I'm trans. Airbnb did nothing. Had I not disclosed I'd be "dishonest"
Petosky says she reported the host via a formal complaint to Airbnb when the incident originally happened, over a year ago, but never heard back from the company. On Monday, Nick Papas, a spokesperson for Airbnb, told BuzzFeed News in an email that "Discrimination has no place in the Airbnb community. We are removing this host from Airbnb." Petosky told BuzzFeed News that she "posted about it now because they've been getting more scrutiny recently," adding that she "had no idea it was going to blow up as much as it did." She has previously spoken out on discriminatory treatment by TSA agents at the airport, said on Twitter that she informs hosts that she is trans out of concern for her own safety.
Ppl don't seem to understand that trans femme people are considered lying monsters who deserve whatever happens to them for tricking folks
Airbnb is a public participant in Pride Month; the company's current pinned tweet on Twitter celebrates the "colorful fingerprints of our community" using the hashtag #HostsWithPride.
Wow rainbow-fied logo and pride month pinned tweet? Weird that Airbnb has no LGBTQ non discrimination policy |
guns highly likely to be used in violence…”
If anything, a gun buyback program would help criminals. You bring your firearm to this event, turn it in with no questions asked, and you receive a gift card or new shoes. That gun could have been stolen, used in a murder or in an armed robbery, and the police just destroyed the evidence. It certainly does not make a lot of sense.
The New Hampshire House of Representatives just shot down a Bill that would have required a background check for every private gun sale. All we have heard from the mainstream media and the Obama Administration is that nearly every American supports Background checks that contain universal registration of gun owners. Then we see a blue state such as New Hampshire pass a bipartisan vote to stop such a law. Once again, it appears their numbers may be just a little misjudged by the Obama camp.
Another state making waves in the gun rights world is Missouri. The Missouri State Senate just advanced a Bill that would make it a crime for any federal, state or local law enforcement office to attempt to enforce federal gun control laws within the state. The law even allows for arresting and fining officers who try to do so. The bill would also lower the carry age from 21 to 19 as well allow open carry anywhere in the state, even in cities which have local bans on the practice.
The Bill needs to pass one more vote in the state Senate, then it would go to a vote in the state House, and if passed would have to be signed into law by the state governor.
It is so reassuring to see our cities and states making such a difference in the fight to protect the Second Amendment. It helps us realize that each and every one of us can make a difference in this fight.
Together, we can preserve the Constitutional rights our Founding Fathers intended our people to have forever.
Thank you. I know I can count on you.
Sincerely yours,
Alan M. Gottlieb
Founder
Second Amendment Foundation
P.S. Remember, the anti-gunners are raising tens of thousands of dollars to steal our rights from us — we need your support now to help stop them dead in their tracks!
To send a check, please mail to:
Second Amendment Foundation
James Madison Building
Dept Code 144
12500 NE 10th Place
Bellevue, WA 98005
The Second Amendment Foundation (www.SAF.org) is the nation's oldest and largest tax-exempt education, research, publishing and legal action group focusing on the Constitutional right and heritage to privately own and possess firearms. Founded in 1974, The Foundation has grown to more than 650,000 members and supporters and conducts many programs designed to better inform the public about the consequences of gun control.
Paid for by Second Amendment Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Contributions are tax deductible. Copyright © 2014 Second Amendment Foundation, All Rights Reserved.
**Image: by Olegvolk.netSurvivor‘s 34th season involves returnees, a list of which was posted online back in April, before finals casting. A significant number of those were winners, and that prompted speculation that the season might be organized with winners versus another group.
reality blurred has confirmed that the planned twist is for will include a tribe of winners—but also two other tribes, making it winners versus jury members versus early boots, people who were voted off the island prior to the merge.
That will make the spring season a competition between three tiers of Survivor players: those who’ve pretty much failed, those who’ve gone all the way, and those who’ve barely made it.
That last tribe was described to me as a kind of Second Chance-ish tribe, though it won’t necessarily be only those who haven’t yet returned to play again. In other words, some people might have a third attempt to make it to the merge.
In March, Martin Holmes posted information at Inside Survivor about season 34, and later posted a list of possible returnees. That information included:
“Filming is scheduled to start at the end of May”
the cast “will be all returning players.”
“[t]he theme was approved by CBS in February,” according to a podcast interview with Jeff Probst
“it is not All Winners, Legends, Second Chance 2 or Heroes vs. Villains 2”
Even though it’s May, the show is still finalizing its cast, I’ve been told, and of course, this structure may change, depending upon what happened in finals casting in April and other variables. Production may also be telling contestants and others that this is the structure to throw them off. I’ll update if and when I receive more information.The two Su-24 attack planes took off from Kaliningrad and skirted the Polish coast before heading north at low altitude towards the Swedish island of Öland in the Baltic Sea, newspaper Expressen reports.
A source told the newspaper several JAS Gripen fighter jets scrambled to intercept the Russian aircraft, which left Swedish airspace when one of the Swedish planes arrived and headed off the encroachment.
The government was informed of the violation, which took place at lunchtime on Wednesday, and has requested the Armed Forces to file a report as a matter of urgency, Expressen said.
The Armed Forces declined to comment on what happened until it has conducted a full analysis.
Expressen's source however said the Armed Forces believed Russia had sent the fighter jets to test how ready Sweden was to respond.
Estonia's president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, noted that the violation occurred while Sweden's outgoing foreign minister, Carl Bildt, was discussing regional security with the country's military.
Just as Swedish military & FM Bildt discuss security in region, 2 Russian jets violate Swedish airspace (in Swedish) http://t.co/a8O3KGYMyK — toomas hendrik ilves (@IlvesToomas) September 18, 2014
SEE ALSO: Russian jets practised attacks on SwedenTo become a TomboyX Pioneer, click "Back this Project" on the right or click directly on any of the available rewards.
Tomboy Exchange is an e-commerce lifestyle brand that creates, curates and cultivates clothing and accessories for women celebrating the tomboy spirit. We create top quality, innovative clothing. We curate retail products that reflect our standards and style. And we cultivate community around the brand.
THE NEED
Traditionally, fashion is designed with an idealized body in mind. We all know that as we get older, no matter how fit you are, your body changes - slightly and not so slightly. But we are still the same on the inside. Clothing is an expression of who we are. It is TomboyX's mission to create clothing that aptly expresses how comfortable and confident we really feel.
OUR ANSWER
We want a streamlined professional look without worrying about exposing ourselves so we've added extra buttons at bust and waistline. We want to accentuate our curves without feeling constricted so we use design lines that highlight them and have bias side panels that move when we do. We want to look sharp but keep our sense of humor and personality with signature pops of color and pattern in every style.
Inside buttons close the gaps and un-confining sleeve width allows freedom of movement.
Our classic has no side seams and we have flipped the fabric on its bias for a more flattering look and comfortable flexibility.
All with fun contrasts that express your personality.
OUR STORY
TomboyX came together a year and a half ago to provide clothing options for a demographic that the fashion industry typically ignores - women who want unique, comfortable clothing that celebrates their tomboy spirit.
OUR TEAM
Combined, our team has over 50 years of clothing design and manufacturing experience, bringing existing relationships into this collaboration - allowing for rapid expansion, less money spent learning the ropes and a ready arsenal of best practices awaiting implementation.
To learn more about our team visit our website at tomboyexchange.com.
OUR PROGRESS
We have 4 styles in our current collection and all of them are ready for production. Fabrics have been chosen, factories and relationships are in place but we need capital to cover the minimum orders for each.
FUNDING
Your support will help us fund the first production runs of our line. We've gotten so much great feedback and are excited to be able to share the TomboyX line with you. Our $75,000 funding goal will cover the extensive production costs associated with meeting factory minimums, fabric purchases, quality control, label production and shipping costs.
OUR PLEDGE LEVELS AND REWARDS
TomboyX Friend: Pledge $10
Every bit of support helps! You'll receive TomboyX updates, share our journey into production and be listed as a Kickstarter founding supporter on our website.
TomboyX hat: Pledge $25
A TomboyX essential. Black with red TomboyX logo ensures it'll match most things in your closet. Made of 100% cotton chino twill with a velcro enclosure at the back for easy adjusting AND looks great with our argyle Polo!
Your pick of TomboyX t-shirts: Pledge $40
1. Our TomboyX navy contrast stitch t-shirt. Super soft with a ribbed collar made from 100% cotton jersey. Wear it on weekends out and about, to the gym or around the house. It'll feel like your favorite old college t-shirt. Unisex fit.. SIZES AVAILABLE UP TO 2XL
OR
2. Our TomboyX eco heather crew tee. Weathered, soft with blind stitching on the sleeves. Love at first sight. Unisex fit. SIZES AVAILABLE UP TO 3XL
TomboyX Luggage Tag and Passport Holder: Pledge $45
Leather TomboyX embossed luggage tag and passport book! Comes in red, brown or black.
All purpose Apron: Pledge $55
The all-purpose utility apron. Great for anyone needing to keep tools and small supplies handy. Made in Seattle WA from rugged natural cotton with navy stitching.
TomboyX t-shirt and hat: Pledge $60
READY FOR THE WEEKEND WITH TOMBOYx T-SHIRT & HAT: Your pick of hat and t-shirt. Great comfort all day long. A must have for your closet!
TomboyX Cotton Polo: Pledge $85
The first in our collection, the signature TomboyX cotton Polo. Contrast collar, longer at the back and wider sleeves for comfort.
TomboyX Argyle Drirelease® Polo: Pledge $95
Our polo incorporates side panels for extra give and comfort. Created with performance fabric featuring a soft, smooth hand, our polo is moisture wicking and odor neutralizing. Play golf or tennis and stay fresh all day. Made in the USA.
TomboyX Argyle Drirelease® Polo & Essential TomboyX Hat: Pledge $115
Throw on your polo and hat and get ready to hear all your friends ask where you got them and how can they get one too! Eye catching and extremely comfortable you'll love this combination.
Your Choice TomboyX Polo & TomboyX T-shirt PLUS TomboyX hat: Pledge $140
The active woman's complete collection. We've got your covered with your choice Polo (cotton or drirelease®) and your choice of TomboyX t-shirt (grey or navy) plus the TomboyX hat to match almost anything in your wardrobe. Polo MADE IN THE USA (Retail $160)
TomboyX Classic Shirt: Pledge $175
Our signature Classic TomboyX shirt. The details will make you sigh and begin to sing that iconic song 'At last...' Contrast collar and cuffs. Checkered placket. The bias side panels for increased roominess create a flattering fit. Extra buttons at the bust and waist line to close the gap. This is our coup de grace response to all the complaints we've heard from women about woven shirts. We think you'll love it! Your choice of Navy or Light Blue.
TomboyX Classic Shirt and your choice cotton or drirelease® Polo: Pledge $250
Perfect for work and play. Classic for the office. Polo for the weekend. What more do you need? Oh! A blazer - keep scrolling...
TomboyX Blazer - Navy or Camel: Pledge $250
The TomboyX Knit Blazer. Soft, french terry makes it feel like you're wearing your favorite sweatshirt. Dress it up or down and wear it anywhere. Like the Classic, our Blazer is full of details - under the collar and pockets. Sleeves are lined. Available in navy or camel.
TomboyX Blazer, Classic & your choice Polo: Pledge $500
We've got you covered with the TomboyX Blazer (navy or camel), Classic, Polo (your choice cotton or drirelease®) and hat. You'll have everything you need for your next meeting, night out or golf date. This combo lets you be tomboy all day every day.
The Whole Shebang: Pledge $675
The whole shebang! Being the trendsetter you are become the TomboyX ambassador of your community. This combo includes the Classic, Blazer, both Polos, apron and hat. Looking good!
The Whole Shebang and Then Some: Pledge $1,500
Get the whole shebang AND both t-shirts. PLUS become part of the TomboyX farm team for a year. As a member of the farm team you have exclusive first looks of new designs, see and provide feedback on curated items before we feature them.
Tomboy Top Dog: Pledge $5,000
You get everything in the $1500 bucket PLUS add a 2nd classic shirt - our dark blue design. AND receive our featured 2nd Blazer. We'll fly you out from anywhere in the US and put you up in a Seattle hotel for 1 day. Meet our designer and crew. See what we're working on next and be part of the feedback process for the next designs
The Ultimate Tomboy: Pledge $10,000
You get everything in the $5000 bucket PLUS more custom features. Choose your own fabric and colors for your custom 3rd Classic shirt & Blazer PLUS have your choice of the Classic, Blazer, Cotton Polo or drirelease® Polo line named after you; Be part of our selection process for the next line of curated items.
SIZING
FROCKING IN THE USA
We're very supportive of bringing the manufacturing industry back to America so we're producing all of our unique designs here in the USA. Our pledge prices reflect the quality of the fabrics we have chosen as well as the increased costs of manufacturing in the USA. While this forces us to raise our prices we feel it's worth it and hope you do too.
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
We need a groundswell of support behind our concept and enough capital to get our first line into production. This is done via pledges, so keep them coming! And tell your friends to join us as well!Flag variables in Bourne shell programs
Who the heck still programs in Bourne shell? Old farts like me, occasionally. Of course, almost every time I do I ask myself why I didn't write it in Perl. Well, maybe this will be of some value to some fart even older than me.. Suppose you want to set a flag variable, and then later you want to test it. You probably do something like this: if some condition; then IS_NAKED=1 fi... if [ "$IS_NAKED" == "1" ]; then flag is set else flag is not set fi Or maybe you use ${IS_NAKED:-0} or some such instead of "$IN_NAKED". Whatever. Today I invented a different technique. Try this on instead: IS_NAKED=false if some condition; then IS_NAKED=true fi... if $IS_NAKED; then flag is set else flag is not set fi The arguments both for and against it seem to be obvious, so I won't make them. I have never seen this done before, but, as I concluded and R.J.B. Signes independently agreed, it is obvious once you see it. [ Addendum 20090107: some followup notes ]
[Other articles in category /prog] permanent linkThe topic comes up every few months: Edward Stanley, a second-year economics and management student at England’s Oxford University, will make the acquaintance of a hockey fan, almost invariably a Canadian. And when the hockey fan learns of Edward’s surname, there will be questions. “The conversation might go, ‘Have you ever had any family out in Canada? Because there’s a cup over there called the Stanley Cup. Is there any connection?’” Stanley was saying over the phone from Oxford recently. “And I tend to say, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact there is.’”
Ed Stanley stands with a hockey stick in Oxford, England. The 19-year-old descendant of Lord Stanley of Preston who donated the Stanley Cup to Canada in 1892 when he was governor general. Lord Stanley is an avid rugby player and has never seen an actual hockey game. ( Jim Ross / for the Toronto Star )
Trade messages via email or text and he signs off as Ed, an affable, humble lad who’ll happily share tales of his rugby-playing, essay-writing young adulthood. Refer to him by his title of British nobility and he is, by inheritance, Lord Stanley. Age 19, he’s the great-great-great-grandson of hockey’s beloved Lord Stanley of Preston, the sixth governor general of Canada, who gave the game its greatest prize back in 1892. “I love talking about (the Stanley Cup) because it’s an incredible piece of history to be a part of,” Stanley said. It’s been a bigger-than-usual year for Lord Stanley’s vaunted chalice. The 125th anniversary of its gifting has been celebrated with a series of tributes, including the October unveiling of a stunning public-art monument to the cup on Ottawa’s Sparks St., a rendering the current Lord Stanley, who’s seen pictures online, lauded as “a fun, contemporary take on the design.” Not that he claims domain over such things. His title, he points out, is not a signifier of authority, only a vestige of a decidedly less contemporary society.
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“The title of Lord Stanley in modern day means very little,” Stanley said. “But to me it’s a reminder of some amazing things that my ancestors have done. And it’s a driver for me, to make them proud and try to strive and get close to what they’ve done.” His lordship doesn’t sit in Britain’s House of Lords, the unelected chamber of parliament in which his family once held a seat by hereditary right. Which is not to say the Stanleys lack influence. They count among their longtime family friends the British Royal Family; Stanley is a godson to Prince Andrew and once served as a page to the Queen. Stanley’s father is an investment banker and the current president of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. As familial legacies go, Stanley figures his connection to one of the most iconic sporting trophies on the planet beats plenty of alternatives. “Unlike a lot of achievements of the great figures of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, the giving of the Stanley Cup has had no negative effects,” Stanley said. “Great leaders winning wars have often caused despair among many. But the Stanley Cup has only brought joy to a lot of people.” Joy to a lot of people — minus the folks whose teams almost never win the thing. Still, one can’t blame a Brit for not yet being intimately acquainted with the tortured existences of Cup-starved communities. Stanley has, in case you’re wondering, never seen an NHL game — an experience he’s saving for a live-action opportunity when he eventually ventures to this side of the Atlantic. The only hockey he’s seen in the flesh was played by friends on Oxford’s club team.
“I’ve watched clips (of the NHL). But slightly embarrassed that I’ve not been able to watch a game in full,” Stanley said. “But I’d love to go out and watch it in person, in Canada, when I do it for the first time, rather than having a cheap man’s TV session.” What he has seen, he says, he’s enjoyed. He figures it looks “definitely more difficult than field hockey,” which he’s tried, and nearly as perilous as his preferred full-contact game.
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“Ice hockey looks like a very violent sport, which I quite enjoy being a rugby player myself,” he said, reeling off a laundry list of injuries that have, over his years at Oxford and elite boarding school Eton College, chronically limited his match readiness. “I’ve had a lot of hematomas and broken thumbs. I’ve had a number of injuries to my neck and shoulder, ligaments and knees … I’m technically still vice-captain of my college rugby team, but I put my shoulder out again just after being appointed, so I haven’t managed to play yet.” His other game is the ponies — another sport in which his family name is elemental. Stanley is the first-born son of Teddy Stanley, the 19th Earl of Derby (pronounced DAR-bee). It was a nearly a quarter of a millennium ago that the 12th Earl of Derby gave his name to the Epsom Derby, the most prestigious horse race in Britain, and the one that inspired the folks in Kentucky as they searched for the name for what became the first jewel of the U.S. Triple Crown. But while the family gave title to the Epsom Derby, it hasn’t been synonymous with winning the race — and not for lack of trying. The Stanleys have been breeding and racing horses for generations, always with an eye toward big prizes. Edward Stanley grew up understanding that a family-bred horse hadn’t won the race at Epsom since 1933 — until, that is, 2014. That’s when Australia, a three-year-old chestnut colt bred by the family, came down the stretch with the lead. To put this situation in hockey terms, this was the Maple Leafs nursing a one-goal lead in the final minutes of Game 7 of a Stanley Cup final. Only instead of Toronto aiming to vanquish a half-century-plus championship drought, Australia was attempting to end a family’s 81-year absence from a particular winner’s circle. “I was extremely nervous. My head spent most of the time in the hat, not wanting to speak to anyone,” Stanley said. Australia, as it turns out, held on to win. “I just remember as (Australia) came down the home straight, my dad bursting into tears,” Stanley said. “You could see how much it meant to have bred a horse 230-some years on from his ancestors starting the race.” Perhaps the victory meant enough that it took some of the sting out of the fact the family sold away Australia two years earlier for about $850,000. Thoroughbred racing, for Edward Stanley, is now only a passionate hobby, although he said he’d be “open” to one day making it a career, as more than one Stanley — including his uncle, Peter, who runs the family breeding operation — has done before him. Growing up Stanley, he said, has meant gradually educating himself on an ancient web of blood relatives, along with various particulars of each one’s long-ago life. “A lot (of family history) comes up discussing pictures and paintings around the house … ‘Why is his picture hanging above your head where you eat?’ ” he said. Stanley said he first learned about the forebear who donated the Stanley Cup on trips to the family’s log cabin. Known as Potato Pie House, it’s set in a woodlot outside Liverpool. Around the time Lord Stanley of Preston gave Canada the gift of a now-iconic silver bowl — an event that coincided with the nobleman’s imminent return to Britain — the people of Canada shipped over the cabin as a going-away present. Why is it called Potato Pie House? “I’m not sure to be honest,” Stanley said in an email. “But I would assume it would be a retreat in the woods where you might go and have a potato pie at a picnic. … We use it regularly.” The family’s preferred fare when they convene at the log cabin imported from Canada? Sausage rolls. The holiday season brings with it another family tradition that’s vaguely new world. It’s around this time every year when Stanley, like many Britons, laces up a pair of skates and goes for an annual wobble around a rink. This is where it becomes clear that hockey, although it’s prominent in the family story arc, isn’t necessarily coursing through the Stanley bloodstream. “I generally pull myself ’round on the banister at the edge, and then get a little bit of confidence after 10 metres, and separate myself from the banister,” Edward said with a chuckle. “And then I usually just collapse onto the ice. I’m one of the worst skaters you’ll ever come across.” From old Lord Stanley of Preston to the current Lord Stanley, bravely eschewing skating lessons, an ice-bound legacy lives on.Was Android actually Google's third operating system choice for its new Pixel C tablet?
The Pixel C finally went on sale this week—but our full review notes that the convertible tablet feels like hardware in search of the software to make it a compelling product. Perhaps that's because, internally, Google engineers seem to have been searching for a compelling Pixel C software package for the last year and a half.
The contradiction between hardware and software is visible all over the tablet, so two examples will suffice. The hardware's keyboard and big screen would point to it being a productivity device, but the software's lack of a split-screen mode and apps optimized for the screen's size hamstring the Pixel C. The hardware seems geared for voice command functionality, given its array of four top-mounted microphones, but the software doesn't support Google's always-on voice commands.
It's also odd that the device hails from the Pixel team. Google has two big hardware brands: "Nexus," which covers flagship Android devices, and "Pixel," which denotes flagship Chrome OS devices. With the Pixel C, though, the Pixel team broke ranks and produced an Android tablet.
In our view, the Pixel C's irregularities all have a single explanation: the Pixel C was originally a Chrome OS device.
Back in July 2014, a new "Ryu" board (a "board" is just a reference to "motherboard"—a Chrome OS device under development) popped up in the Chrome OS open source repository. Further trips through the Chrome OS source code revealed that "Ryu" had a light bar, USB Type-C connectors, an Nvidia Tegra SoC, and wireless charging. That sounds an awful lot like the Pixel C (especially the wireless charging, which is used to charge the keyboard via the tablet's battery when closed).
Open up the Pixel C's software and take a look at Android's build.prop file—which lists all sorts of base information about the device—and you'll see "ro.product.name=ryu" listed in the properties. Based on this commit, it’s safe to say that at one point Google was definitely developing Chrome OS for its new Android tablet.
It appears that the Pixel C was planned as launch hardware for a new, all-touch version of Chrome OS which at some point got canceled—necessitating a switch to Android. The story is a lot more complicated than that, though. What follows is the best timeline we could piece together showing the Pixel C's troubled development history.
Plan A: Project Athena—Chrome OS' (canceled) touchscreen interface
We've long heard rumors of a "Chrome OS Tablet" being worked on at Google headquarters. Some of this touch work was clearly visible to the public. Since at least 2014, Chrome OS has had a semi-hidden virtual keyboard, which could be enabled via a developer flag. While most of Chrome OS' touch work could be attributed to the "laptop with a touchscreen" form factor of the Chromebook Pixel and a few other Chromebooks, a virtual keyboard would be mostly useless in a laptop form factor. This was destined for a tablet.
The Chrome OS team was actually working on a new interface called "Project Athena," which appeared to add a lot of functionality focused on touchscreen usage. In July 2014, right around the same time "Ryu" (the Pixel C) was introduced into the Chrome OS repository, the first references to Project Athena started to pop up.
The biggest addition we knew about was an experimental window switcher, which would have taken Chrome OS' window management UI from a taskbar-based interface to a cascading, scrolling thumbnail UI that looks a lot like what Android has today. Chrome OS' taskbar interface is great for a mouse, but the tiny buttons would make it a poor experience for touch users. No one from Google explicitly said this new thumbnail UI was for a Chrome OS tablet, but the change would provide much larger targets for touch use, and it would be less efficient for a mouse user because of the greater distance the mouse would have to travel. In our hypothetical Chrome OS Tablet world, we'd imagine that the cascading thumbnail window management would be for touch users, while the taskbar would stick around for mouse users.
Athena also added a few swipe gestures to Chrome OS. Dragging up from the bottom edge would enter "overview mode"—presumably the above thumbnail-based window switcher. Dragging in from the left edge would switch to the previous task (just as in Windows' touch UI), and dragging in and holding would enter a split-screen mode. Chrome OS is a windowed OS, so split-screen mode would seem redundant unless you consider that the usual mouse-based window resizing doesn't work well with touch. A "drag in" gesture like this would be great for our theoretical Chrome OS tablet.
Project Athena never shipped, though. In December 2014, about five months after the introduction of Ryu and Project Athena into the Chrome OS code base, the project was canceled.
Plan B: "Frankenboard"—The Chrome OS/Android Hybrid
With no touch interface to run on the 10-inch touchscreen and no mouse to drive the mouse-centric Chrome OS, the Pixel C was in a pickle. In March 2015, Android code started appearing in the Chrome OS Ryu device tree.
Chrome OS really can't run without a mouse, so apparently the team decided that making Ryu boot Chrome OS and Android would fix this. We know that Android wasn't a replacement at this point, because some of the work involved getting the Chrome OS boot loader to talk to Android.
Digitimes actually nailed this news a month before the commits became public. In February 2015, the site said Google was going to start pushing "2-in-1 Chromebooks" that would boot Android and Chrome OS. The device was going to be built by Quanta Computer, the same company rumored to manufacture the Chromebook Pixel for Google, and the report said it would be "Google branded," AKA a Pixel.
Just like with Project Athena, this idea lasted about five months—in July 2015, the dual-boot project seems to have been scrapped. A comment on a Ryu commit mentioned the cancellation while giving us more evidence into the device's hybrid nature, saying "Abandoned. frankenboard is dead." "Frankenboard" of course would be an excellent nickname for a device that was setup to boot Android and Chrome OS.
Plan C: Christmas is coming! Just flash Android and ship it
With Chrome OS now apparently out of the picture for the Pixel C, it looks like the decision was made to put Android on it and ship it out the door. In September 2015 at the Nexus launch event, Google announced the Android 6.0-powered Pixel C. This was just two months after the apparent cancellation of the dual-boot plans, leaving very little time to get regular Android up and running on the Pixel C.
At the launch event, the Pixel C immediately seemed like a rush job. The product's announcement was tacked on to the end of the high-profile Nexus 5X and 6P launch, where it was almost immediately forgotten about. While Google had about 30 to 40 Nexus phones set up for the attending journalists to try, there were a whopping two Pixel Cs set up at the event. The Nexus phones went up for pre-order the day after the event and shipped about 20 days later. For Pixel C customers, Google followed up the announcement with two entire months of radio silence, leaving many to wonder if the device was ever coming out.
Google's silence was only broken with a message along the lines of "Surprise! The Pixel C is for sale right now!" on December 8. The Pixel C's launch timing meant it missed the lucrative Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping period, a sure sign of a troubled launch. In fact, we're still not sure what the retail box for the Pixel C looks like—our review unit was luxuriously shipped in a plastic bag inside of a brown cardboard box.
A quick look at the Pixel Team's recent Reddit AMA shows that the team is scrambling to implement basic Android features like always-on voice recognition, promising that "Android N" will bring features that the device desperately needs (like a split screen mode).
The path to a Chrome OS and Android merge runs over the Pixel C
Connect all the dots from the public Chrome OS commits, and our timeline looks like this:
So why did the first hiccup happen in the first place? Why was work on a Chrome OS tablet abandoned? Our guess is that it has something to do with Chrome OS and Android merging.
Introducing a new Chrome OS form factor, only to have it superseded by a crazy hybrid OS a year or two later, probably wouldn't be received well by customers. Chrome OS customers, a large portion of which are schools and businesses, would especially value platform stability. Convincing those customers to move over to the new hybrid OS will be hard enough, and creating and then killing a new form factor in the span of two years wouldn't inspire a lot of confidence in Google. It's about not further complicating what will already be a rocky transition.
This narrative explains why the Pixel C seems so lackluster today; it wasn't supposed to be this way! It was supposed to be a flagship Chrome OS tablet worthy of the "Pixel" name. It seems those plans were canceled, though, and what we're left with is the Android-powered Pixel C—just another Android tablet.Phishing is one of the most common threats today. In this instance, we receive a PowerPoint via spam email and it leads us to an AES Encrypted Phishing Website.
RING Ø LABS
Malware Report
This post was featured on ThreatPost.com Here!
FILE DETAILS
Filename TransactionID7889277544.pptx Packer None MD5 bd912590f18332ab93af23d1dcc688e4 Sample Sample Unavailable Type PHISHING Video
DETAILS
Today our malware comes to us via spam. This particular spam message states we have a recent purchase through Apple and we should review the attached receipt. The "receipt" is a Microsoft PowerPoint document.
We begin by analyzing the PPTX by changing its extension to ZIP. This is because modern Microsoft Office documents are actually ZIP archives that contain many formatting files.
In our case, we come upon a file named slide1.xml.resl and it contains two distinct URLs that have been shortened using Twitters URL shortening service (t.co):
Other than these two strange links, no other metadata stands out as being suspicious. When we open the PowerPoint to inspect our "receipt" we are given the following slide:
The invoice claims we have purchased something from Apple and to click the link at the bottom to cancel the order. The hyperlink is attributed to one of the Twitter Shortened URLs from earlier.
Opening the URLs in a web-browser reveals another level of shortening via the bit.ly service before finally redirecting to the Phishing site.
The site is quite convincing; proper English, fonts, design. A+ for effort. Inspecting the page reveals something even more deserving of an A+:
Nearly the entire bulk of the page is contained within a single variable that has been AES encrypted. The page decrypts itself on the fly as the page loads via the Aes.Ctr.decrypt function. This is very cool as it defeats many online signature scanning services.
Education of users is one of the weakest links in cyber security and the user protection mechanisms for this type of attack should focus more on emails and downloads. However, the AES obfuscation this site employs isn't for hiding the code from users. It is for avoiding automated reputation crawlers and site security systems that scan webpages for suspicious content and alert providers when questionable activities are taking place. By using this AES encryption technique the site is able to remain hidden for a little longer without detection by these systems. There are NUMEROUS techniques to obfuscate web-pages with javascript and other methods. I have seen a ton of these techniques, but this just happens to be one that I have not seen before.
Instead of manually decrypting the giant blob of data by hand, we can simply open Google Chrome's Developer tools and output the value of the variable "output" via the javascript console. We can then retrieve the decrypted data:
You may also choose to download the entire site by saving the complete webpage in order to inspect all of the dependency files:
With the AES coolness aside, we continue back to the Phishing portion of this threat. The main page asks us to login with our AppleID (the ID is not checked) and then tells us that our account is locked:
When we press UNLOCK ACCOUNT we are directed to a slew of personal questions which will no doubt be recorded by the author (the next page collects financial details):
DETECTION
Currently there are no virus signatures detecting the PowerPoint document. This is to be expected due to it being a relatively benign document that only contains a simple URL.
CONCLUSIONAbstract
Context National vaccine recommendations in the United States target an increasing number of vaccine-preventable diseases for reduction, elimination, or eradication.
Objective To compare morbidity and mortality before and after widespread implementation of national vaccine recommendations for 13 vaccine-preventable diseases for which recommendations were in place prior to 2005.
Design, Setting, and Participants For the United States, prevaccine baselines were assessed based on representative historical data from primary sources and were compared to the most recent morbidity (2006) and mortality (2004) data for diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, rubella (including congenital rubella syndrome), invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), acute hepatitis B, hepatitis A, varicella, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and smallpox.
Main Outcome Measures Number of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations for 13 vaccine-preventable diseases. Estimates of the percent reductions from baseline to recent were made without adjustment for factors that could affect vaccine-preventable disease morbidity, mortality, or reporting.
Results A greater than 92% decline in cases and a 99% or greater decline in deaths due to diseases prevented by vaccines recommended before 1980 were shown for diphtheria, mumps, pertussis, and tetanus. Endemic transmission of poliovirus and measles and rubella |
Council in Bismarck, says the bishop's decision will affect eight Boy Scout troops and Cub Scout packs in Bismarck, Mandan, Beulah and Williston. The troop in Mandan will end a 66-year affiliation with the Catholic church, Wrolstad said.
"They will be working to find other charter organizations within those communities, and there will be a good chance they will be faith-based organizations," he said.
Scout groups pay a $40 annual charter fee to sponsoring organizations, which helps cover insurance liability costs, Wrolstad said.
The Northern Lights Council, which also includes parts of neighboring South Dakota, Montana and Minnesota, has more than 400 packs and troops, he said.
Copyright Associated PressWHEN THE Daily Caller, a news site based in Washington, D.C., reported last week that Michele Bachmann gets migraine headaches, it labored to give the impression that it was breaking an important story.
“Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged,’’ the foreboding headline read. (Cue the grim background music.) The article, by Jonathan Strong, depicted a woman who crumples in the face of stress, reacting to the normal aggravations of political life - a staffer’s resignation, a missed flight - with “medical episodes’’ that leave her “incapacitated’’ for days at a time. To cope, she “takes all sorts of pills. Prevention pills. Pills during the migraine. Pills wherever she goes.’’ These “debilitating’’ migraines “occur once a week on average,’’ and at least three times have landed Bachmann in the hospital. Her staff must “constantly’’ consult with doctors to “tweak’’ their boss’s medication.
Bottom line? “Some close to Bachmann fear she won’t be equal to the stress of the campaign.’’ And some former aides “are terrified’’ by the thought of a migraine-prone President Bachmann.
All very melodramatic. But a few things were missing from Strong’s account. Like the nature of all those “pills’’ that Bachmann supposedly takes - addictive narcotics, or something more innocuous? And the identity of any of the unnamed “former aides’’ whose allegations the story recycles - which candidates, if any, are they working for now? Missing too was any evidence that a migraine condition is incompatible with the pressures of the presidency or any other high-powered position.
That’s because no such evidence exists.
The health of presidential candidates is of course a legitimate news topic. That’s especially true since, to quote the historian Robert Dallek, “concealing one’s true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.’’
Gone are the days when a presidential candidate with severe medical problems could brazenly claim to be in excellent health and expect to get away with it. During and after the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy - who suffered from Addison’s disease, colitis, urinary tract infections, and the near-crippling pain of degenerative back problems - took an astonishing array of medications, including steroids, painkillers, antibiotics, and anti-spasmodics. Yet with the help of a friendly press, the Kennedy machine easily downplayed JFK’s afflictions; one New York Times article described him as being in “superb physical condition.’’
Neither Bachmann nor any other 2012 candidate would get that kind of pass today. But no candidate should be subjected to anonymous media rumormongering about her health, either.
Migraine headaches are a uniquely painful misery, as I can attest from long personal experience, but they are not a stroke or heart disease or polio or Alzheimer’s. At their worst, migraine attacks can involve throbbing head pain, blind spots and other visual abnormalities, intense nausea, chills, and tears streaming from one eye. “That no one dies of migraine,’’ Joan Didion wrote in a famous essay, “seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.’’ Such attacks terrified me when I was young; I vividly remember wondering, as an 11- or 12-year-old, if I was dying of brain cancer. Not until I was in college did I learn I wasn’t the only one to experience those agonies.
More than 35 million Americans suffer from migraines; many, Bachmann included, control their symptoms with medication. Far from popping “pills wherever she goes,’’ however, she takes medicine only when she has an attack. According to Congress’s attending physician, Bachmann’s migraines “occur infrequently’’ and are helped by sumatriptan, a standard drug for relieving the dilation of blood vessels that causes migraine pain, and ondansetron, an anti-nausea drug.
In my case, age, not medicine, seems to have been the best therapy; when my odometer passed 40, the migraine attacks started growing less severe. But even before then, migraine wasn’t a paralyzing disability. The headaches hurt like hell, but they didn’t keep me from getting an education or holding a job. I don’t recommend giving a speech or going on TV while having a migraine, but I’ve managed to do both. I imagine Bachmann has, too. Her migraines plainly haven’t kept her from an impressive rise in national politics, or from setting the GOP primary field on fire. If she were “incapacitated’’ on a weekly basis, it’s unlikely she’d have come so far, so fast.
So is it news that a would-be president once complained of migraine attacks that were “paroxysms of excruciating pain’’ - headaches that “came on every day at sunrise and never left me till sunset’’? No - not unless it’s news that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words, suffered migraines. Ulysses Grant did, too.
I don’t know if Michele Bachmann can become the next president. But I do know this: She wouldn’t be the first one to live with migraine headaches.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jeff_Jacoby.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording a few hours later describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said Thursday.
The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as the Bat Cave and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events of a few hours earlier. The recording included statements of 5 or 10 minutes each by controllers who had spoken by radio to people on the planes or who had tracked the aircraft on radar, the report said.
Officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, according to a report made public on Thursday by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
A quality-assurance manager at the center destroyed the tape several months after it was made, crushing the cassette in his hand, cutting the tape into little pieces and dropping them in different trash cans around the building, according to the report. The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, the report said.
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The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to Federal Aviation Administration policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers ''were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping'' because of the stress of the day.Image caption Continental spurned a merger with United two years ago
United Airlines and Continental Airlines have been cleared to merge, creating the world's largest carrier.
Shareholders in the two airlines overwhelmingly voted to approve the deal on Friday.
The merged airline will be known as United Airlines, with Continental's chief executive Jeff Smisek taking on the same role at the new carrier.
Global airlines have struggled due to overcapacity, and United was forced into bankruptcy protection.
United and Continental announced their merger proposal in May, two years after Continental spurned similar advances from United.
The merger plan already has antitrust clearance from the US and European Commission.
"In approving the transaction, our stockholders recognised the value of bringing together Continental and United to create a platform for increased profitability and sustainable long-term value," Mr Smisek said in a statement.
Many carriers have struggled in recent years due to terrorist threats, soaring fuel prices and economic recession.
Several airlines have sought safety through merging. British Airways plans deals with Spain's Iberia and American Airlines.Gearing up for 2016 presidential race, Michele Bachmann returns to her extremist anti-gay roots.
Many may have forgotten, but Tea Party Congresswoman Michele Bachmann got her start in politics by being one of Minnesota's most anti-gay activists. Like many, the school board was her stomping ground, and Bachmann quickly gained a strong base among the radical religious right.
Bachmann claimed "the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement." She insisted it is "child abuse" to even discuss homosexuality with children. And she's called being gay "the very real issue of sexual dysfunction."
LOOK: Michele Bachmann's Top Ten Anti-Gay Quotes
After Rep. Bachmann's disastrous 2012 presidential campaign, for which she, her husband, and her campaign have been the target of several ethics investigations by several entities, including the Office of Congressional Ethics, the nation heard less and less from the four-term, 58-year old, Evangelical Christian Congresswoman, who announced last year she will not be seeking a fifth term.
Less and less, until now.
This week Bachmann announced, "there's a chance I could run" for President.
And on Wednesday, Rep. Bachmann gave an interview with the conservative radio show, "Faith & Victory," and harkened back to her extremist anti-gay roots.
Calling it "the rise of tyranny," Bachmann claims there is "legislation being pushed all across the United States to punish people who don't agree with" LGBT equality.
"It's the basis for hate speech laws across the United States," Bachmann said. "This is an effort to have government coerce, force, speech and behavior, and it's being pushed and advocated by the gay community."
Bachmann, who has spent decades railing against the LGBT community, same-sex marriage, and even gay people raising children, now claims that she supports a "diversity of opinion," but the LGBT community does not.
"Today," Bachmann continued, "the big push is on transgender."
"I believe we're going to see coming an effort for multiple in marriage. Not just tow, but multiple in marriage. I think they want to legalize that."
"Also, they want to abolish age of consent laws. We would do away with statutory rape laws, so adults would be able to freely prey on little children sexually. That's the deviance that we're seeing embraced in our culture today."
Listen:
https://soundcloud.com/rightwingwatch/bachmann-child-rape-result-of-gay-rights
UPDATE: Michele Bachmann: Striking Down DOMA Is 'Denial Of Equal Protection For All Americans' (Audio)
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr
Hat tip and audio: Right Wing Watch
Recently on The New Civil Rights Movement:
Watch: Michele Bachmann Blames US Job Losses And Rape On 'Invasion' Of Young Immigrant Kids
Watch: Michele Bachmann Spends Ten Minutes Talking About Prayer And God Blessing America
Watch: Fox News Anchor Slams Michele Bachmann
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]Human rights groups and criminal justice organizations are criticizing President Barack Obama’s nomination of Stacia A. Hylton for director of the U.S. Marshals Service because of her ties to the for-profit prison industry.
Hylton was a 29-year career employee of the Justice Department until she left her post earlier this year and accepted $112,500 in consulting fees from the GEO Group, a for-profit prison industry group. Hylton awarded contracts worth up to $88 million to the GEO Group during her nearly six years as DOJ’s Federal Detention Trustee, according to a press release. The GEO Group is the second largest operator of for-profit prisons in the United States.
“Sounds like the fox watching the henhouse to me,” Ken Kopczynski, the director of the nonprofit watchdog group Private Corrections Working Group, told TPMmuckraker.“This is a prime example of the revolving door between the public and for-profit private sectors,” said Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News.
Among some issues causing concern for human rights groups is the fact that, as a Federal Detention Trustee, Hylton objected to a recommendation from the Justice Department Office of Inspector General that called for limiting the amount of profit that a state or local jail — some of which are owned and/or operated by for-profit companies — can earn for housing federal prisoners.
GEO Chairman and Chief Executive Officer George Zoley admitted recently that “the primary driver for growth continues to be the incarceration of criminal aliens” in the area of federal contracts, the Washington Times reported.
The Washington Times reported last month on Hylton’s contract with the GEO Group and the possible conflicts of interest. She received $112,500 in income from her own private company through “consulting services for detention matters, federal relations and acquisitions and mergers” from March through July of 2010, the newspaper said.
“The U.S. Marshals preside over one of the nation’s largest privatized federal detention systems,” said Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership. “Policies that have driven the private prison expansion such as Operation Streamline are carried out by the U.S. Marshals. Ms. Hylton’s consulting work with the GEO Group, a troubled company that benefits handsomely from such policies, is a cause for major concern.”
Hylton told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a questionnaire that an ethics agreement with the government would resolve any potential conflicts of interest.
“In connection with the nomination process, I have consulted with the Office of Government Ethics and the Department of Justice’s designated agency ethics official to identify any potential conflicts of interest,” she wrote.
Hylton has a hearing scheduled before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. She would replace current U.S. Marshals Director John Clark, who has served in that role since 2006. It wasn’t originally clear until Hylton’s nomination that Obama would replace Clark, who was a long-time career U.S. Marshals employee who worked with the administration on plans to handle the closing of Guantanamo Bay and trial of those behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
The U.S. Marshals Service said it would be inappropriate for them to comment during the nomination process and referred questions to the White House. A spokesman there did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Current U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein for the District of Maryland, listed as a reference by Hylton on the nomination documents forwarded to the committee, said through a spokeswoman that Justice Department policy would not allow him to comment on pending nominations.
The GEO Group, which only answers questions submitted via e-mail, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hylton’s work on their behalf.
Here is Hylton’s bio, which mentions her work as a consultant but not the private prison company she consulted for, as provided by the White House:In an impassioned Facebook post following the latest terror attack in London, a Louisiana congressman called for a Christian holy war against “Islamic horror.”
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA.) sees violence as the only viable solution for combating terrorism. Regarding how to treat Muslims who’ve been radicalized, he doesn’t mince words: “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all.”
Attached to Rep. Higgins’ highly controversial language was a photo of a London police officer standing beside the body of one of the attackers. As is often the case these days, the post went viral and sparked a massive online debate.
Backlash
Within hours, the post had spawned thousands of reactions. While many of the congressman’s supporters defended his statement, he also received heavy criticism. Wrote one Facebook user:
“Wow, you are no better than a terrorist. I’m more afraid of people like you than a refugee who was vetted for 2 years by 7 Intel agencies. I think we need better vetting for our representatives. You are an unhinged lunatic and playing right into what ISIS wants.”
The Louisiana Democratic Party also released a statement condemning the language:
“The congressman points to Christianity to justify his backward position. As a party that strives to put in place representatives who serve progressive, inclusive Louisiana values, we urge him to look to 2 Timothy 1:7, ‘for God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.’ Rep. Higgins’ language is exactly the sort of response that terrorists aim to provoke.”
“Cajun John Wayne”
Rep. Higgins is a former law enforcement officer who was elected in a December runoff election. Affectionately nicknamed the “Cajun John Wayne” by his supporters, Higgins has become incredibly popular for his frank way of speaking, unabashed Christian beliefs, and strong support for law and order policies.
But Higgins – who is known to carry a Bible and wear a gun to town hall meetings with constituents – has had his share of problems in the past. Shortly before running for office, he was forced to resign from his law enforcement position after referring to suspects as “animals” and “heathens”. The congressman has also been married 4 times, and is currently trying to pay off over $100,000 in back child support.
Are We Headed for Holy War?
There has been a marked uptick in violent terrorist attacks during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. Recent attacks in London, especially, highlight the severity of the ongoing clash between Islamic extremism and Western values.
When faced with the brutality and inhumanity of such senseless violence, there is little wonder that people like Rep. Higgins find a home for their own extreme thoughts in the fearful hearts of so many.
Is there an avenue for peace moving forward? We’d like to think a holy war can be averted, but comments like those made by Rep. Higgins are far from encouraging.Philippines: Samar outbreak declared, 33 deaths reported
In a follow-up to a previous report on the diarrhea outbreak that has sickened hundreds in the Eastern Visayas region, particularly the province of Samar, health officials have now officially declared the situation an outbreak in three Samar provinces: Calbiga, Sta. Rita and Catbalogan city, Samar.
The declaration was made by DOH-08 regional director, Minerva Molon who said that as of Thursday, some 2,937 individuals have been affected by diarrhea caused by a still yet unidentified etiological agent, resulting in 33 deaths to date. This more than double the cases reported just days ago.
Molona notes that the source of the outbreak is linked to poor source of drinking water and intake of contaminated foods.
Like the diarrheal outbreak in Zamboanga City, officials say the outbreak is likely due to unclean water due to the drought.
However, unlike the Zambo outbreak, where a viral etiology has been linked to the illnesses, the Samar outbreak is suspected to be due to a bacterium and testing continues.
Meanwhile, DOH-8 is continually undergoing disease surveillance and reporting.
Related:A schematic illustration of an Alderson disk
An Alderson disk[1][2] (named after Dan Alderson, its originator) is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure, like Larry Niven's Ringworld and the Dyson sphere. The disk is a giant platter with a thickness of several thousand miles. The Sun rests in the hole at the center of the disk. The outer perimeter of an Alderson disk would be roughly equivalent to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter. According to the proposal, a sufficiently large disk would have a larger mass than its Sun.
The hole would be surrounded by a thousand-mile-high wall to prevent the atmosphere from drifting into the Sun. The outer rim would take care of itself.
The mechanical stresses within the disc would be far beyond what any known material can stand, thus relegating such a structure to the realm of exploratory engineering until materials and construction science become sufficiently advanced.[citation needed] Building a megastructure of this magnitude would require an amount of material that far surpasses the amount of material found in the Solar System.
Life could exist on either side of the disk, though close to the Sun the heat would make life impossible without protection. Conversely, farther away from the Sun living beings would freeze. Therefore, for the entirety of such a structure to be made habitable, it would have to include a vast number of life support systems. Even without such systems the habitable surface area would be an equivalent of tens of millions Earths.
Because the Sun remains stationary, there is no day/night cycle, only a perpetual twilight. This could be solved by forcing the Sun to bob up and down within the disk, lighting first one side then the other.[3]
In popular culture [ edit ]
In 1974, the science fiction writer Larry Niven suggested that an Alderson disk "would be a wonderful place to stage a Gothic or swords-and-sorcery novel. The atmosphere is right, and there are real monsters." Because the zone habitable by humans is relatively narrow, the disc (and the cost of its construction) could be shared with aliens from hotter and colder planets. Over long periods of time, lifeforms would evolve to settle the sparsely-inhabited regions in between. "If civilization should fall, things could get eerie and interesting."[3]
An Alderson disk (the Godwheel) was a prominent feature of Malibu Comics' Ultraverse. The Godwheel was split between two societies, one which used technology and one which used magic (each occupied its own side of the disk). Larry Niven designed the Godwheel, and wrote stories surrounding certain events on it.
Rak Mesba is a partial ancient alien Alderson Disk in Orion's Arm, a multi-authored online science fiction world-building project.
A disk-shaped planet similar to an Alderson disk (though far smaller) served as the home world of the fantasy "Aysle" setting (or "cosm") of West End Games' Torg roleplaying game. In contrast with the Alderson disk, the Aysle "diskworld" works according to fantasy physics, including a "gravity plane" that bisects the disk laterally, so that opposite sides "fall" towards the plane. The diskworld of Aysle had a bobbing Sun and multiple inner layers. Both sides of the disk were inhabited, as were the internal layers.
In Charles Stross's Missile Gap, a copy of the whole Earth (along with copies of many other planets) is placed on an Alderson disk built around a black hole by unknown forces.
Ian McDonald's novel Empress of the Sun features a parallel-universe version of our solar system where creatures evolved from dinosaurs have converted all the mass to an Alderson disk (with a bobbing sun).PORTLAND, Ore. -- It's mid-May and the summer travel season is already proving to be troublesome, with hour-plus security line wait times at major hubs like Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and in Atlanta.
"We've been to Denver recently and we just flew here from Vegas via LAX. The lines in Denver were very, very long. It took us probably over and hour to get through," Portland traveler Tom Feely told KATU News.
A spokesperson for PDX says they are aware of the long lines at other airports across the country and are currently in conversation with the Transportation Security Administration officials about summer travel.
They also advise travelers to expect longer lines during peak travel times; specifically between 5:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., what they call the "noon balloon," and again in the evening.
Airport officials in Portland also ask passengers to arrive early; at least 2 hours before departure for domestic flights.
Last week, passengers reported TSA security lines so long that the two lines; one for "A,B and C" gates and the other for "D and E" gates lines met in the middle of the concourse.
Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA announced a plan to curb security lines congestion by increasing staffing, adding canine units and pushing TSA PreCheck among other efforts.
During a two-week period in April, PDX put up a TSA PreCheck mobile enrollment center. Airport officials say 1,605 travelers signed up for expedited screening program.
"I really hope they fix this soon. There has to be a better manner and a better way to do this than, you know, just this terrible waiting and you're already nervous when you have to catch a flight," one traveler said.
TSA also offers a "My TSA" app where passengers can vie security line wait times.11Alive News has confirmed the husband of a Georgia assistant attorney general has been found shot to death.
Shahriar Zolfaghari, 36, is the husband of Camila Wright.
Wright was hired in November 2014 by Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens to deal with sex trafficking cases.
Zolfaghari, a Lyft driver, was working the night of his death. He was found unresponsive Wednesday morning at the intersection of Rankin Street and Boulevard NE. (Watch video of police talk about the case)
Atlanta police responded to a 1:15 a.m. report of an unresponsive driver.
Police investigate death of husband of Ga. Asst. Atty. General, Shahriar Zolfaghari
"They noticed when the light turned green, he didn't move," Major Adam Lee III said at the scene Wednesday morning.
When witness saw blood, they called 911. The dispatcher advised the witnesses to pull him out of the car and administer CPR. That's when they realized he'd been shot twice in the torso area.
He was rushed to the hospital, but he died during surgery.
Attorney General Olens issued the following statement to 11Alive's Duffie Dixon:
"We at the Attorney General’s office are heartbroken by the tragic loss of Camila’s husband. Our thoughts and prayers are with her and her family."
Lyft spokesperson Alexandra LaManna issued a statement saying:
"Our heartfelt sympathies are with the family and loved ones of Shahriar Zolfaghari. Lyft has been working closely with law enforcement and will continue to assist their investigation."
Camila WrightPu’u ‘O’o Crater East Flank. (6/26/14-7/10/14)
Multi-image movie of Pu’u ‘O’o Crater. (6/26/14-7/10/14)
Thermal image movie of Pu‘u ‘O‘o Crater (6/26/14-7/10/14)
(Activity updates are written by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.)
A lava lake within Halema‘uma‘u produced nighttime glow that was visible via HVO’s Webcam during the past week. The lava lake level dropped during the week, and was 40–45 m (~130–150 ft) below the rim of the Overlook crater on Thursday, July 10.
On Kīlauea’s East Rift Zone, the June 27 breakout continues to build a low shield, topped by a lava pond on the northeast flank of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō. Overflows from the pond, and breakouts from the base of the levee around the pond, fed small flows that rarely reached the base of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō.
There were no earthquakes in the past week reported felt on the Island of Hawai‘i.
Visit the HVO website (hvo.wr.usgs.gov) for past Volcano Awareness Month articles and current Kīlauea, Mauna Loa, and Hualālai activity updates, recent volcano photos, recent earthquakes, and more; call (808) 967-8862 for a Kīlauea summary; email questions to askHVO@usgs.gov.
Halemaʻumaʻu Overlook Vent from HVO (6/26/14-7/10/14)
Time-lapse movie of Halemaumau Crater (6/26/14-7/10/14)
Thermal image movie of Halemaumau Crater (6/26/14-7/10/14)
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PocketForsyth Barr Stadium in Dunedin. Could it host next year's Sevens World Series tournament?
Forsyth Barr Stadium management is coy over a possible Dunedin bid for the New Zealand leg of the international sevens tournament.
About 14,000 people turned up to Wellington's 34,500-capacity Westpac Stadium on Saturday for the Sevens World Series, and 15,500 on Sunday.
New Zealand won the final 24-21 after a come-from-behind victory over South Africa.
Who should host the Sevens? Share your stories, photos and videos. Contribute
Previously, Forsyth Barr Stadium management indicated the annual tournament was a possible target for the 30,000-capacity South Island venue.
READ MORE:
* Sonny Bill Williams knows he has a lot still to prove in sevens
* World Rugby wants Wellington sevens
* Photos: Wellington Sevens
* Rating Sonny Bill Williams' sevens debut
* Recap: Wellington Sevens
Chief executive Terry Davies, when asked if the Dunedin stadium was eyeing up a bid for the sevens, issued a one-sentence statement in response on Monday.
"Should there be an opportunity to look at hosting this Sevens tournament, we would consider this."
Nearly 7000 people have joined the Facebook page, Bring the 7s to Dunedin.
HAGEN HOPKINS/GETTY IMAGES An empty-looking Westpac Stadium during the 2016 Wellington Sevens.
New Zealand Rugby boss Steve Tew confirmed a comprehensive review of the 2016 Wellington Sevens event would be undertaken before a decision on the future New Zealand host was made.
That decision was expected at the end of March.
"The 2016 HSBC Wellington Sevens was a great success on many fronts. Operationally, it couldn't have been better for the teams... the action on the field was excellent and those who attended will have had a great time," Tew said.
MARK TANTRUM/GETTY IMAGES USA fans get excited during the 2016 Wellington Sevens at Westpac Stadium.
"While we would always like to have a full stadium, the decision on next year's host city is based on more than crowd attendance. Over the next month or so we'll consider all aspects of hosting the tournament in Wellington, including the great support we've received from the [Wellington City] Council and the track record in the capital over more than a decade."
New Zealand Rugby has a contract with World Rugby until 2019 to deliver a World Sevens Series tournament.This article is from the archive of our partner.
Could News Corp. have a more sinister reason for shuttering News of the World? James Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer of News Corp., spoke to Sky News, a News Corp. company, Thursday evening about the executive team's decision to close the publication:
Actions taken a number of years ago by certain individuals in what had been a good newsroom have breached the trust that News of the World has with its readers. And we felt that under the circumstances and given the work--the thorough work--and the process that we've undertaken over the last year and a half to come to this point. And that realization was something that was inescapable. And we took the decision to close down the paper, to cease publication after this Sunday, really because of that.
The interview continues briefly with some discussion over plans for a possible Sunday edition of The Sun. Murdoch says that the focus is solely on putting out final edition of News of the World but does not say why News Corp. did not take action against the newspaper any sooner. (Perhaps because the reporter interviewing him did not ask.)
As News Corp. provides few clues, other journalists are digging deep for a better explanation of why News Corp. would close the 168-year-old newspaper. Alison Frankel, a law reporter at Reuters, suggests that it may offer News Corp. the opportunity to destroy records relevant to the phone hacking scandal in advance of a more aggressive investigation by Scotland Yard:
According to British media law star Mark Stephens of Finers Stephens Innocent (whom The Times of London has dubbed “Mr Media”), Rupert Murdoch’s soon-to-be shuttered tabloid may not be obliged to retain documents that could be relevant to civil and criminal claims against the newspaper--even in cases that are already underway. That could mean that dozens of sports, media, and political celebrities who claim News of the World hacked into their telephone accounts won’t be able to find out exactly what the tabloid knew and how it got the information. News of the World is to be liquidated, Stephens told Reuters, it “is a stroke of genius--perhaps evil genius.” Under British law, Stephens explained, all of the assets of the shuttered newspaper, including its records, will be transferred to a professional liquidator (such as a global accounting firm). The liquidator’s obligation is to maximize the estate’s assets and minimize its liabilities.
"Evil genius" is an assertive phrase to describe the speculation. However, it would not be the first time it's been used to describe Rupert Murdoch, who's remained mum on the issue.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Pamela Anderson has fear of mirrors
International
ani-Staff
By Staff
London, Oct 3: Even celebrities are not free from having phobias like the rest of the world, and heading the list is English singer Cheryl Cole, who has been revealed to have a phobia for cotton wool. The Girls Aloud member, who finds cotton wool to be very unpleasant, will just not let it get anywhere near her.
"I went to the dentist the other day and he put it in my mouth and I felt violated for the whole day," the Sun quoted her as saying. "I hate cotton wool. I never use it, not for taking my make-up off or anything. Just the feel of it...it squeaks. Urgh. I can't bear it," she added.
Alison Kerry, a spokesperson for the mental health charity Mind, said that there were many kinds of phobias brought on by fear. "A phobia is an intense fear of an object or a situation, such as wasps or heights, that wouldn't normally worry other people," she said.
"It is an anxiety disorder and centres upon our natural reaction to fear."
"Phobias are extremely common, with recent estimates suggesting that there are 10 million sufferers in the UK.
"They can have a number of causes; some people can trace them back to their childhood and a certain frightening event, whilst in other cases they can result from long-term stress and anxiety," she added.
Cole, it turns out, is not the only celeb who has a phobia, included in the list is the queen of pop herself, Madonna, who is afraid of storms, and hides herself when there is a big thunderstorm.
Another celeb with a phobia is Dame Helen Mirren, who has a fear of talking on the phone.
Even Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson has been added to the celebrity phobia list, hers being a fear of mirrors.
ANIJohan Botha has been brought in as cover for Shakib Al Hasan, who will be with Bangladesh at the time of the IPL © AFP
Kolkata Knight Riders, the defending champions, have recruited Azhar Mahmood and Johan Botha as replacements for the injured pair of James Neesham and Chris Lynn for this IPL season due to begin on April 8.
Neesham, who failed to make New Zealand's World Cup squad, has not regained match fitness after an unspecified injury. He had played four matches for Delhi Daredevils in 2014, was let go and later bought by Knight Riders for Rs 50 lakh during the auction in February.
Lynn was ruled out for 10 weeks after a hamstring problem in the Sheffield Shield earlier this month. He equalled the record for the fastest fifty in the Big Bash League and finished ninth on the charts with 243 runs at a strike rate of 148.17. His first-class season had begun with a shoulder concern, but they were laid to rest during a double-century against Victoria in Brisbane. With form behind him, Lynn could have filled the vacancy left by Jacques Kallis, who retired from all forms of the game last year.
Venky Mysore, the Knight Riders chief executive, admitted losing Lynn and Neesham was untimely, but was confident that Mahmood and Botha would excel.
Mahmood's vast experience - he has played 213 T20s - and knowledge of Indian conditions worked in his favour. He has played two seasons in the IPL for Kings XI Punjab - 2012 and 2013 - and made 382 runs at a strike-rate of 129.05. In 22 matches, he has also taken 29 wickets at an economy rate of 7.61.
Botha, who played three seasons with Rajasthan Royals and then turned out for Daredevils in 2013, was picked by the coach Trevor Bayliss as cover for allrounder Shakib Al Hasan, who will miss a part of the IPL due to national commitments since Bangladesh are scheduled to host Pakistan from April 15.
Botha had an average BBL as a bowler, but as captain he led Adelaide Strikers into the semi-final. "He is the Shakib type of player," Mysore said. "Whenever Shakib is unavailable Botha fits in in with similar skills."
Shakib is likely to play the first two matches at Eden Gardens - the tournament opener against Mumbai Indians on April 8 and three days later against Royal Challengers Bangalore. "He will play as many games as possible before and after the Pakistan tour," Mysore said. "BCB has been most cooperative with us and keeping mind the Pakistan schedule he will be allowed to play to the extent possible."
Nagraj Gollapudi is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.The 1985 letter typed in Latin and signed by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said any decision to remove Stephen Kiesle, a San Francisco priest, from the priesthood must take into account the “good of the universal church”.
The letter, obtained by the Associated Press news agency, could provide |
dead" with cap guns. Bunny Boy plays dead and the boys curse at him, rifle through his pockets, then remove and throw one of his shoes. They grow bored of this and leave him sprawled on the ground.
Tummler and Solomon track down a local boy who is poaching "their" cats. The poacher, named Jarrod Wiggley, is poisoning the cats rather than shooting them. When Tummler and Solomon break into Jarrod's house with masks and weapons with intent to hurt him, they find photos of the young teen in drag and his elderly grandmother, who is catatonic and attached to life support machinery. The poacher Jarrod is forced to care for her, which he had earlier opined was "disgusting". Seeing that Jarrod isn't home, Tummler and Solomon decide to leave. Tummler then discovers the grandmother lying in her bed, states that it is "no way to live," and turns off the life support machine.
A number of other scenes are interspersed throughout the film, including: an intoxicated man (played by Harmony Korine) flirting with a gay dwarf; a man pimping his Down syndrome afflicted sister to Solomon and Tummler; the sisters encountering an elderly child molester; a pair of twin boys selling candy door-to-door; a brief conversation with a tennis player who is treating his ADD; a long scene of Solomon eating dinner while taking a bath in dirty water; a drunken party with arm- and chair-wrestling; and two skinhead brothers boxing each other in their kitchen. There are also a number of even smaller scenes depicting Satanic rituals, footage seemingly from home movies, and conversations containing racial bigotry.
The next scene in the movie is set to the song "Crying" by Roy Orbison, which had been previously mentioned by Tummler as the song his older brother, who was a transsexual, would sing (the brother eventually went to the "Big City" and abandoned him). The final scene involves Solomon and Tummler shooting the sisters' cat repeatedly with their air rifles in the rain with jump cuts to Bunny Boy kissing the teenage girls in a swimming pool. Bunny Boy runs towards the camera through a field holding the body of the dead cat, which he shows to the audience, breaking the fourth wall.
The final scene shows a girl, who shaved her eyebrows earlier in the movie, singing "Jesus Loves Me" in front of her parents in bed. The film finally cuts to black as they tell her to go to bed.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
In writing Gummo, Harmony Korine abandoned traditional three-act plot structure and worked to avoid creating characters of a clear-cut moral dimension. In favor of a collage-like assembly, Korine focused on forming interesting moments and scenes, that when put in succession would become its own unique narrative. To justify such a chaotic assembly, Korine set his film in Xenia, Ohio which had been hit by a tornado in 1974.[3]
To help him achieve his vision, Korine sought out French cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier. His work on Leos Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf made a tremendous impression on Korine. Escoffier, who liked the script, worked on Gummo for a fraction of his usual rate.[3]
During the months of pre-production, Korine scouted for locations in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, filming unusual and distinctive homes to shoot in. Korine often approached people on the street, in bowling alleys and in fast food restaurants and asked them to play a part in his movie. Korine notes, "This is where I grew up. These people are interesting to me, and I'd never seen them represented on screen in a true way."[3]
Chloë Sevigny designed the costumes for the film, mixing pieces that people already owned with items bought at local thrift stores.[3]
Casting [ edit ]
Korine cast the film almost entirely with local non-actors. Old friends were eager to help Korine, such as the two skinhead brothers, skateboarder Mark Gonzales, and dwarf Bryant Krenshaw. Some exceptions include Korine's then-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny, Linda Manz, and Max Perlich.
On Linda Manz, Korine stated, "I had always admired her. There was this sense about her that I liked - it wasn't even acting. It was like the way I felt about Buster Keaton when I first saw him. There was a kind of poetry about her, a glow. They both burnt off the screen."[4] (See Days of Heaven) Gummo was her first screen appearance in 16 years.
Korine spotted his two main characters while watching cable television. Korine noticed Jacob Reynolds in a short role in The Road to Wellville. "He was so visual... I never get tired of looking at his face."[3] The character of Solomon, played by Reynolds, is described in Korine's script as looking "like no other kid in the world."[5]
Nick Sutton (Tummler) was spotted on a drug prevention episode of The Sally Jesse Raphael Show called "My Child Died From Sniffing Paint". In the show they ask Sutton where he thinks he will be in a few years, to which he responds, "I'll probably be dead."[6] Recalls Korine, "I saw his face and I thought that was the boy I dreamed of, that was my Tummler. There was a beauty about him." Producer Scott Macaulay on Sutton stated, "He's this person that Harmony sort of found and put in the middle of this movie, which is at times realistic and at times magical. I think of Nick as being Harmony's equivalent of Herzog's Bruno S."[3] (See The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser & Stroszek).
Korine cast his actors not by how they read lines, but by the visual aura they put off.[7]
Filming [ edit ]
The film was shot in some of Nashville's poorest neighborhoods. Producer Cary Woods comments, "we're essentially seeing the kind of poverty that we're used to seeing in Third World countries when news crews are covering famines, [but] seeing that in the heart of America." One small home housed fifteen people and several thousand cockroaches. Bugs literally crawled up and down the walls.[3] Korine comments, "we had to take out stuff to be able to put the camera in the room."[8] At times, the crew rebelled against filming in such conditions and Korine was forced to purchase hazmat suits for them to wear. Korine and Escoffier, who thought this was offensive, "wore Speedos and flip-flops just to piss them off."[6]
Korine encouraged improvisation and spontaneity. To achieve this, Korine had to establish a mode of trust. "If an actor is a crack smoker, let him go out between takes, smoke crack, and then come back and throw his refrigerator out the window! Let people feel they can do whatever they want with no consequence."[8] Producer Scott Macaulay commented the improvisational methods yielded deep results for everyone involved. "For a lot of the non-actors, you sensed that it was a very emotional experience for them, and that they were tapping into something important."[3] Korine adds, "I wanted to show what it was like to sniff glue. I didn't want to judge anybody. This is why I have very little interest in working with actors. [Non-actors] can give you what an actor can never give you: pieces of themselves."[8]
Korine wanted each scene to be shot with different visual looks and styles. While many scenes are shot in traditional pre-planned 35mm, Korine handed out 8mm, 16mm, Polaroid, VHS, and Hi-8 cameras to his crew, friends and family to achieve an enhanced collage-like style. "I wanted everything to feel that it was done for a reason. Like they shot it on video because they couldn't get it onto 35mm or they shot it on Polaroids because that was the only camera that was there... I felt like shooting each scene on its own terms and then making sense of it afterwards. And I felt that the styles would blend, that there would be a cohesiveness."[8]
On the last day of shooting, Escoffier shot the chair-wrestling kitchen scene alone with a rigged boom on his camera. Some people had just gotten out of prison and Korine felt the performance would be greater if he wasn't in the room. The crew shut all the doors and turned off all the monitors, so no one knew what was going on. In between takes, Korine would run in and get everyone hyped up. At the end of the scene there is a moment of silence where no one knows what to do next. Korine comments, "When I saw that in the dailies, it amazed me, because Jean Yves really captured that awkwardness, that sad silence; it was beautiful."[6]
Korine shot Gummo in just four weeks during the summer of 1996, most of the film being shot on the very last day of production. This was due to the crew waiting for rain. The last scene shot is the one with Korine starring as a heavily intoxicated and homosexual boy on a couch with a little person.
Any scenes appearing to show violence against animals were simulated, sometimes using prosthetic animals.[9]
Editing [ edit ]
Korine worked with editor Chris Tellefsen to synthesize the pre-planned footage with the "mistakist" footage:
"We go from scenes that are completely thought out, almost formal, scenes that resonate in this classical film sense, and then we go to other scenes where it's like, total mistakes, stuff shot on video where the kids forget there's a camera there and talk about how much they hate niggers."[10]
Korine said that he used footage from any source he could find that fit the aesthetic: "That cat tape was a tape that a friend of mine had given me, of him doing acid with his sister. They were in a garage band and there was a shot of their kitten. That [phasing] was an in-camera mistake."[8]
The final film is about 75% scripted.[8]
Music [ edit ]
Gummo's soundtrack paints a wide canvas of American pop-culture, ranging from Madonna's "Like a Prayer", from Almeda Riddle's field recording of the traditional children's song "My Little Rooster", to the stoner metal of the California band Sleep. Other popular songs include Buddy Holly's "Everyday" and Roy Orbison's "Crying", which closes the film and is directly referenced in the dialogue.
Metal and powerviolence bands such as Bethlehem, Mystifier, Absu, Burzum, Bathory, Brujeria, Eyehategod and Spazz are also featured.[11] Korine later showed interest in black metal subculture in his 2000 visual series The Sigil of the Cloven Hoof Marks Thy Path.
Themes [ edit ]
The film explores a broad range of issues including drug abuse, violence, homicide, vandalism, mental illness, poverty, profanity, homophobia, sexual abuse, sexism, suicide, grief, prostitution, and animal cruelty. Korine avoided any romantic notions regarding America, including its poor and mentally handicapped.[7][12]
Korine comments on the film's pop-aesthetic, saying: "America is all about this recycling, this interpretation of pop. I want you to see these kids wearing Bone Thugs & Harmony t-shirts and Metallica hats - this almost schizophrenic identification with popular imagery. If you think about, that's how people relate to each other these days, through these images."[8] Dot and Helen are modeled after Cherie Currie. "I wanted them to seem like homeschool kids... sort of guessing and coming up with these hipster things. They almost make a homeschool hip language. I wanted this inbred vernacular."[8]
The film has a strong vaudevillian influence. The name of the character Tummler is taken directly from the vaudevillian term given to lower-level comics of the day. "The guys that would check you into a hotel room, take your coat, and at the same time throw a few one-liners out. They're like the warm-up, the lowest level comedian. The tummler."[4] (See Borscht Belt)
Robin O'Hara argues that while people naturally look for points of reference to describe Gummo (such as Herzog, Cassavetes, Arbus, Fellini, Godard, Maysles and Jarman) that Korine's art really is his own. "He is an original, in every sense of the word."[3] Korine comments on the film's aesthetic: "We tried very hard not to reference other films. We wanted Gummo to set its own standard."[3]
Release [ edit ]
Gummo premiered at the 24th Telluride Film Festival on August 29, 1997. During the screening, numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.[citation needed] Several festival appearances followed including International Film Festival Rotterdam where it won the KNF Award for "best feature film in the official section that does not yet have distribution within the Netherlands," and Venice Film Festival where it received a special mention from the FIPRESCI jury.[13][14] It was picked up for distribution by Fine Line Features, and saw a limited release with an R rating (edited from the original NC-17 version) in the United States on October 17, 1997[15] for pervasive depiction of anti-social behavior of juveniles, including violence, substance abuse, sexuality and language.
Critical reception [ edit ]
Gummo currently holds a 34% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 50 reviews.[16] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized score, the movie holds a 19/100 rating based on 15 reviews, which indicates "overwhelming dislike." A short excerpt from Gummo was shown after the opening sequence in the 1998 Hype Williams film Belly.
Werner Herzog praised the film and spoke of being especially moved by the bacon taped to the wall during the bathtub scene.[6]
Director Lukas Moodysson listed it as one of his top ten films for the 2002 Sight and Sound Poll and Australian director Megan Spencer also praised the film.[17] David Stratton of SBS's The Movie Show stated in his review that "cat lovers should be warned", but ultimately praised the film, calling it "original".[18]
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant on Gummo writes, "Venomous in story; genius in character; victorious in structure; teasingly gentle in epilogue; slapstick in theme; rebellious in nature; honest at heart; inspirational in its creation and with contempt at the tip of its tongue, [Gummo] is a portrait of small-town Middle American life that is both bracingly realistic and hauntingly dreamlike."[3]
The Diary of Anne Frank II [ edit ]
Screenshot from the collage
The Diary of Anne Frank Pt II is a 40-minute three-screen collage featuring the same actors and themes as Gummo, and can be considered a companion piece.[19]
Korine comments, "I could probably make another two movies with the excess footage [from Gummo]. Some of this material I'm going to use in this art work... the problem you run into doing multimedia projection is that a lot of the time, the style takes over. It threatens and reduces the content. It becomes almost like a music video - mixing all these forms for no reason."[8]`IOLANI PALACE
`Iolani Palace was built in 1882 by the last King of Hawai`i, King David Kalakaua. The seat of government of the Kingdom of Hawai`i, `Iolani Palace had electricity and telephones installed several years before the White House. The Palace remained a royal residence until Queen Lili`uokalani, the King's sister and successor, was deposed and the Hawaiian monarchy overthrown in January 1893. The Queen was imprisoned in the Palace for eight months in 1895 by the unlawful Provisional Government, charged with misprision of treason for attempting to restore Hawai`i's sovereignty. The Palace served as capitol of the Provisional Government, Republic, Territory and State of Hawai`i until 1969. At that time the Palace was vacated and restoration begun. It is now a museum under the direction of Friends of `Iolani Palace, who continue restoration efforts. `Iolani Palace continues to be a focal point in efforts to restore Hawai`i's sovereignty and independence.
`Iolani Palace website with tour information
Photograph by Don Ceppi
Return to the Hawaiian Independence Home Page or the Images IndexPros of Raspberry Pi for Digital Signage
Low Price: It's tough to find any other hardware option that comes with the same functionality on the market.
It's tough to find any other hardware option that comes with the same functionality on the market. Customizability: The possibilities are endless when it comes to customization with a Raspberry Pi. You can write your own programs (depending on your know-how) and customize your content with our open source digital signage platform.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to customization with a Raspberry Pi. You can write your own programs (depending on your know-how) and customize your content with our open source digital signage platform. Compact: The small size allows you to mount it or install it virtually anywhere.
The small size allows you to mount it or install it virtually anywhere. Energy Efficient: Compared to other hardware options, the Pi's energy efficiency is excellent.
Compared to other hardware options, the Pi's energy efficiency is excellent. Community: Our Community is filled with other people who are sharing their experience with Pi's and they're often willing to help others.
When you add up the costs of media players, displays, and software, digital signage can be a big investment. With the release of the Raspberry Pi 3, the engine behind your display just got a lot more powerful for a very reasonable price. If you're looking for an affordable hardware option for your digital signage, the Raspberry Pi is the perfect pick. Read on to learn more about digital signage on the Raspberry Pi and why and when you should consider it. The original Raspberry Pi, combined with our free digital signage platform, introduced everyone to low-cost digital signage. For specific use cases, the Pi works great. Below are some of the pros of using a Raspberry Pi.
However, the Pi does come with limited processing power and numerous challenges for video display. Here are some of the limitations you should be aware of when considering a Pi for digital signage.
Cons of Raspberry Pi for Digital Signage
Limited memory: It's not possible to increase the Pi's RAM above 1 GB. Some users also find it limiting to rely on a microSD card for their storage needs.
It's not possible to increase the Pi's RAM above 1 GB. Some users also find it limiting to rely on a microSD card for their storage needs. Lag: Users have reported lag when displaying resource intensive pages.
Background on the Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi started out as an idea in 2006 with the goal of making an extremely affordable computer for kids to learn to program on. In 2008, encouraged by improvements in the price point and power of mobile processors, the founders of the project decided to form of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and three years later they released their first mass-produced computer, the Raspberry Pi Model B - which has since sold over 2 million units.
Since the beginning, “Do It Yourselfers” have been experimenting with the Raspberry Pi for digital signage. It was in 2011 that we first heard of people successfully adapting our open source player to run on the Pi, and by 2013 we had released an official Raspberry Pi Player. It’s an incredibly popular topic in our user Community.
If you’re interested in the Pi for digital signage, check out our install directions in the Knowledge Base and share your ideas and experiences in our Community. If you have pictures and stories of your Pi-powered displays that you would be willing to share on our blog, send them our way - we’re always looking to see what our users can create!
Raspberry Pi Resources
Want to learn more? We have a lot of resources to help you with digital signage on the Raspberry Pi. Explore the links below:
Now Try This!
Looking for ideas on how to use your digital signage? Here are a few things you can try out:
Get Started with Digital Signage on the Raspberry PiA representative from Nordic Games revealed to Polygon that they have acquired the THQ trademark and will be publishing games under the THQ name.
General Manager Klemens Kreuzer said that Nordic has recently recently closed a separate agreement for the trademark, one that was negotiated outside of the 2013 bankruptcy auctions where Nordic acquired numerous parts of the THQ catalog including the Darksiders series.
Kreuzer says that the agreement will allow Nordic to publish titles, potentially including the upcoming MX vs ATV, with THQ branding.
"It was kind of surprise to some industry veterans and players that we were the winner of the auction of the THQ titles," Kreuzer said. "The challenging fact is nobody has ever heard about Nordic Games before [the THQ auction]. There were so many articles with the headlines ‘Who the fuck is Nordic Games?’ We said, okay they were right.
"We have seen an uplift in the name of Nordic Games, and what we have also done is we have made a second deal with THQ where we bought the THQ trademark."
Kreuzer says that Nordic currently has the credentials of the THQ Facebook page and that a post made on June 10th regarding the upcoming MX vs ATV title was made by his team. That post was initially met with skepticism, with some Facebook users questioning if it was legitimate.
"We are small team," Kreuzer said. "The expectations from outside regarding the IPs of THQ are really high. We see it everyday on our Facebook sites. If we post something new to a project the first comments are, ‘Oh, nice. But what about Darksiders 3?’
"This is where we need some more patience from the fans, because we want to be able to do it right. The owner of Nordic Games has given [interviews] where he has said that he doesn’t want to make a shitty sequel."
He said that when his team is ready they will have something new to say about Darksiders. He also said that more announcements were coming at the Gamescom convention in August.KARACHI: Pakistan hockey team coach Shahnaz Sheikh made allegations that it was "India's conspiracy" to put pressure on his players ahead of the Champions Trophy final against Germany, which his team lost 0-2.Pakistan players had engaged in wild celebrations after beating arch-rivals India 4-3 in a nail-biting semifinal in Bhubaneswar with some taking their jerseys off while making obscene gesture towards the Indian spectators. As a result two of his players Amjad Ali and Mohammed Tousiq were banned.Sheikh, a former Olympian alleged foul-play and also said that a "small incident" was blown out of proportion."The way the incident of our players celebrating after the semifinal win over India was blow out of proportion and the manner in which we were put under pressure before the final against Germany is a confirmation of Indian conspiracy. They didn't want us to win the title," Sheikh said in an interview.Sheikh also complained that the team wasn't provided with any security as they were returning by bus crossing the Wagah Border."It was a long drive and there was no security escort given to us which was strange because in the past buses have been stoned and harassed on this route. More importantly, soon after we beat India in the semifinal, the attitude towards us changed and it added to the pressure on us before the final," fumed Sheikh.The Indian media and Hockey India had lashed out at the Pakistani players after their over-the-top celebrations but the celebrated player of his time defended the incident."It was natural action on their part and it wasn't done with any wrong intention. They are youngsters and they got emotional and carried away. But the way the incident was blown out of proportion and the way I was pressurized to submit a public apology was an awful experience," said Sheikh.He went on to allege that even India's behaviour after their Asian Games triumph was not at all sporting."When the Indians beat us in the Asian Games final, they also celebrated in a big way and they made signs but we accepted all that in sporting spirit because such celebrations are done at spur of the moment. It's not meant to convey any message," said Sheikh.He said he would like to see the Pakistan Hockey Federation take up the matter with the FIH "The Indian hockey officials after the CT semifinal, literally bullied us and the match officials to ban two players which made a difference to us in the final," Sheikh added.There are so many things to say on the subject of child support. Recently a post by Suzanne Cramer,Budget Fail: Child Support is it Enough?, brought up loads of comments and discussion.
Reading some of these comments, once again the disparity of thinking of the men and the women on child support came to mind. From a woman's point of view, who does receive child support and no alimony, child support is never enough to cover the lifestyle of the ex-wife, unless you are my current husband, who made a conscious choice to pay her enough to cover her lifestyle as well as that of his children. But, that is a rarity in this life. Most men don't make enough money to do that, and if they did, I doubt they would fork it over to continue to support a woman they are no longer married to, unless court ordered to do so, in which case each check is written with bitter ink and resentment.
It is said over and over again that the mother needs to get off her a** and get a job, even though she may have the children 90 percent, 70 percent or even 50 percent of the time and the children may not be in school full time and she has been a stay at home mom. I am going to be bold and speak for all divorced women, we get it. And, believe it or not, most of us agree.
Let's turn the tables though. The mother earns the big bucks and has primary custody, while the father is out of work. He is court-ordered to pay child support. The mother doesn't need that money, should she give it up so that he can have a better lifestyle when the children are with him? He doesn't have the same luxuries as the mother at his home. He can't afford the latest and greatest Nintendo DSi with the big screen or even have enough bedrooms for each kid to have his own space. He can't afford cable much less clothing to keep at his house for when his children come to stay with him.
Or better yet, since the mother does make more money, should she subsidize his standard of living so when the kids are with him, they are comfortable? After all, we all say child support is for the children. Let's face it that would hardly ever happen that the mother with custody and more money will pay the dad. I do know some that do it, but they are resentful and angry about it and feel it is the father's responsibility to support not only himself, but his kids.
Light bulb moment! The mother who is paying feels it is the father's responsibility! And, isn't that what all the father's who pay support to their wives are b*tching about? They want to pay for their children, but feel it is the mother's responsibility to provide the lifestyle they want for themselves and the kids.
It is a fact that child support will only go so far in providing the necessities for the kids, and yes, if you want a better lifestyle or even to maintain a lifestyle, you must either marry well or get out there and work. And, this works both ways. The father must do the same. If you are able bodied and smart, or maybe not smart, you can go and get a job, just like the rest of Middle America. Being divorced does not make you handicapped; it just makes you no longer married.
Does it take away your empowerment as a woman to accept child support? No. You were married, you had children, you get divorced and someone has to pay to put food in those little mouths and clothes on those backs. Who should pay? The parent that does not have primary custody. Why? Because the output they have when they do have custody is far less than the output of the parent that has those children the majority of the time, even if they do have clothing and shoes for that child that they purchased.
Does receiving child support entitle you to watch Oprah all day and eat bon bons on the couch? Absolutely not. You have as much, if not more responsibility to financially take care of those children, and you need to do whatever it takes to hold up your end of the money bag. You want a big birthday party bash for your child? Budget your money and if you have enough, have it, but the truth is, your child doesn't care as long as he or she is having a good time with their friends and they are the center of attention for those few hours with gifts coming their way.
You want your child to have a car when they turn 16? Who doesn't, but most kids don't get that when they turn 16, 17 or even 18. You want your children to go to college? We all do, how about instead of taking your children out to dinner; put that money into a college fund. Think of how those meals will add up to over the years to help send your kids to college.They are really taking their defeats in Syria and in recent elections to heart, as the Russian media network, and others like it, are taking much of their audience around the globe.
Add to this are the independent bloggers who are widening the discussion about pertinent issues of the day, and in some cases even discovering new ones purposely left out by the mainstream media.
In response to their increasingly undeniable irrelevance, an onslaught of anti-“fake news” propaganda were unleashed right away in recent days and in all major media networks and establishment blogs, against those sites where people are frequenting for their daily dose of verifiable news.
Interestingly enough, while they were doing that anti-“fake news” overdrive, the US Congress itself is passing a bill that for all intents and purposes acknowledges the effective delivery of Russian news outlets which should only be possible if the audience trust those sites.
Consider the House Bill no. 6393 which is aimed at countering “active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments. It places travel restrictions on personnel and consulars of the Russian Federation in the United States,” and passed without the noisy mainstream media ever talking about it.
These are signs that, unlike before, they are now accepting the fact about their own failure to influence much of the news consuming public, and one of these days, we shouldn’t be surprised if they might just start closing shop.
Here’s the house bill summary:
Summary: H.R.6393 — 114th Congress (2015-2016)
There is one summary for H.R.6393. Bill summaries are authored by CRS.
Shown Here:
Introduced in House (11/22/2016)
Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017
This bill authorizes FY2017 appropriations for the conduct of intelligence and intelligence-related activities of:
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI);
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA);
the Department of Defense;
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA);
the National Security Agency (NSA);
the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force;
the U.S. Coast Guard;
the Departments of State, the Treasury, Energy, and Justice;
the Federal Bureau of Investigation;
the Drug Enforcement Administration;
the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO);
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA); and
the Department of Homeland Security.
The bill also authorizes FY2017 appropriations for: (1) the Intelligence Community Management Account, (2) the Central Intelligence Agency Retirement and Disability Fund, and (3) the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
The ODNI must submit a five-year investment strategy for outreach and recruiting efforts in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) that includes cybersecurity and computer literacy. Higher minimum pay rates may be established for positions that require STEM expertise.
The bill establishes an executive branch interagency committee to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments. It places travel restrictions on personnel and consulars of the Russian Federation in the United States.
The ODNI must implement a uniform policy to ensure the independence of inspectors general of the intelligence community, the ODNI, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the NGA, and the NRO. Inspectors general must report directly to Congress when an employee’s urgent concern involving classified information or false statements appears credible.
The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive is redesignated as the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, with a director to be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.
The bill also revises or sets forth requirements for:
the ODNI to participate in fundraising events for nonprofit organizations that support intelligence community employees and their families;
CIA employee death and retirement benefits;
publication of the logos of terrorist organizations;
space-based environmental monitoring missions and acquisition programs to meet national security requirements for cloud characterization and theater weather imagery;
an evaluation of aerial imagery technologies that can be used to share intelligence with other countries as a replacement for the current regime of observation flights;
a declassification review of intelligence reports regarding past terrorist activities of detainees transferred from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and
a concept for a combined interagency space operations center and an updated strategy for national security satellite systems.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/6393
Definitely, the decentralized “fake news” alternative media is gaining the upperhand as of now in the battle for the mind of the individual, and the responsibility and the risks have never been greater.
Remember that in March of this year, RT founder Mikhail Lesin, died under highly questionable circumstance in Washington, DC.
The investigation into former Russian Press Minister Mikhail Lesin’s death was referred to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. Despite that, US media say authorities don’t see the death as suspicious, citing sources in law enforcement.
The New York Times has reported that the referral of Lesin’s case to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in March was merely a formality, suggesting that no criminal investigation followed.
Citing the same unnamed sources, the New York Times says neither the FBI, nor the US Justice Department have been taking an active part in the ongoing investigation.
Initial reports following Lesin’s death in DC’s Dupont Hotel on November 5, 2015 said he suffered a heart attack.
Four months later, in March, Washington police and a DC medical examiner announced the cause of death as blunt head trauma. They added that “blunt force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities and lower extremities” contributed to the 57 year old’s death.
https://www.rt.com/news/338375-death-lesin-natural-causes/
He was a very close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.The overwhelming vote in Congress to override President Obama’s veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) bill will haunt U.S.-Saudi relations for years. It is a reflection of the growing weakness of America’s oldest alliance in the Middle East that goes well beyond 9/11. The biggest loser will be the next president of the United States who will inherit a poisoned partnership, which she will need to help manage the region’s chaos and to fight terror.
The lesser-noticed 9/11 report
Congress passed JASTA despite two congressionally-mandated independent investigations in 2004 and 2015 that concluded that the Saudi government had no role in al-Qaida’s plot to attack America on September 11, 2001. The 9/11 Commission in 2004 examined the possible Saudi role in the plot closely and concluded there was no evidence to support the claims that the Saudi government or Saudi officials were involved in the attacks. No Saudi official was involved in the planning or execution of Osama bin Laden’s mass murder. The staff report of the commission that investigated the attack’s funding, which was released separately, concluded “despite persistent public speculation, there is no evidence” the Saudis funded it.
There is a second report that has gotten far too little attention in the JASTA debate. In 2014, Congress mandated that the Federal Bureau of Investigation conduct a special review of how it had implemented the recommendations of the 9/11 report. The FBI was also asked to review if there was any new evidence not available to the 9/11 commission that would change its findings concerning the perpetrators of the attack and their supporters, if any, in foreign governments.
The FBI set up a commission to do so. Three outside experts agreed to head the commission: former Attorney General Ed Messe, former Congressman Tim Roemer, and Georgetown University Professor Bruce Hoffman, one of the foremost experts on terrorism in the country. The FBI gave the commission full access to its records and to its employees. The commission also reviewed documents captured from al-Qaida since 9/11—including material found in bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad Pakistan in May 2011—to see if they shed any new light. They also had access to the information acquired from al-Qaida detainees.
The FBI commission report was published last year and is available online. It found that “no new information obtained since the 2004 9/11 Commission report would change the 9/11 Commission’s finding regarding responsibilities for the 9/11 attacks.” The 2015 FBI commission specifically looked at some of the accusations about alleged Saudi involvement and found them not credible. After reviewing the material from Abbottabad and from Guantanamo, it concludes: “none of this evidence identifies any additional participants in the planning or carrying out of the 9/11 attacks” beyond those identified in the 9/11 Commission report. Indeed, the new material available in the last decade since the 2004 report “does strengthen and enhance the case against the existing plotters” identified by the commission in 2004.
Shaky relations
Of course, few members of Congress read the reports they ask for. They voted for JASTA because the Kingdom is increasingly unpopular in America. The fact that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis is only part of the problem. Some Americans never forgot the 1973 oil embargo that ravaged the American economy, and others are appalled at Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, especially on women’s rights.
The war in Yemen has further damaged the alliance. The richest Arab states, led by Riyadh, have been bombing and blockading |
of muscles. Thus it seems that myogenic patterning framework may be an ancestral trait. However, Andrikou and Arnone explain that the basic muscle patterning structure must also be considered in combination with the cis regulatory elements present at different times during development. In contrast with the high level of gene family apparatuses structure, Andrikou and Arnone found that the cis regulatory elements were not well conserved both in time and place in the network which could show a large degree of divergence in the formation of muscle cells. Through this analysis, it seems that the myogenic GRN is an ancestral GRN with actual changes in myogenic function and structure possibly being linked to later coopts of genes at different times and places.[29]
Evolutionarily, specialized forms of skeletal and cardiac muscles predated the divergence of the vertebrate/arthropod evolutionary line.[30] This indicates that these types of muscle developed in a common ancestor sometime before 700 million years ago (mya). Vertebrate smooth muscle was found to have evolved independently from the skeletal and cardiac muscle types.
See alsoGet information on education programs that could help you increase your earning power.
Enlarge 1933 AP photo Some of nearly 5,000 unemployed people who waited outside the State Labor Bureau, which housed the State Temporary Employment Relief administration in New York. AUDIO SLIDESHOW AUDIO SLIDESHOW First, critics said the government's massive $800 billion economic jump-start was too much. Now, with unemployment spiking, some say maybe it's not enough. And yet, as Christina Romer, head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said Monday, the measure has barely taken effect. NOVEMBER REPORT: Is today's crisis another Great Depression? In a speech to the left-of-center Brookings Institution, Romer brushed aside talk that the ailing economy will require a second shot of fiscal adrenaline next year. "We need to let the medicine work for a while," she said. But citing lessons from the Great Depression, she said the government must keep spending to sustain the economy until a recovery is well established. After the 1929 crash, the economy plummeted for more than three years. But as the New Deal's deficit spending took hold, the U.S. posted the fastest peacetime growth in its history. The economy expanded by 11% in 1934, 9% in 1935 and 13% in 1936. Then, though the unemployment rate remained stuck in double digits, President Franklin Roosevelt tightened spending and levied the first Social Security payroll taxes, which drained more purchasing power from private hands. The Federal Reserve, at the same time, doubled reserve requirements for banks. That one-two punch dealt the economy a blow that added two years to the Depression, Romer said. Once seen as hyperbole, Depression references have increasingly become a staple of economic commentary. And with reason: The U.S. today has suffered the worst 12-month job loss since the Great Depression, the highest home foreclosure total and the most crippling financial crisis. Romer, an economic historian who specialized in the Depression while teaching at the University of California-Berkeley, said policymakers have learned the era's lessons. There are parallels between the Depression and the current crisis. Both began with collapsing asset prices, saw leading financial institutions wrecked and were of global dimensions. But even though today's economy is badly wounded, it's still nowhere near Depression depths. From the 1929 peak to its trough in 1932, the economy contracted by more than 25% vs. the 2% decline suffered from the most recent peak, Romer said. Despite fierce public controversy over the trillion-dollar-plus bailouts of banks, insurance companies and automakers, Romer said those initiatives prevented the economy from deteriorating even more than it has the past year. "We've had a much better policy response already," she said. And Romer said the Depression does offer one positive lesson, even if an underwhelming one. "A key feature of the Great Depression," she said, "is that it did eventually end." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreLena Headey is a powerful actress. Whether she’s playing a time-traveling momma, or Ma-Ma, you can’t help but be captivated by her when she’s on screen. Headey, of course, also stars as Cersei Lannister on HBO’s Game of Thrones and was one of the actors involved in a scene making some major waves with fans. We’d already heard what the director, executive producer, George R.R. Martin, and actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau had to say on it but Headey has finally been asked for her opinion on the subject.
In the discussions we’ve had, folks have been wondering what Headey had to say about the scene many consider to have included a rape. An interviewer from GoldDerby did a live Google Hangout with the actress just yesterday and brought it up. Now, to be fair, Google Hangouts are always a bit awkward thanks to the technology involved but this one is worse than usual considering the topic of Headey’s thoughts on “Breaker of Chains” were broached. The video is embedded below but we’ve transcribed it here as well for your consideration.
GoldDerby: There was a massive scene that got a lot of talk, not last night but last week on Game of Thrones involving you and your brother. I guess King Joffrey was around, his cold body was around
Headey: Innocent bystander for the first time ever.
GoldDerby: Yes! The one time he’s not the one causing the mischief. I just wanted to ask, for that scene with Nikolaj, what was your reaction to that scene? When you got it I read online that you had mixed feelings about that scene. Whether that’s true or not I guess you can clear up for us. How did you find, how was your reaction to that scene?
Headey: I think, you know, I don’t know if I’d describe it as mixed feelings, that sounds kind of a bit blasé but I…you know, it’s very important to me and I love Cersei and I…you know, David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] write beautifully for us and Brian [Cogman], and…there’s my phone.
[pause for phone ringing]
GoldDerby: In case you don’t know the scene I was just talking about…Oh, you’re back, Lena?
Headey: I’ve returned. Yes, so, you know, we spent a long time rehearsing it with Alex [Graves], the director, and myself and Nik and Jack [Gleeson] and you know, of course it’s a very complicated moment for many reasons and what I will say about it is, from my stance as an actor who’s had this character for three years, four years, who knows her intimately…you know you’re standing, as a woman in absolute grief, in pain that she’s never felt before. And you know, she’s staring at the body of her dead son who’s been her sanity and her purpose and she’s joined by her brother who’s also her lover so, you know, we’ve also got bigger problems going on than the ones everyone’s talking about [Editor’s Note: I would disagree.]. And it becomes very messy. And there’s lust and desperation and you know, a need to feel something other than this searing, empty loss. And so that’s where I came from when we were filming. There was this need and it wasn’t right and yet it felt great and yet it wasn’t right and it played out the way it did. And I was really happy with it. I thought it was um, my intention was there and I think people’s reactions are right and opinions are varying.
GoldDerby: I read and heard sort of two opinions sort of about this scene. Some people say, “well in the book it was a clearly consensual scene and they’ve gone off from the book said.” Others have been, “no, it sort of ended up being consensual in the show as well.” Do you have an opinion on that, whether this was a consensual act or not?
Headey: [Thinks about it.] This is a really tricky one because, you know, either way, anything I say I’m going to get slaughtered for.
GoldDerby: Yes. How did you play it? As an actress approaching it…
Headey: I came from this place of grieving and a need to feel connected and alive and you know, this is the only other person, probably the only person she has ever trusted in the world. And she’s shunned Jaime and he’s never stopped loving her and in that moment she’s embracing and she’s rejecting of him in the same breath and you know, if I had not have said “not now, not here,” you know, if there were silence I don’t know how people would have reacted, you know what I mean? But it’s tricky, man, because we could go into this for a long time, I could get personal, we could…you know what I mean? It’s a real fucker of a situation. And I also think, you know, without being too much of a twat about it, we’re talking about a show with dragons, incest, babies taken by zombies, you know…
GoldDerby: Do you think it was the right direction for the show to take with that scene? Do you think it was done…
Headey: Yes! I do, I stand by it absolutely and I think that it’s an interesting turning point for Jaime’s character, massively, because we’ve kind of despised him. You know, he killed a fucking child while shagging his sister and then we fell in love with him again and now this you know, this greatly divided scene has happened and it’s getting people talking and bringing up important, important conversations.
From my view, there’s obviously a few problematic things said in this chat but it also reads (and plays) as a woman who really doesn’t want to land on either side of the fence. Obviously Headey also has a different view of the whole thing than viewers had simply from being on set the day of and hearing whatever intention was behind the scene. And I think that’s what it boils down to for her at least. While Graves called it “forced sex” and Benioff admitted Jaime was forcing himself on Cersei, for Headey’s part, her character wanted Jaime in that moment. But wanting to have sex with someone doesn’t constitute consent if that consent isn’t expressed and, unfortunately for a lot of us, that’s not the impression we took away from the scene.
There’s obviously a lot of discussion to be had about Headey’s perspective but how do you feel about what she had to say?
(via several email tipsters)
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I’ve always been one of the most maternal women I know. I’ve quipped for decades “Jewish mother in training” while offering sunscreen or a sweater or more food to someone I thought needed it. In my teens and 20s, I told anyone who would listen that if I made it to 30 or 35 without meeting him, I’d go to a bar or a friend or a sperm bank so I could be a mom. News of a friend’s miscarriage or a celebrity’s infertility brought me visceral pain. I always stumbled when asked “Where do you want to be in five years?,” because the truth was I hoped to be pushing my kid on a swing set, and that’s no way to answer a job-interview question.
So I couldn’t imagine I’d be among the 15 percent of American women who end their years of fertility without children. My desire to have children was too strong, too definite. Yet here I am, nearly 50, without offspring. And I am completely at ease.
Sure, once in a great while, a friend’s child will be so adorable or smart or engaging that one of my few remaining shriveled eggs screams, “Use me, use me!” The last time it happened, two friends, both much younger, said it was proof that I need to hurry up and have kids while I still can, or at least adopt. I recoiled. I like my life without children now — so much that I’m not even fazed anymore when heads tilt sympathetically at class reunions.
My changed outlook followed my life’s circumstances pretty logically. A handful of “hims” wandered in and out of my life, but I never met one I wanted to raise kids with. I could have gone it alone, and I have great respect for women who choose that route, but the demands of daily journalism and a chronic migraine condition made raising a child solo seem too daunting. And then came an unexpected wrinkle: the challenging and draining, rewarding and gratifying task of taking care of my parents.
When I hit 40, my aging parents’ health declined precipitously. Without regret, I left my career and moved back home. Moving in with Mom and Dad might seem extreme. But more than half of Americans with parents 65 and older said in a 2015 Pew Research Center study that they had helped their parents with personal care or day-to-day tasks in the previous year. I just did it full time, with help from my siblings.
Devoting myself to my mother and father was the most important work of my life. It also left little energy, urge or time for pregnancy or baby care.
The first eight months, my mother’s last, were a blur. We had clashes, but we also had the most intimate, emotional, mutually nurturing moments. My favorites, I think, came in the middle of the night, after near-emergencies with mobility or the bathroom or medication or pain had eased. I would curl up on her bed and we’d talk, my presence comforting her the way her voice and touch had soothed me as a kid. I got to return some of the love and support she and Dad heaped on me and grab some more of my own while I could.
Eventually I had to let go — and every parent who sends a kid off to college or their first out-of-town job knows how much that hurts. This, of course, was forever. Mom was done with medical treatment and ready to die; my siblings and I had to tell Dad, and I had to persuade the medical staff to stop trying to fix something they could not. It was certainly not what I wanted to do, but it was what she needed us to do. And so, as loving parents do, I yielded to what was best and inevitable.
Dad’s needs, understandably, grew after we lost Mom. Our four years together included crises of emotion, hospitalization and dementia. Sometimes he’d get irate at my refusal to run some top-secret errand for him or take him to the airport so he could get to some far-flung place to which he never would have traveled. Sometimes he hated the dinner I’d spent hours preparing in hopes that he would eat something. But sometimes his wry humor prevailed. Once, when he let out a yelp, I asked what was wrong. He glared at me and barked: “I don’t know, but you’re an asshole.” We both burst into raucous laughs. Often, when we’d wheel him out into the sunshine, a grin would spread over his face and a wondrous “Oh, my” would escape his lips. And my heart would fill to the brim.
I never experienced such pure love as I did while taking care of my mother and father. The basest chore of cleaning him up, for instance, had to be an act of tenderness because it unmanned him so. When a day of his hallucinations, frustrations and temper exhausted me, all he needed to say was, “You really are my angel,” and my weariness would dissolve into the resolve I needed to sustain me through the next valley. I finally understood how parents could look at sleeping children who had acted like devils all day and think of them only as precious gifts.
Dad would never have relinquished authority enough to think of me as the parent — he was a proud World War II veteran, and the roles aren’t supposed to reverse — but my need to parent was surely filled in caring for him and for Mom. I got so much joy in providing them relief, humor and, in an odd way, freedom to live their lives without the day-to-day worries of adulthood. I took on the minutiae and the logistics so they could just enjoy themselves.
After Dad died, I moved west to recover and regenerate. I was 45, and my fertility was expiring rapidly. But I was too drained to think about my “last chance” to have a child. I didn’t even have the energy to want to keep a plant alive; no way could I take on a person. Rebuilding myself and my life took more than two years. As the possibility of parenting waned, friends would remind me that I could still adopt or marry into kids.
Then a sweet dog reached under his cage at the local animal rescue and begged me to take him into my home and heart. I adore my Malcolm with a depth I never imagined. He accepts my love and cuddles with glee, freely and without condition. After being abandoned twice and with medical issues of his own, he needs me as much as I need him.
Of course it isn’t the same as mothering another human, but it is mothering nonetheless. And at my age, I am grateful that it doesn’t carry the same long-term commitment. With 50 bearing down, I wear out much more easily than I did at 30. I cannot imagine chasing after a toddler day and night or — shudders — trying to launch kids in their 20s when I am in my 70s. I have a life that I love, plenty to give when friends or family are in need and the freedom to indulge an adventurous whim without upheaval to others.
The world still revolves around couples and families. From the people we know to advertising and movies, everyone and everything tells us to have babies because our lives will be so much better. I understand why one of my 30-something friends who “can’t wait to have kids” cannot grasp my fulfillment. I get her. I used to be her. I’m a little shocked I’m not still her.
But my ache is gone because I’ve learned there are many ways to nurture. I am content. And eager to see what happens next.A Maryland mom and dad are being blasted online for pulling a cruel prank on their son — which included cursing the young boy out and convincing him he had done something terribly wrong.
“Get your f–king a– up here!” the child’s mother shouts at the start of a 6½-minute video, which was posted to YouTube and shows the deranged stunt going down.
“What the f–k did you do?! What the f–k?!” she screams repeatedly, as her husband films.
“What the hell is that,” the diabolical dad says, panning out to a mess of strewn Uno cards and fake ink spilled everywhere.
“I didn’t do that!” the boy says, breaking down in tears and clutching his chest in fear.
“I swear to God I didn’t do that!” he explains frantically. “Mom and Dad, I didn’t do that! I swear!”
The father, identified by the Philly Voice as Mike Martin, of Damascus, Md., is a notorious prank puller who has posted a slew of similar videos to his YouTube page, dubbed “DaddyOFive.”
Together, he and his wife rule their family with a funny bone and an iron fist — even going so far as to force their kids to plug their social media accounts at the end of some of their clips.
The “Invisible Ink Prank” video has racked up more than 300,000 views since being shared last week. In it, the couple stages a fake spill on a bedroom carpet and pretends to blame it on their son, Cody, in retaliation for a prior mess he had made.
“And here you go with the f–king lying again,” his mom says, as the boy cowers in the corner.
“You did this before!”
Countless YouTube users posted negative comments about the video throughout the weekend after the footage popped up online — so much, in fact, that Martin was forced to remove it and make another video explaining that his son was fine.
“I’m getting all kinds of hate right now on all my social media,” he said in the video, titled “BLOCKING ALL THE HATERS!”
“A lot of people are really pissed off about this video because we’re yelling and the kids are crying and everything like that and apparently it’s upsetting a lot of people,” he said. “A lot of people apparently don’t get it … A lot of people don’t see the humor in it.”
Martin went on to explain that Cody and his other children were completely fine with the prank, despite the outrage.
“Was anybody traumatized?” his mom, “MommyOFive,” asks in the follow-up video.
“No!” the children reply.
“I don’t even know what that words mean, but no,” Cody adds.
While some social media users defended the prank — saying the Martins were simply having fun and acting like a typical, everyday family — most blasted them for taking things too far.
see also YouTubers who made kids cry with extreme prank lose custody The dad and stepmom under fire for a viral YouTube video pranking...
“How ANYONE could defend DaddyOFive is mind boggling. mental abuse is just as bad as phasyical abuse,” tweeted one person. “There’s a FINE line between being a father/authoritarian and being a straight up f–king a–hole.”
Another user wrote, “Just when I thought prank channels couldn’t get any worse, the daddyofive channel has hit a new low. Essentially just child abuse for profit.”
Some of the other pranks that DaddyOFive has pulled in the past have included breaking Cody’s Xbox into pieces — and giving him a new one soon after — and falsely telling him that he was being put up for adoption.
“We are a wild Bunch but still a very loving and close family regardless of what people are saying,” Martin explained Monday on Twitter.By Olivier Bault.
Poland – “It was enough not to steal! “This is how Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło explained in April this year the excellent tax revenues and also the profits generated by the coal mines, an industry that was on the brink of bankruptcy before the PiS came to power at Fall 2015. “It is enough not to steal and not to waste public money” is now the explanation that regularly comes in the mouth of the PiS leaders, as the very good performance of the budget is confirmed and that the scale of tax fraud is revealed, particularly with regard to VAT, during the eight years of the PO-PSL government under the leadership of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and then when he emigrated to Brussels in 2014 in search of a better salary, by Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz.
These good results, which go beyond the expectations of the government itself, are directly linked to the fight against tax evasion, especially systems of business chains created with the sole purpose of generating false invoices in order to cheat on VAT. In the hydrocarbon trade, for example, there is talk of a genuine “mafia of fuels” which has been undermined by the new rules put in place by the government of Beata Szydło under the impetus of the Minister of Finance Mateusz Morawiecki. It seems that in 2012, fuel companies began to sound the alarm, alerting to increasing unfair competition from fraudsters who did not pay VAT at 23%. After the adoption of new rules by the PiS majority in August 2016, declared trade in fuels rose very rapidly by 30%, which gives an idea of the place taken by the black market.
The PiS government has also unified three administrations that have worked separately until nowadays: taxation, tax control and customs. These administrations are now joined into a national tax administration (KAS) since March 1, 2017. The Ministry of Finance has also introduced new IT solutions to hunt fraudsters. For what result? For the period from January to August, tax revenues increased by PLN 20.5 billion (about EUR 4.8 billion) compared to 2016. Annual income of tax revenues increased by 23.5 % from one year to the next, without any increase in the rates levied. Excise and gaming revenues increased by 4.1%, and income tax revenues by 8.3%, while tax revenues on companies are 13.3% higher. As a result, the budget deficit for this year is expected to be 10 or 20 billion zlotys below what was stipulated in the budget law.
In early September, on the eve of the Krynica Economic Forum, Moody’s rating agency raised its growth forecasts for Poland in 2017 from 3.2% to 4.3% and reduced its forecasts of the public finance sector deficit from 2.9% to 2.5%. Yet when PiS introduced the first family allowances since the fall of communism in the spring of 2016, the liberal-libertarian opposition (the Civic Platform — PO — of the former Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the “Modern” party — Nowoczesna — created in order to recover dissatisfied voters from the PO at the 2015 elections), warned that this would lead to the bankruptcy of the state budget. This is all the more so because the PiS still applies other policies known as “populists”: it has increased minimum wages (the average wage is also rising sharply due to an unemployment rate of 7% which had never been so low since 1991), it increased the pensions of the most disadvantaged pensioners and reduced the age of retirement a contrario of what is done elsewhere in Europe. It has also launched a program to build subsidized housing for families and increases military spending.
How is this possible? “It is enough not to steal”, hammered the Conservative majority in favor of the liberal opposition presented in the foreign media as better manager but which has always benefited, and it is not for no reason, of the support of generous sponsors of business milieu. According to figures prepared by the current government for the European Commission, the difference between the VAT that would theoretically have been collected by the State and the actual revenue from the budget for this tax has been multiplied by more than seven during the PO-PSL leadership period (2007-2015) from PLN 7.1 billion (EUR 1.7 billion) to PLN 50.4 billion (EUR 11.7 billion) in 2015. The cumulative amount of the budget for this period would total 262 billion zlotys (61 billion euros)! By comparison, Poland’s budget deficit for 2017 is expected to be just under 33 billion zlotys (7.7 billion euros).
This, together with the social policies and gigantic cases of corruption exposed today by the parliamentary committees of inquiry set up by PiS (fraudulent bankruptcy of the para-bank Amber Gold institution, fraudulent reprivatizations of real estate in the city of Warsaw, which is still run by the PO, investigations of the Smolensk tragedy, …), is probably contributing to PiS’ record popularity in polls, despite its clumsiness and numerous conflicts with the European Commission, in parallel with the great fall of popularity of the PO.
Translated from French by the Visegrád Post.Elephant garlic (Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum) is a perennial plant belonging to the onion genus. It is not a true garlic, but actually a variant of the garden leek. It has a tall, solid, flowering stalk and broad, flat leaves much like those of the leek, but forms a bulb consisting of very large, garlic-like cloves. The flavor of these, while not exactly like garlic, is much more similar to garlic than to leeks. The flavor is milder than garlic, and much more palatable to some people than garlic when used raw as in salads. It is sometimes confused with solo garlic.
Cultivation and use [ edit ]
Bulb size of elephant garlic
The mature bulb is broken up into cloves which are quite large and with papery skins and these are used for both culinary purposes and propagation. Also, much smaller cloves with a hard shell grow on the outside of the bulb. Many gardeners often ignore these, but if they are planted, they produce a nonflowering plant in their first year, which has a solid bulb, essentially a single large clove. In their second year, this single clove then, like a normal bulb, divides into many separate cloves. While it may take an extra year, it is desirable to plant these small bulbils (several can be produced by each bulb) and the harvest increased, though delayed a year.
Unlike many garlics, elephant garlic does not have to be harvested or divided each year, but can be ignored and left in the ground without much risk of rotting. The plant, if left alone, will spread into a clump with many flowering heads (one stalk and flower from each clove, once the bulb divides). These are often left in flower gardens as an ornamental and to discourage pests. Of course, once they get overcrowded, the plant may not do as well, and growth is stunted, with some rotting.
Elephant garlic is not generally propagated by seeds.
The immature plant tops can be topped off (cut) when the plant is young and they are still tender, as can be done with onions, and chives, along with the very immature flower bud, and are called scapes. They can be pickled, lactofermented, stir fried, added to soups, etc. The scapes (whether elephant garlic, garlic, onion, chive, or garlic chive) can also be frozen without any cooking, and generally remain fresh for a year or so without freezer burn, to be added to any soup, stew, stir-fry, etc. Topping the plants off also helps more of the plant's energy to be directed toward the bulb. Since seed is not generally gathered from elephant garlic, this is the best use of resources and helps the bulb, though it does detract from the aesthetic value. A few scapes can be left to mature into stalks to flower.
Like regular garlic, elephant garlic can be roasted whole on the grill or baked in the oven, and then used as a spread with butter on toast. Fresh elephant garlic contains mostly moisture and foams up like boiling potatoes, whether on the stove or in a glass dish in the oven. Drying in the basement for a few months reduces the moisture content, and also brings out a fuller flavor.
Properties [ edit ]
When crushed and then analyzed using a DART ion source, elephant garlic has been shown to produce both allicin, found in garlic, and syn-propanethial-S-oxide (onion lachrymatory factor), found in onion and leek, but absent in garlic, consistent with the classification of elephant garlic as a closer relative of leek than of garlic.[1]
Cultivation [ edit ]
Elephant garlic can be planted at two different times of the year: spring and autumn. In warmer areas, it can be grown over winter for a late-spring harvest.
References [ edit ]
^ Block E, Dane AJ, Thomas S, Cody RB (2010). "Applications of Direct Analysis in Real Time–Mass Spectrometry (DART-MS) in Allium Chemistry. 2-Propenesulfenic and 2-Propenesulfinic Acids, Diallyl Trisulfane S-Oxide and Other Reactive Sulfur Compounds from Crushed Garlic and Other Alliums". Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 58 (8): 4617–4625. doi:10.1021/jf1000106. PMID 20225897.An investigation has been launched into a police officer in Hawaii who allegedly arrested a lesbian couple for kissing in public.
Courtney Wilson and Taylor Guerrero are a Los Angeles couple who were vacationing in Honolulu in March when they were confronted by off-duty Officer Bobby Harrison in a Foodland supermarket. According to a federal lawsuit that the pair has filed in Hawaii's US District Court, they were holding hands while shopping and at one point hugged and kissed when Harrison "observed their consensual romantic contact and, in a loud voice, ordered plaintiffs to stop and 'take it somewhere else.'"
When they made it to check-out, Harrison confronted them again after witnessing similar consensual contact.
"He said, 'You girls don't know how to act. You don't know the difference between a motel and a grocery store,'" Guerrero said.
While Wilson was attempting to call the police, Harrison reportedly grabbed her arm and a scuffle ensued.Body found (Photo: The Republic)
FLORENCE — Authorities have identified a man who died after being found by train tracks in Casa Grande.
The Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office and Pinal County Sheriff's Office say dental records confirmed the body as being that of 18-year-old Nickolas Harris of Casa Grande.
Sheriff's spokesman Jim Knupp says Harris was an unauthorized passenger who possibly fell or attempted to jump off of a train.
Employees from Union Pacific Railroad reported finding him lying on the ground beside their train tracks near Jimmie Kerr Boulevard and Casa Verde Lane on Feb. 16.
He was transported to a Phoenix hospital where he died five days later.
Authorities believe Harris may have boarded or attempted to board the train while in the Tucson/Marana or Picacho areas.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1BNtqapFollowing the sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear programme being lifted in January, many companies are slowly starting to collaborate once more with Tehran, to the excitement of politicians and business investors.
Suspended in 2008, Air France flights to Tehran will recommence from 17 April, flying three times a week. However, the new promising business opportunity for Air France results in a conflict within the company. For the reason, as they say in France, "Cherchez la femme".
The cause for this new protest of Air France staff began with a note to the female cabin crew members that said they would be required to wear long sleeve jackets, trousers (instead of a skirt) and headscarves as uniform on their arrival to Tehran. Air France stewardess expressed their outrage at the "new rules" and refused to cover up.
Flore Arrighi, head of the UNAC flight crews' union, said: "It is not our role to pass judgment on the wearing of headscarves or veils in Iran. What we are denouncing is that it is being made compulsory for us at work."
In France, the full-face veil is forbidden in public spaces and headscarves and other religious signs are banned by law in state schools and offices, which is motivated by the French law on the separation of state and church from 1905.Therefore, making the headscarf part of a uniform would be considered against the law in France.
Moreover, expecting female cabin crew to cover themselves is considered an attack on their dignity and individual freedoms. In response to the "girls' riot" within Air France, the company's spokesperson refused to understand the demands of the female cabin crew and declared that: "Tolerance and respect for the customs of the countries we serve are part of the values of our company."
They later said they would offer an opt-out clause for women on the Paris-Tehran route."If, for personal reasons, they don't want to wear the headscarf when they leave the plane, they would be reassigned to another destination," said Gilles Gateau, Air France's human resources director, on 4 April.
This incident has taken place right in the middle of a heated public debate in France, with liberals on one side, who, in the spirit of Charlie Hebdo, call for society to exercise freedom of speech and refuse to be afraid to criticise Islam and some of its medieval norms. On the other side the so-called regressive left, fractioning with campaigners such as Tariq Ramadan, demanding respect for cultures and attempting to silence any debate about Islam.
Read more from Inna Shevchenko: Europe is divided into two gangs of fools - the racist right and the regressive left
However, the Air France affair goes beyond a simple discussion as here the rules of the Islamic Republic of Iran were imposed upon French female workers while they continue to work for a French employer under French law.
By enforcing headscarves, Air France did not encourage tolerance or support towards the customs of Iran, as it claimed, but demanded support to the theocratic regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The headscarf is not cultural, it is political; it was imposed by the regime after the Iranian Revolution 1979. An imposed head coverage for women is oppression and an attack on their freedom.
In this move, Air France shamefully betrays Western values but more importantly, insults the Iranian women and men who have been campaigning for decades against this oppressive law and struggle with the constant harassment of religious police. The Facebook page of Iranian female campaigners, called My stealthy freedom, that is followed by nearly a million of people and shares photos of women in Iran taking off their headscarves, condemns the Air France initiative and supports the protest of the French stewardesses, calling Western women to support them.
As long as the headscarf remains compulsory for women in many countries and communities, it is a moral crime to claim a headscarf is a sign of woman's freedom and choice.
"This situation once more highlights the necessity for female tourists along with female politicians travelling to Iran to voice their opposition to this unfair law obliging women to comply with a certain dress code. As you might have all realised, numerous Iranian women have taken huge risks to voice their opposition to this compulsory dress code. Why shouldn't the rest of women in the world voice a similar opposition to these laws as loudly as they can?" wrote the Iranian campaigners on their page.
The debates about the Muslim veil are well known. On one hand feminists claim it is a sign of oppression for women, and on the other "Muslim feminists", as they call themselves, argue it is a choice of every woman and a protection of their dignity.
The compulsory nature of the headscarf in countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia, and the similar attitude of communities and now even companies like Air France, contradicts all the claims of Muslim feminists |
-spread picks per week in the LVH Supercontest, which attracted a record 1,034 gamblers, went 37-47-1.
On a smaller scale, the records in the Las Vegas Sun’s sportswriters handicapping contest also regressed. I split the title with a mediocre 51-49-2 mark. Ray Brewer went 50-48-4; Taylor Bern finished 45-54-3.
Combined, those picks were solid losers with a winning percentage of.491 on the year. No matter, it’s time to lumber ahead with what looks like a promising playoff slate.
No spreads of more than a touchdown are on the board for Saturday and Sunday’s wild-card weekend. It’s only the third time that’s happened in 12 seasons, since the NFL realigned to its current structure.
The average first-round spread of 3.75 points in 2014 is more than two points lower than both the 2013 and 2012 playoffs. It would be nice if the bettors could take advantage and reclaim some of those season-long losses.
Talking Points will try to help the best it can with breakdowns and picks of all the playoff point spreads going forward. Blog picks went 5-5-1 in last year’s postseason.
Read below for the wild-card edition of the series.
Kansas City Chiefs at Indianapolis Colts, 1:35 p.m. Saturday on NBC
The line: Indianapolis minus-2.5. Sports books may have opened the spread just an average Trent Richardson rushing attempt too high. In other words, it was just a marginal amount. While Colts minus-2.5 has stuck at a couple properties, most others have shifted either a point or a half-point towards the Chiefs. The adjustment did feel a little drastic considering the Chiefs were 7.5-point favorites when these teams met in Kansas City two weeks ago. Indianapolis rolled 23-7, but that shouldn’t be enough to precipitate a 10-point swing even when factoring in home-field advantage.
The matchup: The Chiefs looked as sloppy as Andrew Luck’s neck beard when they played the Colts in week 16. Despite only getting outgained by 59 yards, Kansas City had four turnovers. Indianapolis committed none.
It added to the season-long sample of Indianapolis raising its play against premier competition, as it went 4-2 straight-up and against the spread versus playoff teams despite being an underdog in all six instances. Luck’s success at Lucas Oil Stadium is well documented as he’s gone 13-3 straight-up, 12-4 against the spread in two seasons. He led the Colts to wins over the league’s two best teams — the Seahawks and Broncos — at home this season.
Luck is better than Kansas City counterpart Alex Smith by most statistical measures, but not by a wide margin. Smith, for example, posted the same number of touchdowns, fewer interceptions and a higher passing rating on the season. He gets back Kansas City’s best offensive lineman, left tackle Branden Albert, who was out in the first Indianapolis game. The Colts had five sacks to just one from the Chiefs, who were missing their best defensive player in outside linebacker Justin Houston. He also returns for the playoffs.
Pick: Chiefs plus-2.5.
New Orleans Saints at Philadelphia Eagles, 5:10 p.m. Saturday on NBC
The line: Philadelphia minus-2.5. Nice job, oddsmakers. Nailed this one perfectly. The spread has wobbled less than a Drew Brees pass over the middle. Ninety percent of sports books posted the Eagles giving 2.5 points and left it there, seeing roughly equal action on both sides in the early going. The Saints might wind up with a slight edge in the ticket count, as the public might not be able to pass on seeing one of their favorite teams taking points.
The matchup: That would indicate bettors have a short memory, though, as the Saints have burned anyone betting on them as underdogs this season. They’ve taken points on three occasions — against the Patriots, Seahawks and Panthers — and failed to cover every time.
And as much as coach Sean Payton tries to make the light of the situation by beefing up the pregame macaroni-and-cheese and changing the Gatorade colors, New Orleans’ propensity for road stinkers is an issue. The stench becomes clearer through a Vegas filter. New Orleans is 1-7 against the spread away from the Superdome, with the only cover coming all the way back in Week 5 in a pick ’em game at Chicago. Philadelphia isn’t exactly roses in front of its unruly home fans, going 4-4 straight-up and 3-5 against the spread this season at Lincoln Financial Field.
But the Eagles are on a tear, winning seven of eight — 5-3 against the spread — since Nick Foles claimed the quarterback job for once and for all. Foles might somehow be underrated, as he’s the second-best quarterback in the league and leading the second-best offense according to Football Outsiders’ DVOA. Brees and the Saints counter with high marks at No. 4 and No. 5 in the rankings, respectively. These offenses have oddsmakers unconcerned about the winter storm currently blowing into the Northeast. New Orleans at Philadelphia has an over/under of 54 points, a touchdown higher than the rest of the games that share the same 46.5-point total.
Pick: Eagles minus-2.5.
San Diego Chargers at Cincinnati Bengals, 10:05 a.m. Sunday on CBS
The line: Cincinnati minus-7. Looks like another one the guys behind the betting counter got right from the beginning. A couple shops dabbled with Cincinnati minus-6.5 earlier in the week, but went right up to a touchdown. The Bengals beat the Chargers by that exact margin in a Week 13 game where they were favored by 2.5 points on the road. Based on that line, San Diego would project as more than a touchdown underdog at Cincinnati. But the Chargers have apparently gotten a boost in oddsmakers’ power ratings to limit how many points they take.
The matchup: The Chargers earned the spike in respect from sports books. After falling 17-10 to the Bengals, they had a 5-7 record with playoff odds of less than 10 percent. The LVH Superbook raised the Chargers’ Super Bowl price to 500-to-1.
They needed to win out and get some help to make the postseason, which is exactly what happened. San Diego also covered three straight before last weekend’s fortunate 27-24 escape as 14.5-point favorites against Kansas City’s backups. Chase Daniel and Kniles Davis sliced the Chargers up in that game to reinforce they have the biggest weakness of the 12 playoff teams. San Diego’s defense ranks dead last in Football Outsiders’ DVOA, finishing just barely out of reach of historical incompetence.
At No. 17, however, the Bengals have the weakest offense remaining. A performance like last weekend’s four-interception bonanza from Andy Dalton is exactly the kind of break San Diego’s defense could use. Dalton has rarely played that feebly at home, as the Bengals are undefeated straight-up and against the spread there this season. They haven’t won or covered in a playoff game, however, since 1990.
Pick: Chargers plus-7.
San Francisco 49ers at Green Bay Packers, 1:40 p.m. Sunday on Fox
The line: Green Bay plus-3. Sports books might want to consider constructing some levees. That’s as effective a plan as any for something to stop the flood of San Francisco money already starting to drift in. Bookmakers will be hoping to attract some big wagers on the Packers to limit their liability on the publicly loved 49ers. Bettors aren’t as keen on the Packers if the way the spread jumped from 2.5 to 3 points is any indication. Oddsmakers will be stubborn and not move off of the key field-goal spread if at all possible.
The matchup: Hard to blame the pro-49er sentiment with the way the series has played out lately. San Francisco has always seemed one step ahead of Green Bay since coach John Harbaugh arrived, winning and covering in all three meetings over the past 15 months. The 49ers haven’t owned the Packers with their characteristically stout defense, either.
They’ve taken their lumps against Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, but have always managed to outscore him, averaging 36 points per game to put all the matchups well over the total. Colin Kaepernick had a career day against Green Bay to open the season with 412 passing yards and three touchdowns, while Frank Gore ran for more than 100 yards in each of the two wins before that. The Packers defense looks ripe for the taking again, finishing the season ranking ahead of only the Chargers at No. 31 in the league according to Football Outsiders.
But oddsmakers’ point-value assessment of Rodgers, as detailed last week, continues to be too low. To get the Packers into the playoffs, Rodgers picked up his sixth cover in eight games (where he played more than a possession) this season against the Bears last week. Lifetime, Rodgers is an unbelievable 58-36-1 against the spread.
Pick: Packers plus-3.
Case Keefer can be reached at 948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.Well, I must say I was certainly surprised by this gift! There was a lot in it, and way more than I expected!
Picard is actually my favorite captain, so seeing a Jean Luc action figure was a great start to this party.
My Secret Santa sent me a questionnaire before this got started so that they could make sure they got me stuff I would like, and they definitely delivered.
Or, as Yoda might say, "Delivered, they did." - My GF was excited when she saw the Harry Potter cards, too. She loves HP more than I do, and is insistent that we put these up with our Harry Potter stuff on the shelf. :)
I was actually really surprised by the strips of film that I got, too! I've never received anything like that before, which made this a really cool, unique gift. These are going to go on the shelf with the Jean Luc action figure, which will sit beside my Star Wars action figures that are still in their packaging. However, that thumb drive is going to be put to good use - I ain't afraid of no ghosts!
Then, of course, the piece de resistance, a signed figure of Deanna Troi. I think this is particularly bad-ass, and my Secret Santa went above and beyond what was required for this gift-giving season. I hope they have a wonderful Christmas!Vatican City (AFP) - Pope Francis on Tuesday hailed the bravery of Nigerian priests who have stood strong in the face of Boko Haram violence and worked to build bridges with the Muslim community.
"How can we fail to remember the priests, religious men and women, missionaries and catechists (lay teachers) who, despite untold sacrifices, never abandoned their flock, but remained at their service," the Argentinian pope said in an open letter.
"I wish here to express my heartfelt thanks to you, because in the midst of so many trials and sufferings the Church in Nigeria does not cease to witness to hospitality, mercy and forgiveness," he said.
Boko Haram has seized swathes of territory in Nigeria's northeast in an Islamist insurgency that began in 2009 and has killed more than 13,000 people, displaced 1.5 million, and destroyed churches and mosques.
Francis slammed the militants as "people who claim to be religious, but who instead abuse religion, to make of it an ideology for their own distorted interests of exploitation and murder."
But he urged the African country's Church to continue "to favour reconciliation, to promote experiences of sharing, to extend bridges of dialogue, to serve the weakest and the excluded."
Boko Haram's violence has intensified over the six-year conflict, with attacks into Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
A four-country joint offensive against the militants, part of efforts to stabilise northeast Nigeria in time for general elections set for March 28, has claimed a string of successes in rebel-held territory in recent weeks.NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Renting a billboard, handing out flyers or printing up T-shirts with your contact information used to seem like an outlandish way to get a job but now unemployed workers are going to just such lengths to get attention.
There were more jobs lost in 2008 than any year since 1945 and more layoffs are announced practically on a daily basis. Unemployment now stands at 7.2%, a 16-year high, and the number of job seekers outnumber openings by three to one, so it's no wonder people are getting creative.
"In today's marketplace it is critical that you stand out in a crowd," said Eric Winegardener, a vice president at Monster Worldwide. But standing out is harder than ever when there are 11 million unemployed people in the crowd.
Most experts agree that networking is the best way to find a job, and many job searchers are aiming to broaden their network online by using sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. But with sites like those becoming mainstream, job seekers need to think outside the box to make contacts.
Jacob Share, 33, started an email chain by sending his resume and job search objective to his family and friends. He asked them to send it on to others and offered a monetary prize in the amount of $150 to the person who led him to a job as a Web development manager.
"The process went quickly after I sent my initial mailing to almost everyone I knew," he said. "It only took one friend's forward beyond that initial mailing to get a referral that lead to the ultimate job offer."
To find employment as a private duty registered nurse in Hobe Sound, Fla., Peggy Greco, 53, printed a T-shirt with her Web site and contact information and wears it while riding her bike ride around her neighborhood.
Even though she hasn't gotten a job yet, Greco says she has gotten a few calls so far - and lost about five pounds.
Kelly Kinney, 29, has been looking for a full-time position as a marketing manager for over a year. She also decided to put her resume on the front of her shirt, along with her cover letter on the back and hit the streets.
After landing a few interviews, Kinney is hopeful to have an offer by the end of the week.
Other job seekers have worn their contact information on sandwich boards, posted it on billboards, or even printed it on cocktail napkins to get attention.
Unconventional vs. unprofessional
Tony Beshara, author of "Acing the Interview" and "The Job Search Solution," encourages job seekers to employ such unusual strategies to find jobs. "People spend hours crafting their resume," he says, but "it can get lost in the shuffle."
Instead, he advocates putting more effort toward getting face time. "Wait in the lobby of the building where you want to work and ride the elevator with the manager," he said. "Try to bypass HR if you can."
But others say unconventional strategies can be a gamble. "I think your odds are far better by standing out through the traditional means," said Winegardener from Monster.
Winegardener recommends that job seekers focus their energy on getting informed about their job prospects, including who is hiring and where the demand is for their skills, in addition to tailoring their message to each employer and being mindful of the details, which means having a "perfectly accurate" resume and following up every interview with a handwritten "thank you" note.
More than half, or 52%, of marketing executives and 26% of advertising executives said they view unusual job-hunting tactics, such as sending a potential employer a shoe "to get a foot in the door," as unprofessional, according to a survey by The Creative Group, a staffing firm specializing in advertising and marketing positions.
David Perry, co-author of "Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters," says job seekers should aim to be creative, but only as long as it's specifically targeted to the job they want. For example, Perry suggests appealing directly to the hiring manager in the department that you want to work in.
"You can rent a billboard, but you are far better off deciding who you want to work for and crafting a message especially for them."A doctor at the Donka university medical centre appeared to confirm the toll given by the human rights group telling the AFP news agency: We have counted 52 bodies and six more have just come in."
Other medical officials were quoted as saying that "dozens of bodies" had been taken from another hospital by the military.
'Police state'
The protesters, who had gathered outside the stadium, carried placards reading "No to Dadis" and "Down with the army in power" before police stopped them from gaining entry.
Al Hassan Silah, a local journalist who visited the stadium shortly after the security forces had opened fire, said he and other journalists had seen bodies lying inside and outside the stadium.
"People did not wish for a military regime in Guinea because for almost 25 years Guinea was led by a military man" Lansine Kaba,
Guinean scholar
"People who had gone to attend the protests have fled for dear life," Silah told Al Jazeera."But Conakry can be rightly described as a police state... All across town, military people at checkpoints are searching people and people have been forced back into their houses."The military government, which took power last December, plans to hold elections in January 2010.Lansine Kaba, a Guinean scholar at the Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, said: "Many people don't want the president to stand for election. He promised when they had the coup that he would not stand for elections.
"People did not wish for a military regime in Guinea because for almost 25 years Guinea was led by a military man," he told Al Jazeera
The government had banned Monday's demonstration, but a coalition of political parties, trade unions and civic organisations vowed that the event would go ahead.
Leaders arrested
Police arrested at least 30 people who were driven away in lorries, witnesses said.
Cellou Dalein Diallo, the leader of the opposition Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG), and several other politicians were reportedly among those detained.
Mouctar Bah, a correspondent for the AFP news agency who also works for Radio France Internationale (RFI), was manhandled by uniformed men who took his microphone and recorder before shoving him to the ground.
Speaking on national television on Sunday, Frederic Kolie, the interior minister, declared that "all demonstrations on national territory are prohibited until the national holiday on October 2".
News of the ban came a day after Camara - in his first visit outside the capital since he took power - went to Guinea's second city and opposition stronghold Labe.
Camara seized power in the francophone West African nation after leading a bloodless coup within hours of the death of Guinea's president Lansana Conte, who had been in power since 1984.By waiting until the week practice begins to finalize his schedule, Mississippi State coach Rick Stansbury has outsmarted a nine-game NCAA penalty that would have pushed junior Dee Bost’s season debut deeper into SEC play.
Bost was given a nine-game suspension for failing to withdraw from the NBA draft by the new May 8 deadline. The Bulldogs’ starting point guard is also academically ineligible for the fall semester.
But Stansbury still had a few games to schedule while he was waiting to get Bost’s decision from the NCAA. He also had the ability to move a November game to December to give Bost a chance to start the SEC season on time since the NCAA starts counting Bost’s suspension after Dec. 11.
Stansbury accomplished every goal.
The Bulldogs moved a game against Alabama State from Dec. 4 to Dec. 14, so it’ll count as one of the nine games Bost will be forced to miss post-first semester. And then Stansbury secured a game against Sweet 16 team Saint Mary’s on Dec. 29 in Las Vegas, as Mississippi State returns from playing in the Diamond Head Classic in Honolulu.
The moving around of the schedule means Bost will make his season debut in the Jan. 8 SEC opener against Alabama, instead of waiting until Jan. 13 at Ole Miss or possibly Jan. 16 against Auburn.
Meanwhile, Stansbury also scheduled an exhibition for Dec. 15 in either Starkville or Jackson, Miss., to give heralded sophomore Renardo Sidney, who is serving a nine-game amateurism penalty, some sort of competition before he makes his season debut Dec. 18 against Virginia Tech in the Bahamas.
So here’s the breakdown. Sidney and Bost will miss these first nine games:
Nov. 12 – Tennessee State
Nov. 19 – Appalachian State
Nov. 22 – Detroit
Nov. 26 – Troy
Nov. 30 – Florida Atlantic
Dec. 11 – East Tennessee State
Dec. 12 – North Carolina A&T
Dec. 13 – Nicholls State
Dec. 14 – Alabama State
The Bulldogs will then play an exhibition with Sidney on Dec. 15. And will play these next five games with Sidney but without Bost:
Dec. 18 – vs. Virginia Tech in Bahamas
Dec. 22 – vs. Washington State (Honolulu)
Dec. 23 – vs. Baylor or San Diego (Honolulu)
Dec. 25 – vs. Butler, Florida State, Hawaii or Utah (Honolulu)
Dec. 29 – vs. Saint Mary’s in Las Vegas
Bost might have missed 16 games had Mississippi State not added and moved around games. Instead he will miss 14 (and no conference games) for the SEC West favorite.
“We just have to survive those games at home before we get Sidney,’’ Stansbury said. “Then it all turns up. Once he’s eligible, it’s all quality games.’’
Stansbury said the Bahamas-to-Hawaii-to-Las Vegas trip is daunting, but if “we’re not going to be in Starkvegas for Christmas, this was a pretty good option. These are some good cities with all good teams.’’
The Bulldogs return guard Ravern Johnson alongside Bost, as well as Kodi Augustus inside. State will count heavily on Sidney inside, and in Bost’s absence will likely look to Brian Bryant, a JC point guard. Freshman Jalen Steele will also be in the backcourt rotation, as will sophomore Twany Beckham (possibly the starter in Bost’s absence) and redshirt freshman Shaun Smith.(NaturalNews) - Measurements taken recently at the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear complex in northern Japan have revealed record levels of radiation contamination, officials with the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said.The elevated contamination levels were discovered in the basement of reactor No. 1, officials said - a discovery that will further delay and impede operations aimed at cleaning up the site. It was the first internal measurement carried out since three of the plant's nuclear reactors were damaged by a tsunami caused by a major earthquake off Japan's northeastern coast in March 2011.TEPCO engineers reportedly gathered samples from the basement after inserting a camera and consulting measuring instruments through a drain hole located in the ceiling of the basement.The company said radiation levels above radiation-contaminated water in the basement measured as high as 10,300 millisievert per hour - a dose plenty high enough to kill human beings in short order after making them sick within minutes.Put another way, the annualdose for plant workers at the site is reached in just. One report said the dose was enough to kill humans in less than an hour."Workers cannot enter the site and we must use robots for the demolition," said TEPCO, in a statement.TEPCO official, Junichi Matsumoto said he believed there was a higher radiation level in the No. 1 reactor because more fuel rods than suspected melted down following the incident.The power company said radiation levels there were 10 times what they have measured at the plant's other damaged reactors, numbers two and three. In all, the Fukushima plant contained six reactors.The meltdown of the reactors came after the tsunami managed to cut power to their cooling systems.The plan now is to demolish the three damaged reactors, as well as the plant's No. 4 unit, but that is expected to take 40 years and will require use of new technologies.Meanwhile, Fukushima now faces yet another impending typhoon season, which could result in even more damage and contamination at the site.Already this season Typhoon Guchol has hit Japan, which led to warnings of floods and landslides from theTyphoons are common to Japan this time of year so that part is nothing new. But given the exposure and vulnerability of the Fukushima Daichai plant, the risk of a violent storm causing even more calamity is real.A major tornado also struck in the latter part of June, killing a teenage boy, injuring 50 others and destroying houses and property.Scientists are particularly worried about twisters hitting the damaged plant."Uranium spent fuel pools of No. 3 and No. 4 reactors are currently naked," Kazuhiko Kudo, a research professor of nuclear engineering at, said June 5. "A tornado with winds of 100 meters per second like the one that hit Tsukuba could suck up the pool water," exposing the fuel rods, he said.It's a wrap—the 2013 Python Challenge has nabbed 68 invasive Burmese pythons in Florida, organizers say. And experts are surprised so many of the elusive giants were caught.
Nearly 1,600 people from 38 states—most of them inexperienced hunters—registered for the chance to track down one of the animals, many of which descend from snakes that either escaped or were dumped into the wild.
Since being introduced, these Asian behemoths have flourished in Florida's swamps while also squeezing out local populations of the state's native mammals, especially in the Everglades. (See Everglades pictures.)
To highlight the python problem, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and its partners launched the 2013 Python Challenge, which encouraged registered participants to catch as many pythons as they could between January 12 and February 10 in state wildlife-management areas within the Everglades.
The commission gave cash prizes to those who harvested the most and longest pythons.
Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida and scientific leader for the challenge, said before the hunt that he would consider a harvest of 70 animals a success—and 68 is close enough to say the event met its goals.
It's unknown just how many Burmese pythons live in Florida, but catching 68 snakes is an "exceptional" number, added Kenneth Krysko, senior herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
Snakes in the Grass
Finding 68 snakes is impressive, experts say, since it's so hard to find pythons. For one, it's been unusually warm lately in Florida, which means the reptiles—which normally sun themselves to regulate their body temperature—are staying in the brush, making them harder to detect, Krysko said.
On top of that, Burmese pythons are notoriously hard to locate, experts say.
The animals are so well camouflaged that people can stand right next to one and not notice it. "It's rare that you get to see them stretched out—most of the time they're blending in," said Cheryl Millett, a biologist at the Nature Conservancy, a Python Challenge partner.
What's more, the reptiles are ambush hunters, which means they spend much of their time lying in wait in dense vegetation, not moving, she said.
That's why Millett gave the hunters some tips, such as looking along the water's edge, where the snakes like to hang out, and also simply listening for "something big moving through the vegetation."
Even so, catching 68 snakes is "actually is a little more than I expected," said Millett.
No Walk in the Park
Ruben Ramirez, founder of the company Florida Python Hunters, won two prizes in the competition: First place for the most snakes captured—18—and second place for the largest python, which he said was close to 11 feet (3.4 meters) long. The biggest Burmese python caught in Florida, nabbed in 2012, measured 17.7 feet (5.4 meters).
"They're there, but they're not as easy to find as people think," said Ramirez. "You're not going to be stumbling over pythons in Miami." (Related blog post: "What It's Like to Be a Florida Python Hunter.")
All participants, some of whom had never hunted a python before, were trained to identify the difference between a Burmese python and Florida's native snakes, said Millett. No native snakes were accidentally killed, she said.
Hunters were also told to kill the snakes by either putting a bolt or a bullet through their heads, or decapitating them—all humane methods that result "in immediate loss of consciousness and destruction of the brain," according to the Python Challenge website.
Ramirez added that some of the first-time or amateur hunters had different expectations. "I think they were expecting to walk down a canal and see a 10-foot [3-meter], 15-foot [4.5-meter] Burmese python. They thought it'd be a walk in the park."
Stopping the Spread
Completely removing these snakes from the wild isn't easy, and some scientists see the Python Challenge as helping to achieve part of that goal. (Read an opposing view on the Python Challenge: "Opinion: Florida's Great Snake Hunt Is a Cheap Stunt.")
"You're talking about 68 more animals removed from the population that shouldn't be there—that's 68 more mouths that aren't being fed," said the Florida museum's Krysko. (Read about giant Burmese python meals that went bust.)
"I support any kind of event or program that not only informs the general public about introduced species, but also gets the public involved in removing these nonnative animals that don't belong there."
The Nature Conservancy's Millett said the challenge had two positive outcomes: boosting knowledge for both science and the public.
People who didn't want to hunt or touch the snakes could still help, she said, by reporting sightings of exotic species to 888-IVE-GOT-1, through free IveGot1 apps, or www.ivegot1.org.
Millett runs a public-private Nature Conservancy partnership called Python Patrol that the Florida wildlife commission will take on in the fall. The program focuses not only on eradicating invasive pythons but on preventing the snake from moving to ecologically sensitive areas, such as Key West.
Necropsies on the captured snakes will reveal what pythons are eating, and location data from the hunters will help scientists figure out where the snakes are living—valuable data for researchers working to stop their spread.
"This is the most [number of] pythons that have been caught in this short of a period of time in such an extensive area," said the University of Florida's Mazzotti.Given the rates of diabetes reaching ‘epidemic proportions’, we figured it was time to have a better overview of biotech’s progress in the field. With some serious advances having been made in the treatment of the disease, we have to ask – how much further can biotech go in the treatment of diabetes?
It is important to note the various complications that can arise from the disease, which has a series of serious co-morbidities. These can range from increased risk to infection, cardiovascular disease and even neuropathies (nerve damage across multiple tissues), each of which presents their own challenges to tackle.
So here’s a review of recent developments, including developments in insulin, the growing MedTech field and how cell therapy is also tackling the disease.
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Improving Efficacy of Insulin
Insulin was the first human recombinant protein to be approved on the market under the brand Humulin. It was initially developed by Genentech and marketed by Eli Lilly in 1982. This was a massive step forward to replace pig insulin and improve the life of diabetics worldwide. Since then, the recombinant insulin never stopped being improved.
Enhancing existing insulin treatments and metformin have been the first line-of-treatments in tackling Diabetes (type I and type II respectively).
Although treatments vary between types, generally improving synthetic insulin is done by either increasing the absorption rate of synthetic insulin, new formulations (analogs – e.g. Lantus) or introducing biotechnological enhancers, such as BioChaperones. One example of the latter is the French biotech Adocia’s Biochaperne Lispro, which went on to be licensed by Lilly in 2014.
Additionally, other treatments include once-daily human analogs of the naturally occurring hormone Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 (GLP-1), which only stimulates the release of insulin when glucose levels become too high.
Many are working on these GLP-1 analogs as a treatment for type 2 diabetes – from Novo Nordisk’s Diabetes Care Unit to Sanofi (partnered with Denmark’s Zealand Pharma) and GSK etc.
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The general principle here though is to combine these therapies with insulin analogs to maximize the effect. However, one of the main challenges in diabetes care is a sustainable and reliable drug delivery.
MedTech: The Solution to Needle-Free Digitisation of Diabetes?
A big emphasis in the industry has been to find needle-free methods for delivery, given the obvious discomfort and hassle the repeated use of needles can cause (compliance, mistake of medication).
Improving Delivery
Over the last decade, an increasing number of drugs, from hormonal contraception to anti-smoking aids, have become available as transdermal drug delivery systems (TDDS). These are non-invasive patches that facilitate drug absorption through the skin.
For insulin delivery, one example is Prometheon Pharma, which has developed the TruePatch, a multi-day basal insulin patch. Patches can also be problematic and irritating (e.g. cosmetically).
So another approach is the Intarcia implant from Boston (the Medici Drug Delivery System), partnered with the French pharma Servier. This is a futuristic matchstick-sized intra-dermal pump that has undergone three Phase III trials in conjunction with a GLP-1 agonist (exenatide).
Ultimately, if approved, the ITCA 650 system (pump and GLP-1 formulation) would represent the first injection-free therapy capable of delivering up to a full year of treatment from a single device. Regulatory filing in the US is projected for later this year.
Replacing the Lancet
There’s also a whole range of monitoring tech out there designed to avoid the use of lancets to test glucose levels. These include GlucoSense (a spin-out company jointly formed and funded by NetScientific and the University of Leeds) that uses laser technology and NovioSense (a Dutch start-up in Nijmegen), which is a 15 mm-long metal coil that uses tear fluid to measure glucose.
On the other hand, Gluco-Wise is a new product from MediWise (in London), which is also an optical reading device designed for the ear-lobe. There is also the hotly discussed Google Lens being developed in conjunction with Novartis. Trials are due to start for the lens this year (read more via IEEE Spectrum), however, it’s not so clear whether this is a lot of ‘hot air’, as one ex-Verily employee leaked.
Roche is also making progress in its Diabetes Care Unit. It has struck a deal with the MedTech company Senseonics to sell an implantable glucose sensor in some major European countries.
With an app, patients then can access real-time glucose measurements. The software also predicts the ‘wobble’ in glucose levels, so that patients can take steps to stay in control if they are near to developing a hypo or hyperglycemic episode.
A Monitoring-Delivery Combo?
Automated pancreatic simulation is an interesting alternative to the standard insulin injections, as these might not always best match the rapid changes in blood glucose throughout the day. In addition to an intradermal pump, Cellnovo’s mobile system comprises a handset from which the patient can control the pump.
A research team from the University of Cambridge has also managed to develop a closed loop beta-cell based insulin delivery system for diabetes type I. This bionic pancreas prototype has been constructed for human trials using an iPhone app which monitors blood glucose levels.
A similar research development has been made by Boston’s Bionic Pancreas project, which completed its 22-day outpatient trial in April of last year. In collaboration with Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the Bionic pancreas has been branded the iLet.
However, this kind of system has been scrutinized by the ‘Biohacking’ community and even parents – particularly in the States, where this kind of MedTech could potentially be too far-off from regulatory approval or too costly for some patients.
But is Cell Therapy the Ultimate Cure?
Bolstering up dysfunctional tissue with transplant tissue to enhance insulin production is also a popular area of development.
The Diabetes Cell Therapy Institute (DCTI) is a research initiative looking to improve pancreatic beta-cell replacement therapy (islet transplantation) as well as helping improve patient access to such therapies.
Along with other attempts to create islets in the lab (and bypass the problem of donor shortage), these procedures seem to be the future of treatments for type 1 diabetes. On this front, the DCTI is even partnered up with some biotechs, including the well-known Galapagos.
Islet transplants have actually already been around for a while though. In 2000, patients in a trial were able to stop their daily insulin injections after successful transplants – which sounds like the end of diabetes altogether!
But not so fast. The problem was, that although transplantation does technically work, donor islets tend to fail in insulin production over time, which is why the DCTI is looking to optimize pancreatic islet isolation from donors. Therefore, different surgical and transplant methods have been investigated to improve islet transplantation.
Here the DCTI in Groningen (Netherlands) explains the Islet Transplant problem…
Which brings me to news we just covered yesterday – a new surgical method using part of the stomach cell lining has resulted in the successful ‘cure’ of a patient at a hospital in Milan. This is the first example of successful proof-of-concept of this kind of Islet transplant technology in Europe, which was developed at the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) at the University of Miami.
So is this the end?
So there we have 3 broad areas in which diabetes is being tackled in biotech: new analogs for insulin and insulin-stimulating hormones, improved delivery and monitoring of existing therapies, and lastly, cell therapy.
It is by no means an exhaustive list of all those working in diabetes but will hopefully bring together some of the angles used by the field to approach the disease. Considering that some of these trials are |
treatments, he dispels concerns about any possible side effects.
“There is no side effect. I have cured over 1,000 homosexuals. There was this man, 26-27 years’ old, who used to have sex with other guys four to five times a day. His parents and family members were worried about his shameful behaviour and brought him here. After my treatment, he got married in three months and now is a father,” Dr. Raina claims.
FAST TRACK 'CURE'
He says the number of people approaching him for treatment of homosexuality has gone up after an AIIMS doctor recently committed suicide and blamed her gay husband for her action.
“The problem with homosexuals is that they have more female hormones. After taking blood samples, we increase male hormones in them,” Dr. Raina says.
He also blames "recessive homosexual genes" in parents that become dominant in their kids, as well as childhood sexual abuse as causes for homosexuality, a theory that finds support from Dr. P.K. Gupta, consultant senior sexologist at Dr. P.K. Gupta’s Super Speciality Clinic in Karol Bagh.
Dr. Gupta describes homosexuality as a mental and genetic disorder and believes in exploring evidence of childhood psychological damage before starting the treatment. He is also a member of the Council of Sex Education and Parenthood (International), an organisation that believes in embracing all forms of sexuality non-judgmentally.
“Get the patient here,” he says when asked about treatment details on behalf of a patient’s worried family members.
“Before treatment, I have to know (patient’s) history and find out if he has been abused as a child,” says Dr. Gupta.
“He will first have to undergo counselling for 15 minutes; charges for which are Rs 4,500. I will ask him several questions to help me decide whether to go for hormonal therapy or psychological therapy. For this, it’s very important to evaluate the patient,” he says, reassuring that a cure will be in sight in three or four months.
While conversion therapy survivors often recount stories of seizure-inducing electric shocks with electrodes attached to their skulls (the last resort in a line of treatments to bring behavioural changes in the brain), therapists Mail Today spoke to denied using electric shocks as an option, perhaps in the absence of a real patient.
LGBT supporters protesting at Jantar Mantar against the recriminalisation of homosexuality. (File picture)
The closest we came to experiencing the dangers facing homosexuals was at Radha Poly Clinic in Mahipalpur.
Tucked inside a narrow concrete lane amid local retailers is Dr. Nagendra Kumar’s clinic, a one-storey building resembling in part a chemist shop, though a notice on the wall clearly discourages prospective medicine buyers.
On his official letter head, Dr. Kumar is named as a resident at ‘Max Hospital’. A few minutes into the conversation, he prescribes Oleanz 5mg, a tablet for treating a variety of mental disorders, which can cause serious side effects such as seizures, changes in vision and breathing difficulties, for our fictitious gay relative.
“This is a neuropsychiatric disorder like schizophrenia, mania, bipolar disorder and hysteria. It is a good thing that you have decided to seek a doctor’s help. Start the medicine’s usage and we will see the effect in time,” he says.
MAINSTREAM IRE
But how do you notice the effect? “It can be gauged only through observation,” Dr. Kumar tells us, listing a series of visual indicators to watch out for.
“Keep a watch on what time the patient sleeps, find out if he wakes up in between to stimulate himself or watch pornography, whether he wants to be alone, whether he is afraid/hesitant to talk to women and if he is able to sustain eye contact…all these activities have to be watched,” he says.
“If you see at least 20 per cent change (an estimate he revises several times during the conversation before finally settling at 5 per cent), we know we are on the right track. Otherwise we will change the medicine after 10 days,” he says nonchalantly.
If the practitioners of modern medicine are treading on a host of ethical and legal issues while attempting to "cure" homosexuality, their counterparts in alternative medicine such as homeopathy and ayurveda, on the other hand, seem to be operating with absolute impunity and advertising fast-track cure at nominal rates.
The Dr. Dilbag Clinic in Uttam Nagar claims it can cure homosexuality in just a month for as little as Rs 2,100.
The clinic’s website describes homosexuality as the root cause of many “complicated diseases” in future life.
“There is no need for the patient to come here. You can carry the medicine,” says Dr. S.P. Singh, resident sexologist.
“The advantage with homeopathy is that there is no side effect,” he adds.
The view is also touted by Dr. S.K. Jain of Karol Bagh-based Burlington Clinic which prescribes ayurvedic medicine as a remedy for homosexuality. He also claims that a patient will be cured with counselling and medicine in a month without any side-effect or relapse.
Reacting to the Mail Today exposé, mainstream medical bodies and health professionals have expressed shock and strongly condemned the unethical practice.
Dr. Harish Shetty, psychiatrist at L.H. Hiranandani Hospital, Mumbai, says: “Any attempt to convert people with definite sexual orientation is a crime. It is quackery and violation of human rights. There is no evidence to show that any form of therapy can convert a homosexual into a heterosexual or vice versa.
“It is a violation of medical ethics and doctors who engage in such practices can be prosecuted by the medical council. Prescribing medicines without the knowledge of a patient is a crime even if it is under the instigation of parents or family members,” Dr Shetty adds.
“It is really sad. People who claim to cure homosexuality are taking the gullible for a ride,” says Nimesh G. Desai, Director, Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS), a neuropsychiatric hospital under the Health Ministry.
“Homosexuality is a variation of human sexuality. It is not a neuropsychiatric disorder,” Desai says, adding: “The best way to counter such practices is to increase public awareness and acceptance of homosexuals. To say that those sexually abused as children will turn out to be homosexuals is a fable.”
Pulkit Sharma, a Delhi-based clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic therapist, says it is a myth that homosexuality can be cured.
“There is absolutely no scientific evidence that any of these treatments will work,” he says.
Emphasising that the Indian Medical Association (IMA) does not believe in differentiating between genders, its general secretary Dr. K.K. Agarwal adds that doctors have the right to intervene and help if it is a case of forced homosexuality.
“The doctors need to decide this on a case-to-case basis,” he said.
For its part, the Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS) urges therapists to refrain from diagnosing or tracking the history of homosexuals in an attempt to treat them.
“IPS does not regard homosexuality a mental disorder,” says its national general secretary N.N. Raju.
“As doctors, you should make the homosexuals understand that they are just like any other normal individual.”
Why the therapy DOESN'T work
Conversion therapies have little scientific evidence to back them up.
A review of studies on the subject by the American Psychological Association from 1960 to 2007 has showed that a vast majority of them did not reveal whether the therapies achieved their stated goals.
Rather, they can be harmful to patients, leading to loss of sexual feeling, depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies.
As recently as June last year, the UK’s department of health in consultation with various psychiatric and psychological associations issued a public health advisory stating that it would be irresponsible and potentially damaging for a therapist to try and change sexual orientation.
The website of Dr. Dilbag Clinic in Uttam Nagar East offers a 'total cure' for homosexuality in just one month
FIRST PERSON: 'I received 21 electric shocks in three months': What really happens in conversion 'therapy'
As told to Sangeeth Sebastian
Traumatised: The young man who spoke to Mail Today endured 21 shock treatments. (Picture for representation)
I was doing my final year master’s at D.U. when we went for a study tour as a part of the course. There was this boy in my class whom I had feelings for; he also happened to be my family friend. I was always afraid to share my feelings with him for fear that I might lose my best friend.
Then this trip happened. During the trip we shared the same room and one night we got drunk and I couldn’t resist myself. It was the beginning of my end. He came home, narrated my shameful behaviour and humiliated me in front of my entire family.
My sister is a psychologist. She promised me that she would help me become straight, though I did not want to be. She took me to a leading psychiatrist. It was a nightmare for the next three months. The psychiatrist asked me to change my thinking. He talked to me about heterosexual love making.
When I told him that I was not attracted to girls at all, he asked me to sit on a chair and attached electrodes to my finger tips. He then gave me mild electric shocks, administering each shock after showing the picture of a nude male, to induce aversion.
When it didn’t work, I was sedated and asked to lie down on a bed with electrodes attached to my skull. My hands and legs were tied and my mouth gagged to prevent me from biting my tongue during the shock treatment.
The session lasted for 15 to 20 minutes with a cooling period of 30 seconds after each shock. In three months I received 21 shock treatments. It was terrible. I was in a dizzy state, feeling nauseatic all the time. I could not talk properly. My words got jumbled when I tried to speak.
Due to this I had to miss my viva. I was literally imprisoned in my house for three months. My study got disrupted and my degree got delayed by a year.
To tell you the truth, all this treatment has made little change in my orientation. I am still gay and will always be, though to my family, I am "normal" now.
My mom keeps teasing whenever I go out and asks for the names of girls whom I have met or made friends with. It is disgusting. I hoped that at least she would understand me when I was bedridden for three months. If she can’t feel my pain, then why should I be bothered about her feelings?
I am firm that I am not going to get married to a girl. I don’t want to ruin the life of a woman.Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc has been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia but says he will continue to work as he begins treatments.
LeBlanc, the MP for the Beauséjour riding in New Brunswick, announced the diagnosis in a statement posted to Twitter on Wednesday.
The statement, which was co-signed by his physician, Dr. Nicholas Finn, says the condition is a chronic disease that must be closely monitored but can be controlled.
LeBlanc is scheduled to begin treatments next week, the statement said.
Confident diagnosis won't affect work
LeBlanc was diagnosed with the disease in April after a routine physical exam.
The disease is at a stage that allows LeBlanc to schedule treatments in a way "that will have minimal impact on his work," the statement said.
Ahead of question period Wednesday, LeBlanc told reporters that some people live with the condition for many years, even decades, and that he and his doctors are confident that he'll be able to maintain a normal work schedule.
His treatments will involve chemo immuno therapy twice a month and will continue into the spring.
"You spend two mornings once a month at the hospital and then you go home and carry on with your life and your commitments and your family obligations," he said.
Though he was diagnosed in the spring, he said he decided to begin treatment now after doctors advised it would be "prudent" to do so over the next few months.
He also said he wanted to take advantage of the lull in the parliamentary schedule.
Hesitant to discuss health publicly
Initially, LeBlanc said he didn't want to discuss his health publicly.
But given that New Brunswick is a small place, he said he didn't want rumours circulating that his condition was more serious than it is, he said.
"Moncton is a small place," he said. "If I go to the Georges Dumont hospital a couple of times between now and Christmas and a couple of times at the beginning of January, I thought the risk of a much more serious or much more negative stories circulating meant that I should say something matter of fact."
Trudeau reacts
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shared words of support for LeBlanc on Twitter.
"We're all thinking of you today," he wrote Wednesday afternoon.
"But we also know you'll continue to excel as a Minister and MP. My friend, you have my full support, always."
We’re all thinking of you today, <a href="https://twitter.com/DLeBlancNB?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DLeBlancNB</a>, but we also know you’ll continue to excel as a Minister and MP. My friend, you have my full support, always. <a href="https://t.co/uJHV6f5KOA">https://t.co/uJHV6f5KOA</a> —@JustinTrudeau
New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant, who is a longtime friend of LeBlanc, also responded to the news on Twitter, tweeting a photo of the pair together.
"We will be there for you," he said.Paul Beatty read from his newest novel, The Sellout at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. He was joined in conversation by Sam Lipsyte. When Beatty took the podium, he seemed momentarily overcome with emotion. He explained that he felt similarly overwhelmed recently at a reading in Detroit. The reason, he explains, was the feeling of satisfaction from completing the book: “I realized I was really close to getting what was in my head on the page.”
The novel required four years of typing, Beatty says, but there are hints that other years were required before that. “It was a really hard book to start,” he says. He kept writing blocks of thirty or forty pages and felt he didn’t really have a framework for the novel. Once he found the setting though, he was able to finally start writing.
“I knew where it ended,” he says, and then wrote towards that, even if he wasn’t certain of what would happen in the middle. He says when he writes, he usually knows where he is going.
The New York Times has given Beatty a positive review and profiled him. But he is also critical of the paper. “They only call me when a black person dies,” he jokes, adding he feels like he is biting the hand that feeds him to receive a good review and then criticize them for the lack of people of color on staff. Lipsyte jokes that they have already fed him with the good review.
Lipsyte brings up Beatty’s history as a spoken word poet. Beatty though is immediately defensive. He says one of the first times he heard the term he was in Germany. “I was like what does that even mean?” The people in Berlin all seemed to talk about being bold and pushing boundaries, he says, but to him, everything they were doing was really safe. “I try to not be safe when I write,” he says.
Beatty also teaches writing. He says that he has a few rules he gives his students. First is what he calls the “here and now.” Everything the writer needs should come from right there in that moment. He doesn’t let them talk about books, for instance.
The second rule is to listen to yourself listening. He says this creates distance between the writing and the author. It allows the author to think about what she wants to say. The rules usually come up when his students are trying to figure out what they’re writing about, he says.
Finishing a book feels a bit less rigid than a set of rules. Beatty explains that Toni Morrison has said a novel should take six years. He disagrees. Some novels might take two weeks. Others might take ten years. Its about the feeling of the work being finished. Beatty mentions Percival Everett. Everett has a bit of a different perception of writing than Beatty who describes Everett as a completionist rather than a perfectionist. Regardless though, Beatty says, “at some point you gotta finish; at some point you gotta start.”
Though he mentions other authors, he says he doesn’t consider himself as writing in any kind of dialogue with them. “I’m not really friendly,” he says. He doesn’t show people what he is writing. He says he figures it out himself.
“I panic. And then I sit back down and figure it out,” he says. He believes in writing the sentence well: if the writing is right, the rest takes care of itself.
Growing up, his family didn’t keep a television in the house. Instead, he read his mother’s books. His mother never censored him or his siblings, and she never censored the books he read. He says his mother is the reader that is most important to him.
Paul Beatty and Sam Lipsyte
Greenlight Bookstore
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Share the link!NEW DELHI: An Indian hacker group hacked and defaced the official Pakistan railways website on Friday, Pakistani newspaper The News International has reported. According to the newspaper, the group, that calls itself " Black Dragon Indian Hacker Online Squad ", took responsibility for the cyberattack.
"Hello, citizens of Pakistan; this site has been hacked. Years of injustice and misbehaviour and bloodshed from Kashmir in India by Pakistan. Big numbers of Indian websites including government are being hacked by your cyberbrothers," the message left by the hackers on the page, along with a picture of the Indian flag, reportedly said."The Indian hackers also made the so-called claim that they loved Islam and Muslims but hated Pakistan. Giving a warning to Pakistanis, they said that websites of organizations like electricity distribution companies and commercial banks would also be hacked," the report said.Men seen at the window of a train at Karachi's Cantonment railway stationEarlier, reports suggest that the same group has also hacked the website of the Bangladesh cabinet division.Indigenous rights leader Kandi Mossett -- (Democracy Now screen grab)
In an emotional interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, a Native American activist from North Dakota explained the high cost on human lives that the fracking industry is taking on her community, saying it is turning it into a “sacrifice zone.”
Appearing at the Paris Climate Summit, indigenous rights leader Kandi Mossett became teary-eyed as she described the influx of thousands of fracking workers living in “man camps” that have brought with them crime, drug usage and rape — leading to a 168 percent increase in violent assaults against women.
Asked by host Goodman to explain conditions in North Dakota during the fracking boom, Mossett initially skipped over the environmental and health damage done by fracking to explain the societal impact of so many men flooding the communities.
“What we’re dealing with is a death by a thousand cuts. We have people that are literally on the front lines being killed by all of the semi traffic, by the increase in violence against women,” Mossett explained. “Ever since we’ve had the oil industry enter, we’ve had these jobs that were created n– but there were 11,000 jobs created and over 10,000 people that came into our state. And we’ve had violence against women increase by 168 percent, particularly in the area of rape. We have 14-, 15- and 16-year-old girls that are willingly going into man camps and selling themselves.”
Asked by Goodman to explain “man camps,” Mossett continued.
“We call them that because there are literally thousands of men living in these hovels. They’re like FEMA trailers or RV parks or wherever they can find space, that used to be a wheat field or a sunflower field, is now an oil-fracking operation,” she said. “And so we’ve seen an increase greatly of crime and violence, drug abuse. I have buried two young girls, my friends, this last year, who got addicted to the heroin, because we now have organized crime.”
Turning to environmental degradation, tears streamed down Mossett’s face as she described her fears for her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and what she may have to face one day.
“As far as the environmental toxins, we won’t even feel the effects for 20 years,” she explained. “And I’m so worried that at this COP21 my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter won’t have a say, but she will be experiencing the worst impacts. And it just doesn’t make any sense to me that this is the 21st COP and we are considered sacrifice zones in my community.”
Watch the interview below:Video
WATERLOO, Iowa – Hillary Clinton’s campaign has used Donald J. Trump’s proposal to bar non-American Muslims from entering the United States as a fund-raising and organizing tool, selling a special edition “Love Trumps Hate” bumper sticker and texting supporters a link to a letter from Mrs. Clinton declaring her support for religious freedom.
But at a town-hall-style meeting here on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton delivered her toughest and most somber critique yet of Mr. Trump’s plan.
“It’s O.K. to be afraid. There’s no reason not to be afraid,” she told the crowd. “When bad things happen it does cause anxiety and fear, but then you pull yourself together and, especially if you want to be a leader of a country, you say, ‘What are we going to do about it? How are we going to be prepared?’”
“But instead of showing leadership, some of the candidates in this campaign are really resulting in ugly, hateful rhetoric,” she added. “Donald Trump, you know, he does traffic in prejudice and paranoia. It’s not only shameful, it’s dangerous.”
She said Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims “runs counter to what I, and others who have actually been in the Situation Room, making hard choices, know what we have to do.”
Mrs. Clinton had previously denounced Mr. Trump before quickly trying to link his opinions to the rest of the Republican field. But on Wednesday, she singled out Mr. Trump, saying he was harming the nation’s ability to fight the rise of the Islamic State.
“We have to enlist help from American Muslims, Muslims around the world, in defeating the radical jihadist and the hateful ideology,” she said. “Instead, Donald Trump is providing them with propaganda. He is playing right into their hands.”
“The vast majority of Muslims here and abroad are on our side in this fight,” Mrs. Clinton continued. “They are the primary victims of the attacks and the brutality coming from these terrorist organizations.”Those who can, cite evidence to support their position; those who cannot play gotcha. Events have overwhelmingly supported a Keynesian view of the effects of fiscal policy, but the anti-Keynesians have responded, not by reconsidering their views, but by seeking to discredit the messengers. In particular, there’s a lot of “Krugman said X would happen, and it didn’t, so Keynesian economics is wrong.” And in particular particular, the experience of 2013 – when British growth accelerated, and US growth continued despite the budget sequester, is claimed as some sort of decisive experiment.
I’ve already written about the British story – short version: the Cameron government more or less paused in its austerity drive, putting a hold on further tightening. But what about the US story?
Keynesians certainly did argue that the sequester would be a drag on the US recovery, and the economy did in fact continue to recover despite this drag. But in considering the events of 2013 you need to bear in mind two important things.
First, in Keynesian models the economy’s rate of growth depends, other things equal, on the change in fiscal policy. The sequester certainly imposed fiscal tightening; but was it more or less than the fiscal tightening that took place over the previous couple of years, as the ARRA faded out and state governments continued to retrench?
Second, even in 2013, and even on the fiscal front, the sequester wasn’t the only thing going on.
What we should have realized, but I didn’t – at least not fully – was that the sequester just wasn’t that big relative to the economy. The CBO put the first-year impact on the deficit at $68 billion, or 0.4 percent of GDP, in the first year with much smaller additional impacts thereafter – not trivial, but not huge either.
And the sequester did have a real, visible effect on federal spending – particularly federal consumption. Here’s the annual change in that expenditure:
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But this impact was, as I said, not that big relative to the economy, and there were other things going on – such as a sharp slowdown in the rate of fiscal tightening at the state and local level:
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So what happened overall? Well, here’s the IMF measure of the cyclically adjusted primary surplus for government as a whole – measured not in levels but in changes from the previous year, which is what should matter for the growth rate:
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According to the IMF’s estimates (which are similar to other estimates), there was indeed fiscal tightening in 2013 – but the pace of that tightening was no faster than it had been in 2012 or 2011. So there is no reason we should have seen a sharp growth slowdown, and the fact that growth persisted is in no sense a refutation of Keynesian economics.
I know what the response will be: “But you said blah blah blah!” So what? Even if I did, and even if my remarks aren’t being taken out of context, I am not the Oracle of Keynes, and my fallibility says nothing about how the economy works. If gotcha is all you’ve got, then you’ve got nothing.Finn “Karrigan” Andersen — Turning contenders into champions
Mygind Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 23, 2017
NiKo. Device. Dupreeh. Rain. These are some of the greatest CS:GO players in history, but until they teamed up with Finn “Karrigan” Andersen, they were just great contenders. He turned them into champions.
In the first few years of CS:GO, Karrigan didn’t have much of a career to write home about. Playing for teams like Fnatic, Reason Gaming and Mousesports, he didn’t manage to accomplish any great results. But when he got the offer to join the team at the time known as Dignitas (later TSM and Astralis) things started to turn around.
Dignitas at the time was made up of Device, Dupreeh, Cajunb, Xyp9x and FeTiSh, who Karrigan would go on to replace. Back in 2014, they were famous for being a very good lineup that could always reach the semifinals, but they could never manage to go beyond that. Part of the reason for that were lackluster Terrorist sides as well as their infamous choking issues. Once Karrigan came into the lineup, it only took him a few events to take the team that became known as TSM to the finals of a tournament for the first time in their history. This happened at Copenhagen Games in 2015, after beating their fellow Danes, Dignitas in the Lower Bracket Finals. In this game TSM managed to take 9 terrorist rounds to win the match, something that was almost unheard of for the previous iteration of the lineup.
It only took a few more events until TSM finally became champions at the PGL CCS Kick-Off Season Finals, defeating two of the greatest CS:GO teams in history, NiP and Fnatic. This wasn’t just the first CS:GO championship for Karrigan, but also for players such as Device and Dupreeh, who were long overdue for a big CS:GO title. But the success wouldn’t stop there for TSM, as they would go on to win 3 more big events over the course of the spring and summer of 2015. While TSM would only go on to become champions once after this great run of form, nobody can deny that Karrigan took a side that seemed to be stuck in the semifinals forever and turned them into champions.
In 2016 it eventually became clear that the team now known as Astralis needed a new direction. The players seemed to have lost faith in Karrigan as a leader and they ended up benching him in October of 2016. But the story didn’t end there. Only about a week later he would end up joining the less successful, but star studded lineup of FaZe Clan. If you are reading this in October 2017, you know that FaZe is considered to be the best team in the world, but that was far from the case when Karrigan joined. While the FaZe lineup had a lot of great players come through its doors at the time, such as Rain and Allu, the squad at the time was considered nothing more than a group of misfits. They were considered a group of players that were stuck in a form of luxury prison where you would have a great salary, but never accomplish any results. Karrigan seemed determined to change that. While the championships didn’t come straight away, you could immediately see the team benefiting from finally having an actual leader, something that the other members themselves praised a lot in interviews at the time. And as soon as the team got NiKo, another player with a massive amount of talent but no big championships to his name, into the lineup it didn’t take them long to win a title. Once again Karrigan had a duo in NiKo and Rain that was comparable to the one of Device and Dupreeh that he needed to win championships.
At the StarSeries Season 3 Finals, FaZe would win their very first championship, beating Karrigan’s former teammates from Astralis. With that win Karrigan added another trophy to his collection, but for Rain and NiKo, this was their first big title in CS:GO.
It would take a few more roster changes before FaZe became champions again. Removing Allu and Kioshima and replacing them with legendary players Olofmeister and GuardiaN has given FaZe a superteam like we have never seen before in CS:GO and perhaps this will be their era of dominance.
A common criticism of Karrigan is that he is only able to lead good players. While it’s easy to look at the current FaZe lineup on paper and say that it will be easy for them to win championships with that amount of talent, let’s not underestimate Karrigan’s contribution to the team. Device and Dupreeh had never lifted a CS:GO trophy until they were under the leadership of Karrigan. Rain and NiKo had only managed to win smaller events like Acer Predator Masters and Gaming Paradise. Prior to Karrigan joining, FaZe itself was an example of a team that had more than enough firepower to succeed in theory, but without any leadership their success was very limited.
To make an analogy, FC Barcelona have always been a great team in recent history, but they were never as successful as they were under the leadership of Pep Guardiola, a man who has also been criticised for not being able to manage “bad” teams. One thing Guardiola and Karrigan have in common is that no matter how much criticism they receive nobody will be able to take away their accomplishments. And if Karrigan can lead this FaZe squad to dominance and perhaps even a victory at the ELEAGUE Major in 2018, those results are gonna speak for themselves. If you are able to be dominant in what is perhaps the most competitive era in CS:GO history, it doesn’t matter how much talent you have on your team, you deserve a lot of credit, and Karrigan deserves a lot of credit for taking what is indeed very talented players, but being a huge contributing factor in turning them into champions.A recent report from the U.S. National Research Council found that the public does not consider investing money in the space program a priority. This poses a problem for NASA, which, with its current level of funding, will never be able to undertake a massive endeavor like a manned mission to Mars.
Public apathy toward NASA, a lack of understanding of the benefits of a space program, and more pressing matters all lead people to ask: is NASA worth funding at all? Couldn't that money be better spent working on the economy, homelessness, or the housing market?
A key misconception among Americans is the amount of government money that goes to the space program. Just how much funding does NASA receive, relative to other governmental departments? Probably not as much as you think.
In 2013...
The Department of Justice received double the funding NASA received.
the funding NASA received. The Department of Homeland security received three times the funding.
the funding. The Department of Education received four times the funding.
the funding. The Department of Transportation received five times the funding.
the funding. The Department of the Treasury received six times the funding.
the funding. The Department of Defense, including the ongoing efforts of the War on Terror Overseas Contingency Operation, received over 35 times the funding NASA received.
For the past few years, NASA's budget has accounted for roughly 0.5% of the total U.S. federal budget. 1966 marked the height of NASA's funding, when it received 4.41% of the total budget - nine times the relative budget it receives currently. In fact, 1963-1969 were the only years in history that NASA received over 2% of the total budget. And what was it able to accomplish with that level of funding? Oh, just a little historic event like landing a man on the moon.
But maybe you don't want your hard-earned tax dollars being put towards space shenanigans. Maybe you resent the fact that roughly $10 - yes, a whopping $10 - of your annual personal income tax goes to fund NASA. We have bigger problems to solve here on Earth; why allocate money to space exploration? What has NASA ever done for you?
I'm so glad you asked.
Research and development either led by NASA or effectuated through partnerships with NASA have led to inventions that have found everyday, practical use in our lives.
Those cordless tools in your cabinet? They evolved from technology developed from the Apollo lunar landing program. That ear thermometer that saves you an awkward rectal exam? Developed from the application of 30 years of experience in remote measurement of the temperatures of stars and planets. How long do your tires last? You can attribute 10,000 miles of their tread life to tire technology developed for Mars rovers. Enjoy sleeping on that memory foam mattress? Developed from technology designed to improve crash protection for airplane passengers. Glad you didn't have to wear those hideous chain-link dental braces? The transparent material in invisible braces was developed for military tracking purposes. Enjoy jogging with your athletic shoes? Those insoles derived from technology in moon boots designed for shock absorption. Wear glasses? They're scratch-resistant thanks to synthetic diamond coatings developed for aerospace systems.
The list goes on: high capacity batteries, advances in the aerodynamics of vehicles, UV filters for glasses, cloud technology, satellite television, Google Earth imagery, breast cancer detection... NASA has had a hand in all of these things - and more.
The fact is that NASA has filed thousands of patents with the U.S. government, and technology either spun-off from NASA or directly developed by the program is all around us. Some of the greatest discoveries and inventions in human history were not a result of direct development, but rather were incidental to the development of other technologies and ideas. Funding a space program isn't just funding the construction of spaceships - it's funding invention itself.
But maybe you didn't need to be reminded of the tangible examples of the application of NASA science to our daily lives. Maybe you were already sold on the idea of space exploration, because you can appreciate the far-reaching benefits that may not be obvious to everyone.
By funding a space program, we inspire the next generation to enter the fields of science and engineering. We show the world that we are a progressive, forward-thinking people seeking the betterment of the human race. We further our understanding of the universe we inhabit. We continue the proud human tradition of exploration, the eternal zeitgeist fueled by unbridled ambition that has pushed our civilization to achieve things once thought impossible. We pave a path among the stars for the eventual expansion of humanity into a universe whose mysteries we will conquer, one eureka at a time.
So why should we fund the space program? Ultimately, it all boils down to one reason.
For Science.Supporters of President Hassan Rouhani of Iran have won more seats in parliamentary runoff elections, the Iranian state news media reported Saturday, but they failed to win enough of the 68 contested seats to secure a majority, limiting their ability to carry out significant political and social changes.
The gains made by the moderates and reformists were not enough to decisively alter the balance of power in Iran, the president’s supporters acknowledged. They added that political clashes between their lawmakers and conservative hard-liners were bound to increase.
“Expect a Parliament with a slightly friendlier tone, but also many political crises,” said Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political analyst close to the government.
After Friday’s runoff elections for races that were not decided in the first round of voting in February, the reformists and moderate supporters of Mr. Rouhani hold 122 seats in the 290-member Parliament, and the conservative hard-liners have 84, the state media reported.Past and Future Events List
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World Blockchain Summit, Nairobi, March 22–23, 2018
Kenya’s forward-looking government is prioritizing its various service areas in public and private organizations that can benefit from blockchain technologies — and educate the market about the transformational potential of blockchain technology. The Summit aims to connect global blockchain gurus, technology innovators, investors and startups in this space — with regional business and IT leaders from across key industry verticals to debate on the nature of blockchain and its many potential to improve efficiency in every business processes. Learn more.
Chainges, Amsterdam, May 4–5, 2018
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Brendan Rodgers has catapulted from candidate for the Aston Villa manager's job to possible stand-in for his former mentor Jose Mourinho at Chelsea.
Carnlough man Rodgers is in the frame as the Premier League champions look for a stopgap manager to take charge, with owner Roman Abramovich running out of patience with Mourinho's failure to halt the worst run by a defending title winning team.
Rodgers' stock remains high at Chelsea where he served as youth and reserve team manager in Mourinho's first reign at Stamford Bridge.
That has led to his odds of becoming the next Chelsea boss slashed from 20/1 to just 7/1. Since his sacking by Liverpool earlier this month, Rodgers has also been linked with Aston Villa, but an interim role at Chelsea could be a more likely option, favourable to both parties.
Chelsea are in the Premiership bottom six and Tuesday's Capital One Cup exit at Stoke added to the pressure on Mourinho.
The Portuguese manager will be fighting to save his job if his team are beaten in their next Premier League game, at home against Liverpool on Sunday.
The biggest question for Abramovich would be who could take over immediately from Mourinho, with realistic caretaker options limited, as he pursues new No1 target Diego Simeone, under contract at Atletico Madrid until the summer, shifting the focus onto Rodgers.
Chelsea have a rich history of appointing interim managers who have gone on to produce success, most notably Roberto di Matteo, winner of the Champions League and FA Cup in 2012, Guus Hiddinck (2009 FA Cup) and Rafa Benitez (Europa League 2013).
Belfast TelegraphThe National Assembly is not sitting in the first two weeks of March, so that its members can supposedly attend to what the Assembly calendar calls (wink) “work in the riding.”
Nobody checks on the MNAs to make sure they actually are working in their ridings, however. And when they return to the Assembly after their March break, some of them are always sporting sun tans, as if they spent the time looking for constituents on golf courses in Florida.
Those tanned MNAs have to settle for bronze, however, while six of Premier Philippe Couillard’s cabinet ministers have struck gold. Along with the premier, they’ve won an all-expenses-paid junket — excuse me, “mission” — to Europe this week.
Five ministers left with Couillard on Monday for a five-day visit to Paris and Bordeaux, which incidentally is the world’s most famous wine-producing region. A sixth minister is on a separate itinerary.
Counting the premier, that’s more than one-quarter of the 26-member cabinet, plus staffers, who are travelling to Europe, after the government has been telling Quebecers they must pay more for less public service so that it can balance its budget.
So, for example, Jean D’Amour, a junior minister without a department of his own, is spending five days in France this week, and not his Lower St. Lawrence riding.
The trip will cost the government more than $2,300 a day for each minister, the Coalition Avenir Québec party said.
Supposedly, the ministers are travelling so they can meet with officials in Europe, as though it’s still the 20th century. Haven’t they heard of Skype?
Naturally, Quebec’s head of international diplomacy, the minister of international relations and the French-speaking world, Christine St-Pierre, is accompanying Couillard.
Last year St-Pierre criticized her Parti Québécois predecessor, Jean-François Lisée, for misusing public funds on personal travel to Paris, then had to apologize because Lisée had spent his own money.
Couillard defended his bloated entourage by pointing out that its French hosts would pick up the tab for lodging and ground transportation. Quebec taxpayers would be on the hook for the rest, however, including airfare.
This got Couillard in trouble in France, where he was criticized as a Freeloading Phil, as well as in Quebec.
True, for the government, the ministers’ travel costs are loose change behind the sofa cushions compared to the more than $7 billion in spending cuts and revenue increases required to balance next year’s budget.
Politically, however, that’s the problem: the sums involved are small enough for a taxpayer to grasp easily.
In the 1930s, the $10 a minister charged his department for a pair of breeches to wear on his inspection tours in the bush — “les culottes à Vautrin,” or Vautrin’s pants — contributed to the government’s election defeat.
Couillard’s politically tone-deaf mini-cabinet European tour is the kind of mistake a government usually makes only after it’s been in power too long.
It seems that the longer ministers spend in the back seats of their chauffeur-driven government sedans, the more they become isolated from the public, and the more they develop a sense of personal entitlement. And the less they care about appearances.
Couillard’s government has been in power for less than a year. Because of the defeat of the PQ minority government that preceded it, however, the Liberals were out of office for only 19 months between governments of their own. As columnist Michel David of Le Devoir has pointed out, that’s not much time in opposition for a former governing party to renew itself.
Couillard was out of politics from 2008 to 2012. Still, his government looks older than its official age. And with his multi-ministerial mission to France, it also acts like it.
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Hurricane Irma has caused more than $10 billion (8.3 billion euros) in damage across the Caribbean so far, making it the costliest storm ever to hit the region's island nations and territories, disaster risk experts said Friday.
Compiled by the Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology (CEDIM) in Germany, the estimate covers a dozen island nations and territories hit by Friday, along with projections for the Turks and Caicos, which are on the hurricane's path.
"This will likely be a $10 billion loss across the Caribbean -- a huge loss," said James Daniell, senior risk engineer at CEDIM, and head of its Forensic Disaster Analysis Group.
The Caribbean tally is sure to rise as the super-storm hits the Bahamas on its way toward Florida, but already surpasses the costs -- excluding the United States and Mexico -- inflicted by Hurricanes Ike in 2008 and Hugo in 1989 (9.4 billion each, in 2017 dollars), Daniell said.
Hardest hit by Irma have been the Dutch Sint Maarten ($2.5 billion) and the US Virgin Islands ($2.45 billion), followed by Saint-Martin ($1.55 billion) and the British Virgin Islands ($1.4 billion).
The US territory Puerto Rico was not hit head-on by the storm, but is projected to sustain $790 million in damage, the CEDIM reported.
The $10 billion bill also excludes the more densely populated Dominican Republic and Haiti, which followed later on destructive path, and for which the tally is likely to be high.
The total bill for loss and damage could hit $120 billion once the United States is included, according to data modelling firm Enki Research.
Irma is projected to hit Florida late Saturday.
© 2017 AFPThe following is an excerpt from Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets, by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams
We are getting ever closer to discovering a multiplicity of far-distant ocean worlds, some perhaps life-bearing. Planets, we know, are commonplace in the distant heavens. The next generation of satellites and telescopes will find and examine numbers of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone, and will glimpse evidence of atmospheres, oceans, and perhaps signs of life itself, via planetary chemistries pushed out of equilibrium.
By then we should also have learned more about the hidden ice covered oceans of such nearer bodies as Europa, Triton, and Callisto (where liquid water has been smuggled far beyond the normal habitable zone by the power of tidal energy), as well as understanding the history of the oceans that seemingly long ago covered, however briefly, the surfaces of our near neighbours Mars and Venus. Each of these planets, present and past (relatively), near and far, will have oceans quite as various and complex as our own. We see them now as simple images, cartoons almost — blank canvases to which we hope to add detail. Those far oceans will be stirred by currents and by differences in temperature and chemistry, each in a specific pattern and combination, and each different — some of them very different — to the patterns and moods we see in our oceans.
There will be different flavours of ocean out there too. We cannot imagine that any of those oceans will be of pure water. Rather, they will be complex chemical cocktails of dissolved salts and minerals — and of organic compounds too — some dilute, others more concentrated than even the dense brines of the Earth’s Dead Sea.
Those far oceans will not be constant, but will evolve through time as their parent planets and stars evolve, either gradually or suddenly and catastrophically. They will, over geological timescales, change in volume, shape, temperature, and chemistry, some waxing larger, others drying out or freezing as water moves between planetary interior, crustal surface, atmosphere, and outer space. The new astronomy will capture oceans young, middle-aged, and old, being born and dying. We are on the verge of not just a new chapter in oceanography — or exo-oceanography, if you like — but of setting up an entirely new library of oceans, for the diversity and complexity of cosmic oceans will be beyond anything that we can dream of. Truth will be stranger than both fiction and scientific hypothesizing alike — and that is even before we think of the kind of life forms that may be evolving in those extra-terrestrial waters.
As these new seascapes open up in front of us, we are here on Earth at another transition: the likely transformation — and biological impoverishment — of our own Earthly oceans that surely still represent a cosmic jewel, even on this widest of universal canvases. For it seems very likely that, over the coming decades, the oceans of Earth will undergo a transformation the like of which has not been seen for many millions of years. The changes wrought by warming, acidification, overfishing, and pollution threaten to kill off not just many species, but also whole ecosystems — not least the extraordinary biological riches of the coral reefs.
It is still — just — not too late to stop or slow this marine holocaust, and there have been many useful initiatives, both national and international.
The setting up of marine reserves helps sharply depleted fish populations to recover to something like their former numbers. Current discussions on how the International Law of the Sea may evolve have as one central theme the effects — and possible control — of harmful human activities.Benjamin Powell is director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He is also a senior fellow with the Independent Institute and the North American editor of the Review of Austrian Economics. His new book is Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy, and it’s sure to leave some folks unsettled.
The Freeman: Sweatshop workers work long days with little time off for low pay in stifling conditions. How is that a good thing?
Powell: The way Penn (of Penn & Teller) put it once when he interviewed me is that “it’s better than tilling the soil with Grandpa’s femur.” That is a bit crass... but true. Wishing away reality doesn’t give these workers better alternatives. Workers choose to work in sweatshops because it is their best available option. Sweatshops, however, are better than just the least bad option. They bring with them the proximate causes of economic development (capital, technology, the opportunity to build human capital) that lead to greater productivity—which eventually raises pay, shortens working hours, and improves working conditions.
The Freeman: What are the alternatives for people in the developing world who don’t want to work in a sweatshop?
Powell: The main alternative is work in agriculture (sometimes subsistence) or domestic services. In countries where sweatshops locate—like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, Burma, and Vietnam—more than half of the population worked in agriculture. But agricultural work typically pays less, has similarly long hours, and often has higher rates of injuries.
The bottom line is that poverty is the norm in countries where sweatshops locate. I examined the 85 countries where “sweatshop wages” were reported in the popular press, and I found that large segments of the population lived on less than $2.00 and $1.25 per day (purchasing power adjusted). Yet the average wage reported in these sweatshops in every country exceeded $2.00 per day.
Bangladesh is often in the news because of factory accidents. More than 80 percent of the Bangladeshi population lived on less than $2.00 per day and more than 50 percent lived on less than $1.25 during my period of study. Yet the average reported sweatshop wage exceeded $2.00 per day and no factory was reported as paying less than $1.25 per day.
The Freeman: How is taking advantage of poor people’s lack of options not exploitation?
Powell: Exploitation is a bit of a loaded term and it is a contested concept in philosophy and business ethics. We’re not going to resolve that here. I do devote part of a chapter to the topic based on prior work that I did with philosopher Matt Zwolinski.
For our purposes, here’s the main point: Even if it is “exploitation,” how is that bad if the workers consent to it and the “exploitation” makes them better off? If it is not wrong to ignore poor people in the third world—meaning they don’t have a positive right to an income transfer from us—how is it more wrong to benefit the workers a little bit rather than not at all, even if that little bit doesn’t rise to the level of some philosopher’s definition of being non-exploitative?
The Freeman: If you’re right about the benefits of sweatshop labor for the world’s poor, do you have any concerns about robots replacing them—perhaps sending them back to the streets and fields?
Powell: None! Think about the countries with sweatshops in 1960: Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea. All of them now have more machines but the workers haven’t gone back to the streets and the fields. Increased productivity is the result of more capital coming into those countries and now workers earn enough for first world living standards. Ironically, the sweatshops have disappeared precisely because the workers became too productive to justify using their labor for textiles and other goods made in sweatshops. Some people mistakenly think of this process as a “race to the bottom,” but it’s actually the opposite. Hong Kong and its cohort didn’t become impoverished when the sweatshops left to go to a poorer country. Hong Kong had simply moved up from the bottom rung of the ladder of economic development and that allowed a new poorer country to get on the bottom rung.
The Freeman: Can you tell us a little about “Nana”?
Powell: Ha! I never expected to be talking about my great grandmother in this interview!
In the 1920s she worked in the Cardinal Shoe Factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Lawrence, Lowell, and my hometown of Haverhill (nicknamed the Shoe City) were all cities that had many jobs during the industrial revolution that would be classified as sweatshops today. My great grandmother’s job was one of those. But it allowed her to earn an income and help her kids have a better life. One grew up to earn a doctorate and the other became a vice president of a bank. I’m in good company here. Milton Friedman’s mother also worked in what would be called a sweatshop today.
The Freeman: It seems like well-intentioned activists and young people want to universalize some ideal of working conditions. Why is this neither possible nor desirable in your mind?
Powell: If a worker has a productivity of $1.00 per hour, mandating any compensation greater than $1.00 per hour will result in that worker being fired. But from the employer’s perspective they are mostly indifferent as to whether they pay the $1.00 in wages or in better working conditions or other forms of compensation. The workers do care. In the case of sweatshop workers, most are desperately trying to feed, clothe, and shelter their families so they want all of their compensation in wages and little in working-condition improvements. As productivity and wages go up, then the market forces improvement in working conditions. Mandating universal working conditions will reverse the preferences of workers and kill jobs in poorer countries, as employers shift jobs to places that are more productive and already have better working conditions.
The Freeman: Recent reports say extreme global poverty has been cut in half during the last 20 years. To what major factors do you attribute this massive improvement in human wellbeing?
Powell: The biggest factor is the increase in economic freedom around the world. Even in places that are still relatively unfree, massive strides have taken place. Since 1980, China has made the biggest improvement in economic freedom in Asia. Since 1990, India has made the second biggest improvement. This improvement in economic freedom has brought economic growth that has lifted more people out of dire poverty than at any other time in human history.
The Freeman: And what BS reasons are given for the improvement?
Powell: People often mistake minimum wages, worker safety laws, bans on child labor, and other government regulations for improvements in living standards. Although these laws exist in wealthy countries today, the United States and other wealthy countries didn’t have these laws when we were at the level of development of countries with sweatshops today. Instead, the laws largely came after our development and mostly codified improvements in wages and conditions that market forces had already improved.
Take child labor for example: Massachusetts passed our nation’s first child labor law. It limited the work day to 10 hours for children under 12 years old. It was hardly a restriction at all. The United States didn’t pass a national child labor law until 1938, when our per capita income was already more than $10,000 (in 2010 dollars). It’s no coincidence, as child labor virtually disappears in all countries when incomes reach a little over $10,000. The laws were largely redundant.
The Freeman: Word on the street says you just started a free-market institute at Texas Tech University.... What sort of awesomeness can we expect from this institute—that is, what will your team get up to?
Powell: We’re up to big things at the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech. We just secured a major grant to study the origins and social change dynamics that lead to greater economic freedom. I’m in the process of hiring two more faculty members to join our team and we’re working on adding more after that. I even taught a course on Austrian economics last fall. We’re running conferences, holding lectures, working with graduate students, doing outreach... the whole nine yards. We are going to make Texas Tech one of the premier places to study free-market economics. Check out what we’re up to at www.fmi.ttu.edu.
The Freeman: Professor Powell, thank you very much.
Powell: Thank You!
(For more on this topic, see "Banning Sweatshops Only Hurts the Poor.")Donald Trump campaigned on the claim that he would be a "law and order" president, and the 2016 Republican platform called for more "gratitude and support" for law enforcement and expressed concern over "the murder rate soaring in our great cities." (That last part, at least, was pretty much a fabrication.) Despite that high-minded rhetoric, congressional Republicans are pushing forward with a stealth bill that will make life easier for contract killers and make it more dangerous for police to protect themselves from gun violence.
On Tuesday, the House Committee on Natural Resources will hear testimony about the innocuously titled "Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act" (or SHARE Act), introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican. Buried in the middle of a bunch of provisions regarding hunting and fishing on federal lands, however, is a provision that would roll back parts of an 80-year-old law — passed in response to the St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929 — that regulates the sale of firearm silencers.
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"Silencers distort the sound of a gun, and in the wrong hands, they put people's safety at risk," John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, explained to Salon.
Under the National Firearms Act of 1934, people who buy gun silencers must pay a $200 tax and go through a cumbersome registration process with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. When Trump won the election, the NRA made it a top priority to push for the end of these regulations. The campaign largely involved rebranding silencers as "suppressors" and arguing that they are necessary for firearm safety, because they supposedly protect people's hearing during sport shooting.
Gun safety advocates argue, however, that silencers make it easier for criminals to operate and put the lives of police officers at risk. They also argue that the gun lobby has cynical motivations for wanting to get rid of silencer registration and taxes: Profit.
"NRA leadership and their congressional allies are working behind closed doors to prop up lagging gun sales by making it easier for gun companies to sell silencers," Feinblatt argued, adding that the bill's backers "put profits ahead of public safety."
As Lois Beckett at the Guardian reported recently, American Outdoor Brands, which is the new name for the venerable gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson, recently acquired Gemtech, a company that sells silencers, anticipating the strong possibility that a Trump presidency would lead to deregulation of silencer sales.
“We view this acquisition as somewhat opportunistic, allowing us to enter the suppressor category prior to the potential favorable changes in legislation and at a time when the market is particularly soft," American Outdoor Brands CEO James Debney said during a shareholder call last week.
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Silencers are seen by the gun industry as a great way to recruit new customers, because the devices make guns less scary to children.
"For new or younger shooters, using a silencer means being able to focus on marksmanship fundamentals and enjoy the overall shooting experience with considerably more comfort," the 2017 catalog for Advanced Armament Corporation explained.
Donald Trump Jr., who is a big fan of silencers, concurs. Last year, in a video interview with Joshua Waldron, the CEO of a silencer manufacturer, Don Jr. said that silencers were great at getting "little kids into the game."
NRA leaders have argued that the name "silencer" is a misnomer, because the devices muffle but do not eliminate the sound of gunfire. In May, gun lobbyists invited reporters to a demonstration of guns fired with silencers, to show that one can still hear a firearm's report. Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA's lobbying efforts, argued that the movies distort people's views of silencers, adding, "They’re not silent."
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It's true that silencers don't completely silence the sound of a gunshot, but the perception is correct that to muffle or distort that sound can be used by kidnappers, robbers or domestic abusers who use guns to control and intimidate their victims. Seeing a silencer on a gun could go a long way towards convincing a victim that the assailant could shoot them without being detected, making the crime victim more likely to comply with an assailant's demands. It's also true that the movie images of silencers, accurate or not, are a big selling point with gun customers who are motivated in large part by the glamorization of guns in pop culture.
Gun safety advocates argue that while the silencers don't completely muffle the sound, they do conceal the sound of gunfire far more than gun lobbyists are letting on. Noting that SEAL Team Six used the devices for stealth when they raided Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, Americans for Responsible Solutions write that "guns fired with silencers could increase the risk of ambush attacks targeting cops " and may also make it harder for police to deal with active shooters, because silencers make it more difficult to ascertain the direction of a gunshot. They also point out the grim reality of such cases as California mass shooter Christopher Dorner, who killed four people with 14 shots from a silenced weapon in February 2013, without neighbors even noticing.
The Violence Policy Center released a report on silencers in June, noting that requiring people to register silencers has largely been successful in keeping these devices out of criminal hands. However, silencers "have been involved in serious and sometimes deadly crimes that graphically illustrate the threat to public safety." Many of these cases involved attempted terrorist attacks planned by white supremacists, anti-government radicals or those affiliated with ISIS.
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That report also emphasizes one of the big concerns raised by gun safety advocates, which is the worry that silencers will make it easier for mass shooters to kill more people. They cite a March 2011 article in Tactical Weapons magazine, titled "The Science of Silencers," in which the author explained how American soldiers used silencers in the Afghanistan war.
"If you’re being shot at and you can’t hear the actual gunshot because it’s suppressed and the only thing you hear is the ballistic crack, you’ll think the fire is coming from exactly opposite from where it is," the writer explains, noting that, "this has caused Taliban to run towards the incoming fire, right at our guys."
An April poll commissioned by Americans for Responsible Solutions found that 73 percent of gun owners want to keep the restrictions on silencer sales in place. Slipping this regulatory rollback into a bill that, on its surface, addresses the use of federal lands for hunting and fishing suggests that Republicans know that the public has no interest in deregulating silencers, and are trying to sneak this bill through Congress while no one notices. In a news cycle dominated by Trump's incessant antics, there's a good chance they will get away with it.'A' Company of the Victorian Mounted Rifles on manoeuvres in Victoria in 1889
A slouch hat is a wide-brimmed felt or cloth hat most commonly worn as part of a military uniform, often, although not always, with a chinstrap. It has been worn by military personnel from many different nations including Australia, Britain, India, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia, France, the United States, the Confederate States, Germany and many others. Australia and New Zealand have had various models of slouch hat as standard issue headwear since the late Victorian period.
Today it is worn by military personnel from a number of countries, although it is primarily associated with Australia, where it is considered to be a national symbol. The distinctive Australian slouch hat, sometimes called an "Australian bush hat" or "digger hat", has one side of the brim turned up or pinned to the side of the hat with a Rising Sun Badge in order to allow a rifle to be slung over the shoulder. This was also the practice with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, albeit with the New Zealand military insignia worn on the front of the puggaree of that era.
In the United States it was also called the Kossuth hat, after Lajos Kossuth. During the American Civil War (1861–65) the headgear was common among both Confederate and Union troops in the Western Theater, although not always with its brim turned up at the side. During the Spanish–American War, as commander of the Rough Riders, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt became known for wearing a slouch hat.
History [ edit ]
The name "slouch hat" refers to the fact that one side droops down as opposed to the other which is pinned against the side of the crown.[1] This style of hat has been worn for many hundreds of years, especially during the English Civil War during the 17th century when it became associated with the forces of King Charles I, the Cavaliers, but it was also fashionable for the aristocracy throughout Europe during that time until it was superseded by the cocked hat which has been referred to as the tricorn or bicorn depending upon the number of points.[citation needed]
It was introduced into Australia around 1885, although it traces its military use back to Austrian skirmishers.[2] The modern slouch hat is derived from the black "Corsican hat" (Korsehut) – historically used in the Austrian army during the Napoleonic Wars. The headwear saw primary use by 15 battalions of Austrian Jägers (skirmishers) and it featured an upturned brim, leather chinstrap and feather plume. The regular infantry also saw limited use of the Corsican hat from years 1803–06 and 1811–36.[3]
A shortage of cork helmets led to the widespread use of the slouch hat amongst British Empire forces during the Second Boer War,[4] where it was used by units such as the City Imperial Volunteers (CIV), Imperial Yeomanry, and King Edward's Horse.[5] An 1884 painting displayed in the regimental museum of the pipe band of 1st Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders shows the unit in service dress, crossing the veldt in Zululand, wearing khaki slouch hats.[6] After the war, however, many armies rejected the once-popular headwear (as the British Army did in 1905), although it came back into fashion briefly during World War II during the Burma campaign and amongst troops serving in India and Southeast Asia at this time.[7]
The slouch hat in gray felt was worn by the Schutztruppe (protection force), the colonial armed force of Imperial Germany, as an alternative to the pith helmet, especially in South West Africa. Different coloured puggarees were worn by the Germans in South West Africa, German East Africa, German West Africa (Togo and Cameroon), German New Guinea and China. The hat had its brim pinned up on the right side with a cockade in the national colors and was worn with the home uniform as well. German colonial police units in South West Africa wore a khaki slouch hat with a small national cockade on the front and the right side pinned up by a metal Imperial crown device.[citation needed]
It became associated with the Australian military around the end of the 19th Century and since World War I it has been manufactured in Australia for the Australian Army by companies such as Akubra, Mountcastle[8] and Bardsley Hats.[9][citation needed] This slouch hat is still worn by the Australian military today and it has become a national symbol in Australia.[10] A Unit Colour Patch is also worn by members of the Australian Army on their slouch hat to indicate which unit they are from.[11]
The slouch hat or Terai hat is also associated with the Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (Dutch East Indies Army), and Gurkha regiments of the British Army and Indian Army (formerly the British Indian Army) and although it is still worn by the Gurkhas, the hat is no longer worn on active service. The 2nd Gurkha Rifles became the first Gurkha regiment to adopt the slouch hat when they were issued with the Australian variant in 1901. The Gurkha terai hat is created by fusing two hats into one to make the hat more rigid and is worn at an angle, tilted to the right.[12] The Chindits and other units of Field Marshal William Slim's British Fourteenth Army, who fought against the Japanese in the Far East during World War II, also became associated with the slouch hat (also known as the bush hat in the British Army).[13] The slouch hat was also used by colonial units of the British Empire, including the Royal West African Frontier Force, the Canadian Yukon Field Force, Canadian Pacific Railway Militia, the Kenya Regiment and troops from Rhodesia.[14]
Users [ edit ]
Australia [ edit ]
The slouch hat was first worn by military forces in Australia in 1885 when the newly created Victorian Mounted Rifles adopted the hat as part of their uniform after their commanding officer, Thomas Price, had seen them worn by police in Burma.[10] On 22 December 1890, the military commanders of the then separate Australian Colonies prior to the Federation of Australia met to discuss the introduction of the khaki uniform throughout Australia. They agreed that all Australian Forces with the exception of the Artillery would wear the slouch hat. It was to be looped up on one side—Victoria and Tasmania on the right and the other colonies (later states) on the left.[15] This was done so that rifles could be held at the slope without damaging the brim.[4] After Federation, the slouch hat became standard Australian Army headgear in 1903 and since then it has developed into an important national symbol.[4]
The slouch hat (also known as a Hat KFF, or Hat Khaki Fur Felt) is worn as the standard ceremonial headress for all members of the Army, except those belonging to units or corps that have an official headress such as a beret, and is treated with the utmost care and respect. It is also worn in some units as general duty dress. When worn for ceremonial purposes, the "Grade 1" Slouch hat is worn with a seven-band puggaree, six of which represent the states of Australia while the seventh represents its territories of Australia.[16] A Unit Colour Patch is worn on the right of puggaree,[11] while a Corps or Regiment Hat badge is placed to its front and the General Service Badge (The Rising Sun) worn on the left brim which is folded up and clipped into place. When worn for general duties, the "Grade 2" Slouch hat is worn with the left brim down and the Rising Sun badge removed.[citation needed]
The slouch hat worn by the Army is one of its trademarks,[10] but it is not theirs alone: the Royal Australian Air Force wears the HKFF with a dark blue or "Air Force Blue" Puggaree, as a Non Ceremonial head dress for the RAAF;[17] the Royal Australian Navy is also known to wear the hat when wearing camouflage and other uniforms, and has the same features as the RAAF's HKFF. The RAAF and RAN slouch hats do not have unit colour patches, nor do they wear it brim up; instead the only badge worn is the RAAF or RAN cap badge, of a design appropriate to the wearer's rank, at the front of puggaree.[citation needed]
Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR) wear a jungle green coloured puggaree with no colour patch, which dates back to traditions when serving in Malaya.[18] Staff Cadets at the Royal Military College, Duntroon also wear a darker pugaree, however it contains eight pleats. The eighth pleat signifies the graduation of the first international cadet through the Royal Military College who hailed from New Zealand. They also wear the chin strap of the hat the opposite way around from that of the rest of the Army, as the first commander of the 1st Australian Imperial Force, William Throsby Bridges, was found wearing his slouch hat back to front when he was fatally wounded at Gallipoli.[16]
Some units of the Royal Australian Armoured Corps such as cavalry and light horse regiments wear emu plumes behind the Rising Sun badge. This is a reference to a practice dating from World War 1, where Light Horsemen would chase down emus and steal their feathers to mount in their hat as a mark of their riding skill.[4] Within the Australian Army, mixing articles of uniform and civilian attire is known as mixed dress and prohibited. Removing all badges as well as the puggaree removes the hat's status as uniform and it may be worn with civilian dress.[citation needed]
New Zealand [ edit ]
The NZ version of the slouch hat, known in the New Zealand Army as the "Mounted Rifles Hat", is currently worn by the various corps and regiments of the New Zealand Army. In all cases the puggaree is khaki-green-khaki, the original Mounted Rifles puggaree, with only the badge denoting the wearer's Regimental affiliation. It was originally reintroduced for wear by Queen Alexandra's Mounted Rifles in the mid-1990s, but in 2000 its issue was broadened to all Corps for wear with working dress (influenced by such use by QAMR) as well as with service dress. As an alternative to the typical NZ army lemon squeezer, the NZ Mounted Rifles Hat is worn on all but the most important occasions, where the lemon squeezer takes precedence.[19] The slouch hat predates the introduction of the lemon squeezer hat (which did not appear until after the Boer War) and is worn brim down. Historic photographs indicate the brim to have been worn up in the Australian style on occasion.[1] The term 'bush hat' is also associated with New Zealand culture such as the Bushman, Southern man and Man Alone stereotypes. The New Zealand Police Force wear a variant of the 'bush hat' in navy blue, normally in rural areas. Considered obsolete as main dress, few individuals wear it instead of the standard peaked cap.
Canada [ edit ]
Officers and men of the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force serving overseas were issued with white cotton duck hats produced by Tilley Endurables during the Gulf War.[20][21]
US military [ edit ]
The slouch hat has been known in the US military at least since the American Civil War, being fairly common among officers. Some American soldiers assigned to units in the China Burma India Theatre of World War II (CBI) such as the OSS Detachment 101 and the 1st Air Commando Group wore British Army issue bush hats with their uniforms without official authorization.[citation needed]
In the early 1960s, when American soldiers went to the Vietnam War, the standard headgear was a fatigue baseball or field cap that offered limited protection from the sun. Local tailors made a slouch hat in a style between a French type bush hat of the First Indochina War and an Australian type bush hat with a snap on the brim to pin one side up that was widely bought and unofficially worn by American troops in Vietnam. The local tailors usually used green fatigue cloth or leopard skin pattern military camouflage from old parachutes. The hat often had a cloth arc emblazoned with the word VIET-NAM on the brim. The US 1st |
man's troops are up in arms over the target of the investment bank's latest round of cost cuts – the humble pot plant.
The bank is thought to spend tens of thousands of pounds a year on the supply and upkeep of plants in its London headquarters but this week ordered that many of them be removed in a bid to cut down on overheads.
Sources say the decision provoked disquiet at the bank and that some employees tried to block the move, leading to a stand-off between the plant pickers and staff.
In some cases, a solution is believed to have been found only after employees agreed to sign forms guaranteeing to take responsibility for particular plants. Many of those plants that were removed are believed to have been given to charities.
That pot plants were the subject of the controversy will spark surprise given that Goldman is cutting about 1,000 jobs globally as Wall Street and City banks try to cope with difficult markets and lower business volumes.
Banks cut costs and removed perks en masse in the wake of the financial crisis but many of those benefits had reemerged as markets recovered.
Goldman's policy of removing plants is one of the first examples of cost cutting to emerge in the latest phase of the downturn.
In 2008, Goldman reduced the use of taxis for staff and bankers were encouraged to stay at lower cost hotels.
Other companies took similar steps. Citigroup and Credit Suisse asked employees to cut back on colour photocopying, while DTZ, the property company, stopped supplying biscuits at its meetings.
Goldman declined to comment.Corner-shops (can you still call them that?) can hold rich pickings for beer hunters. If I’m somewhere new, I often pop into supermarkets or local stores, pick up a paper, and inspect the beer and wine section. Yes, it’s almost always cans of cooking lager and ever-bigger bottles of cider moldering under those fluorescent lights, but occasionally – such is the thrill of beer hunting – a little gem pops up.
When I first moved to the area where I live now, my new purveyor of papers, lottery tickets and snacks had a decent little range of bottled beer; from the big boys, obviously, but there was also a clear-bottled, exotic-sounding Banana Bread Beer. I’d just ‘got into’ beer and was trying to taste every beer I could get my hands on, so I picked one up. Slightly dusty, god-knows how old, that odd little beer seemed to fit perfectly with the slightly 1970’s feel of the corner shop.
Banana Bread Beer. Now, my palate somewhat more refined with a few years of enjoying beer and food under my belt, the name alone still evokes a smile.
Banana bread itself is one of the more versatile treats to enjoy with beer: pairing with a stout or porter brings out the brown sugar notes in the loaf, while bitter and old ale plug the fruit and wheat aspects into the mains and amplify them. Add cream cheese frosting to proceedings, pair with an imperial stout, and you’ve gone from Betty’s-tearoom-on-a-Saturday-lunchtime pedestrianism to something altogether more seductive and sinful.
But Banana Bread beer? The aroma is the first thing you notice. You try to stop yourself thinking ‘Well it does smell like Banana’, but you can’t. It’s there all right; sweet and almost cloying, recalling those foam banana sweets. You prepare yourself for a super-sweet mess of a beer that doesn’t actually happen – instead the body of the beer sings with toasted bread, toffee and raisin notes, and that sweetness dissipates to a decently clean finish. It may not be your cup of tea (or slice of banana bread), but it is a well-balanced, enjoyable beer.
It works so well, and yet this is one of the few examples where the humble banana is used anywhere in brewing.
When you think about the flavour profile of banana, it seems quite natural that it should end up in beer. In her essential book The Flavour Thesaurus, Niki Segnit writes: “…By the time the peel is mottled with brown, the fruit’s flavour is reminiscent of vanilla, honey and rum…Banana has a great affinity for roasted flavours such as coffee, nuts and chocolate, and for heavily spiced flavours such as rum.”’
If those flavours aren’t bedfellows for beers of a number of types, I’m not sure what is. There is also the distinct banana-like flavour that’s produced by many yeasts fermenting at a higher temperatures when they throw out fruity ‘esters’. It’s difficult to imagine a German wheat beer or many Belgian ales without those vital banana-y notes at work.
In Belgium the tradition of kriek and framboise use fruit in a sublime balancing act between tart and sweet beers in beers from breweries such as Cantillon, Boon and Lindemans. Elegantly served in fluted or bulbous glasses, fizzing away like Champagne, these beers appeal to a different kind of beer drinker than the UK’s more stately efforts.
Admittedly, younger breweries – influenced by what’s going on elsewhere in the world – have recently been loading fruit into continental style beers. Magic Rock’s Salty Kiss blended their interpretation of Leipzig’s Gose with gooseberry – and Beavertown Brewery created a sour beer with damsons last year. But British brewers have been mixing fruit and beer for a while in our very own way.
Normally appearing as seasonal special releases, our older fruit beers combine the hedgerow with bold, robust base beers. Damson and blackcurrant stouts (recently brewed by Hawkshead, Waen, Art Brew and Burton Bridge to name a few) remain popular, making use of the seasonal fall of British soft fruit to flavour the already-luscious stout. Saltaire Brewery pride themselves on their flavoured beers, dosing their blonde ale with raspberry and cherry flavour to create something new.
Yet Wells’ Banana Bread Beer enjoys a larger scale of production that the experiments of the armies of UK’s microbreweries, and also feels distinctly ‘retro’: the beer equivalent of prawn cocktail and vol-au-vents. Except where those dishes have reappeared in cookbooks only with an ironic raised eyebrow, Banana Bread Beer still stands as a proud member of Well’s portfolio.
The beer is more modern than my first impressions led me to believe though, first appearing in 2002. So, what drove the Bedford-based brewers of Bombardier (then Charles Wells, now Wells & Young) – to start throwing banana into their beer? Karl Ottomar, Head Brewer at Wells & Young’s, explains.
“The idea of Banana Bread Beer initially came about as a suggestion from the wife of one of the Charles Wells team – who was a keen banana bread baker. Research also suggested that bananas were one of the bestselling line items in supermarkets – which provided a basis to test if this could in fact be a popular flavour for beer.”
“…The brewing team began developing a brew which was then tested with drinkers. The feedback was extremely positive and as such, Banana Bread Beer was born. The beer combines all the traditional qualities and style of a Charles Wells beer with the subtle flavour of banana and is now sold all over the world.”
And is it really brewed with Banana?
“It is true! Free trade bananas are added to the mash of the brew and natural banana essence is added at the conditioning stage.” So there you have it: a mix of both the real thing and essence is how that smooth, sweet Banana flavour is achieved.
In its first year of existence, it won the best beer award at the Campaign for Real Ale’s London Drinker Beer Festival. Soon, it was being touted as the gateway beer to lure more women to the joys of cask ale. In fact, when CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival held its first women-only beer tasting poll in 2003, Banana Bread Beer romped away with the top prize, gaining 26 per cent of the votes.
Search for it on YouTube or Google, and you’ll see how thirsty they are for it in the United States, in particular. Sam Calagione, head honcho of Dogfish Head, recently attested to his admiration for the beer when interviewed at the launch of Dogfish Head and Well’s collaboration beer, ‘DNA’. The high regard in which it is held by American drinkers is noted by Jim Robertson in this interview by Sophie Atherton for episode three of The BeerTalkers podcast. Over there, it is sometimes even blended with Young’s Chocolate Stout to make a luscious banoffee pie-inspired concoction.
“Seventy per cent of the sales are in international markets.” confirms Karl. “The USA accounts for 50 per cent of the beer’s sales internationally – and this is growing following the launch of Banana Bread Beer on draught keg there a year ago. It also continues to grow in popularity significantly in Canada with an 83 per cent increase in sales last year. Brazil, Australia and Ireland are also big markets for the beer.”
I’ve never drunk it on cask, and it looks as if, for now, I’ve missed the chance. “Banana Bread Beer has previously been available in cask as a seasonal beer but is currently only available in bottle in the UK” Oh well.
Still, its availability in bottle brings it into the home, and not least the kitchen. Last year, Dea Latis held a ‘Seven Beers for Seven Breakfasts’ session in London’s hip Somers Town Coffee House. Annabel Smith, one of the UK’s first female beer sommeliers and Training Manager for Cask Marque, led the tutored tasting, which included Wells’ Banana Bread Beer. Inventively, she created a smoothie with it, blending the beer with strawberry. So, Annabel – where did that idea come from?
“The banana and strawberry smoothie was a suggestion by the venue – we had all this rich savoury food and they said ‘how about a healthy option?’” Annabel explains. “As soon as the word banana was mentioned I wanted to compliment it rather than try something really diverse. Initially I considered a beer like Leffe Blond – which has a slight banana aroma – but then I thought, no, let’s go all out for it and match flavour for flavour. I wanted to use a British beer and this was the obvious choice. It has a lovely malty, nutty body but then that gorgeous, almost banoffee flavour hits your tongue and whilst the smoothie was the healthy option, matching it with the banana bread beer made it feel really indulgent and luxurious.”
To Annabel, the beer is a welcome and useful tool in the sommelier’s arsenal, and she feels that is belongs among a group of brews that can illustrate beer’s diversity to people who perhaps don’t drink it often, or have preconceived idea about how it tastes.
“There are so many people in the world – especially women – who say they don’t like beer, partly because they have been conditioned to think of all beer as ‘bitter’ and ‘brown’ (two of the most depressing words in the English language!). One of the beauties of being a sommelier is getting a non beer drinker to try something they would never perceive as beer – or beer as they know it. Kriek is a great example: people say to me “that’s never a beer!” when they first try it, so it can be a useful stepping stone to introduce people to the variety of flavours and styles.”
“Banana Bread Beer is one of those beers that acts as an eye opener for non-beer-lovers. Their senses go into meltdown as they try and reconcile the concept of beer as they think they know it, with the beer as their taste buds experience it.”
As you have probably gathered, I have quite a soft spot for Banana Bread Beer myself. Affection would be a good way to describe it – it’s not a beer I could ‘drink a lot of’ (that dreaded, peculiarly British phrase that doesn’t really mean much unless you’re talking about session beer), but I recognise – and cherish- its uniqueness and latent oddness. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.
A fruit beer in an age where fruit beers in the UK still struggle with finding a niche or identity, Well’s Banana Bread Beer has certainly endured. I would bet it’s a guilty pleasure for a lot of people.
AdvertisementsChapter Nine: Hitting one’s body in grief
This is one of the favourite areas of exploitation for the Nasibi and they enjoy making fun and insisting that these practises are against the Shari’ah. They serve as further evidence that the Shi’a are a deviated Sect. Since they adhere to Umar ibn al Khattab’s way famed for his words ‘the Qur’an is sufficient for us’ lets turn the tables on them. They keep asking us to prove our mourning rituals from the Qur’an such as crying, chest beating etc.We ask them to cite us any verse containing the words Matam, Latmiyah (blood letting) wherein Allah (swt) has declared such practices to be Haraam. No where in the Holy Qur’an has Matam been classified as Haraam. On the contrary, the stories of Prophets include examples of their mourning. As such, the permissibility of Matam is there in Qur’an but not its prohibition. Thus an act, for which there is no restriction of any kind by Islamic Laws, becomes permissible. It is Nasibi who have lied by stating that Matam is against patience and call only for patience instead!
Mourning rituals and self harm as found in the Qur’an
We read in Surah Nisa 004.148:
YUSUFALI: Allah loveth not that evil should be noised abroad in public speech, except where injustice hath been done; for Allah is He who heareth and knoweth all things.
This verse makes it clear that the public’s relaying of injustice is permissible. Relaying the suffering of a victim is permissible.
Major efforts are made to prove that the term mourning is proof that Matam is Haraam under the Shari’ah. On the contrary breast-beating, bloods letting all come within the term mourning and its purpose is to convey the pains inflicted on the victim, something which the Quran has sanctioned. We the Shi’a perform all these acts as Allah (swt) has permitted us to do so, and the opposition of Nasibi is only on account for their love and support for Imam Husayn (as)’s killers.
Mourning and shedding blood is the Sunnah of Prophet Adam (as)
We read in Ahl’ul Sunnah’s authority work Ma’arij al Nubuwwah, Chapter 1 page 248:
“Adam was so distressed that he smashed his hands onto his knees and the skin from his hands caused gashes from which bone could be seen”.
Those who deem the act of self-harm to be batil should look at the bloodletting actions of Adam (as). If Adam (as) can do this why cannot the Shi’a when mourning for Imam Husayn (as)?
Mourning and hitting one self is the Sunnah of the Prophet (s)
As evidence we shall cite the following works:
Sahih Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 92, Number 446 Sunan al Nasai, Volume 3 page 305 Adaab al Mufarad, page 426 Sahih Muslim Volume 1 page 291 Musnad Abu Aawna, Volume 2 page 292
We read in Sahih Bukhari:
Narrated ‘Ali bin Abi Talib:
That Allah’s Apostle came to him and Fatima the daughter of Allah’s Apostle at their house at night and said, “Won’t you pray?” ‘Ali replied, “O Allah’s Apostle! Our souls are in the Hands of Allah and when he wants us to get up, He makes us get up.” When ‘Ali said that to him, Allah’s Apostle left without saying anything to him. While the Prophet was leaving, ‘Ali heard him striking his thigh (with his hand) and saying, “But man is quarrelsome more than anything else.” (18.54)
Ibn Hajr Asqalani in the commentary of this tradition in Fatah al Bari, Volume 3 page 11 writes:
قوله يضرب فخذه فيه جواز ضرب الفخذ عند التأسف
“His statement ‘striking his thigh’ shows the permission of striking the thigh to express the grief”
If hitting oneself is Haraam then what Fatwa do the Nawasib have for the Prophet (s)? The Pillar of Shari’ah is himself hitting his chest, so if the Shi’a do the same, why are their actions Batil?
Thigh beating is the Sunnah of Maula Ali (as)
We read in Tauhfa Ithna Ashari page 523 published in Karachi:
“When Ayesha was defeated and Ali saw the corpses on the ground he began to beat his thighs”
Tauhfa Ithna Ashari, page 523
These Nasibi claim that hitting one’s chest is Batil, if this were true what view should we have of Rasulullah (s), Adam (as) and Maula ‘Ali (as)?
Thigh beating is the Sunnah of Sahaba
We are relying upon the following Sunni books:
Musnad Abu Awana, Volume 2 page 141 Sunan Nasai, Volume 3 page 12 Sunan Abu Daud, Volume 1 page 244
“Mu’awyia bin Hakam al-Sulami said: ‘I was preforming prayers behind Allah’s messenger (pbuh) then a man sneezed, thus I said to him: ‘May Allah’s mercy be upon you’. Thus the people looked at me, then I said to my self: ‘O my, why are you looking at me?’ Then they started striking their thighs, therefore I came to know that they want me to remain silent’”.
This Hadith has been recorded by Albaani in his ‘Sahih Sunan Abu Daud’ Volume 1 page 175 Hadith 823
Before deeming self harm to be Haram, perhaps Nawasib should take a closer look at the acts of the Sahaba. The Sahaba’s hitting their thighs and the silence of the Prophet (s) proves that such acts of distress are not haraam. It’s amusing that these Nasibi Mullah’s never raise questions on any action of the Sahaba whether good or bad but they find fault with every act of the Shi’a. If the act of the Sahaba’s beating themselves is not Haram then the Shi’as act of beating themselves should not be construed as Haram either.
Proof of head beating from the Qur’an
In Surah adh-Dhaariyaat we read that Sara (as) struck her face when she was told that she would conceive a baby.
“Then came forward his wife in grief, she smote her face and said (what! I) An old barren woman?”
Quran 51:29
“Faskat” does not just mean rub or touch, it means slap and this is evidenced from Sahih Muslim Book 030, Number 5851, Bab Fadail Musa:
Abu Hurraira reported that the Angel of Death was sent to Moses (peace be upon him) to inform of his Lord’s summons. When he came, he (Moses) boxed him [Sakka] and his eye was knocked out. He (the Angel of Death) came back to the Lord and said: You sent me to a servant who did not want to die. Allah restored his eye to its proper place (and revived his eyesight), and then said: Go back to him and tell him that if he wants life he must place his hand on the back of an ox, and he would be granted as many years of life as the number of hair covered by his hand. He (Moses) said: My Lord what would happen then He said: Then you must court death. He said: Let it be now. And he supplicated Allah to bring him close to the sacred land. Thereupon Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: If I were there, I would have shown you his grave beside the road at the red mound.
This has also been reported in Sahih Bukhari, Book 23 Volume 2, Book 23, Number 423, Book of Funerals.
The slapping of Prophet Ibraheem (as)’s wife Sara is proven from the Qur’an. The Qur’an tells us to adhere to the ways of the people of Ibraheem (as), so if the Shi’a beat themselves whilst mourning for Imam Husayn (as) such acts are lawful.
Beating oneself at a time of distress is the Sunnah of Prophet Adam (as)
We read in Madarij al Nubuwah, page 221:
“When life was breathed into the spirit of Adam he hit his hand on his head and cried. He made this tradition of beating one’s head with one’s hand and crying in times of trouble for his descendants.”
Hitting one’s head in times of trouble is the Sunnah of Prophet Yusuf (as)
We read in Tafseer Kabeer, Volume 9 page 98:
قيل إن جبريل عليه السلام دخل على يوسف عليه السلام حينما كان في السجن فقال إن بصر أبيك ذهب من الحزن عليك فوضع يده على رأسه وقال : ليت أمي لم تلدني ولم أك حزناً على أبي
“It has been said that when Gebrail (pbuh) went to Yusuf (pbuh) in jail he (Gebrail) said to him: ‘Your father has become blind due to the grief for you. Thus he (Yusuf) put his hand on his head and said: ‘I wish if my mother didn’t give birth to me and there would not have been the reason for my father’s grief.”
We have proven that the acts of hitting one’s head are not Jahiliyya or Un-Islamic.In fact it is the Sunnah of Prophets Adam (as) and Yusuf (as).
The Shi’a mourn Imam Husayn (as) as a form of remembrance. We seek to remember and share his suffering and pain, since assisting one in trouble is a recommended (Mustahab) act and a kind of worship. We also deem mourning and presenting our sincerity to Imam Husayn (as) to be a form of worship.
Beating oneself in times of trouble is the Sunnah of Umar
We read in Ahl’ul Sunnah’s authority work Aqd al Fareed, Volume 1 page 342:
ولما نُعي النًّعمان بن مُقَرَّن إلى عمر بن الخطاب وضع يدَه على رأسه وصاح يا أسفي على النعمان
When Umar received news of the death of Numan ibn Muqran, he placed his hand on his head and wailed: ‘O my grief for Numan!’
We find a similar narration in Kanz al Ummal, Vol.8, Page 117, Kitab al Maut:
When Omar heard of Nu’man ibn Muqran’s death he beat his head and screamed, “O what a pity that Nu’man died”.
When Umar mourns the death of his friend in such a way, the descendents of Mu’awiya remain silent, but if the Shi’a mourn Imam Husayn (as) through such an act they are deemed Kaffirs. If Nasibis wish to accuse us of introducing Bidah into the religion then they should know that Umar introduced this long before the Rafidis! If such acts of hitting oneself and extreme wailing are prohibited then what was your Khalifa indulging in this act for?
Beating and mourning by the wives of the Sahaba
Before we expand on this reality let us begin by citing words that we had previously cited from
Ibn al Hashimi who claims: Additionally–and this point cannot be stressed enough–there were many Sahabah who were killed in the Path of Allah, but the Prophet (صلّى الله عليه وآله وسلّم) never mourned their deaths in the manner in which the Shia mourn Hussain (رضّى الله عنه). The Prophet lost his own dear uncle, his own wife, and many of his dearest companions, but do we see that the Prophet (صلّى الله عليه وآله وسلّم) ever resorted to self-flagellation or excessive mourning? The Shia can never provide such an example from the life of the Prophet (صلّى الله عليه وآله وسلّم), probably not even from Shia sources. Therefore, we find that it is not part of the Sunnah to mourn in such an uncivilized manner and we shall never take part in it because of this.
Let us refute this Nasibi by citing Allamah Shibli Numani al Hanafi is a renowned Sunni scholar from the Indian subcontinent. In his Sirat-un Nabi (Eng translation Volume 2 pg 74) quoting Sirat Ibn Hisham we read the following about Hamzah (as) martyrdom:
“The Holy Prophet (P) returned to Madina and found the whole city gone into mourning. Whenever he went, he heard wailing and lamentation in every house. He was grieved to find that all who were martyred in the battle had their mourners doing their duty to the memory of their dear ones. But there was none to mourn the death of Hamzah (ra). Overwhelmed with grief, the words that there was no one to mourn the loss of Hamzah escaped his lips. The Ansâris were touched to the core when they heard this remark from the Prophet(s). They asked their women to go to the house of the Prophet (S) and mourn for Hamzah. The Prophet (p) thanked them for their sympathy, prayed for their well-being, but added that it was not permissible to lament in memory of the dead. (Women in Arabia were used to wailing and lamenting aloud, they would tear off their garments, dig their nails into their cheeks, slap themselves on the face and put up loud screams. This undesirable practice was from that day stopped for future)”
Nawasib such as Ibn al-Hashimi will no doubt take heart from the last few lines so let us pass a comment on them:
Observation One
Whilst these words are not acceptable for being contradictory to previous lines of the narration, our readers should also know that the words ‘it is not permissible to lament in memory of the dead’ is an addition that cannot be found in other history books.
We read in the History of Tabari Volume 7 page 137:
“The Messenger of God passed by a settlement of the Ansar of the Banu Abdal al-Ashhal and Zafat and heard sounds of lamentation and women weeping. The Messenger of God’s eyes filled with tears and he wept, but then he said “Yet Hamzah has no women weeping for him”. When Saad bin Muadh and Usayd b. Hudayr came back to the settlement of the Banu Abdal al-Ashhal, they told the women to gird themselves up and go and weep for the Messenger of God’s uncle”.
History of Tabari Volume 7 page 137
History of Tabari Volume 7 page 137
Al Muhaddith Shah Abdul Haqq Dehlavi in ‘Madarij un Nabuwat’ records the event as follows:
“When Holy Prophet (s) reached Madina, he saw that cries could be heard from most of the houses of Ansaar (the helpers) but not from Hamza’s house. Holy Prophet (s) said that wasn’t there anyone to cry over Hamza? The helpers (Ansaar) asked their women to mourn over Hamza first and then they may go and cry over their own martyr. The women went to Hamza’s house in the evening and kept crying till midnight. When Holy Prophet(s) woke up and asked about it, he was told the whole thing. Holy Prophet(s) blessed them by saying” May Allah be pleased with you and your children.”
Madarij un Nabuwat, volume 2 page 179
It has been similarly recorded in Al-Isti’ab that after Holy Prophet’s query, “none of the wives of the helpers cried over their own dead but cried for Hamza”,
Therefore through no tradition, reference or logic can it be proved that Holy Prophet (s) stopped Ummah from crying over the death of their dear ones.
Observation Two
Our assertion that the words “It is not permissible to mourn over the dead” is a later addition is confirmed when we observe the first edition of Shibli Numani’s work. We relied on the Urdu to English translation of Numani’s work. Of interest is the fact that the part in brackets wherein the practice of mourning is condemned was added in later editions. The original statement as narrated in the first edition is mentioned above. Look at this report from “Seerat Un Nabi” part 1, page 361, published in 1975 by “Deeni Kutb Khana Islami, Lahore.”
“Holy Prophet (s) reached Madina, the whole of Madina had turned into a mourning place, his Excellency could hear voices of people mourning from every house, and Holy Prophet (s) felt grieved that all martyrs were being cried upon by their relatives but there was no one to mourn over Hamza. In severe grief he said: “Isn’t there anyone to cry over Hamza?” The Helpers (Ansaar) palpitated when they heard this and therefore all of them asked their wives to go and mourn over Hamza’s martyrdom. When Holy Prophet(s) saw that the females of Ansaar (the helpers) were mourning for Hamza, he blessed them and thanked them for their sympathy but he further said “It is not permissible to cry over dead.”
After this a whole paragraph from “This was a tradition in Arabia” till “intense love for Hamza” has been removed from the frst edition and further replaced by this new statement. This is the ingenuity of Syed Salman Nadvi who completed this book of his teacher (Shabli Naumani) after his death. This new paragraph is not present in the first edition.
“Women in Arabia were used to wailing and lamenting aloud, they would tear off their garments, dig their nails into their cheeks, slap themselves on the face and put up loud screams. This undesirable practice was from that day stopped for future”.
The Urdu/Arabic alphabet “seen” in the text denotes that this statement was not present in the earlier edition and Syed Suleman Nadvi added it afterwards. Later editions simply removed th ‘Seen’ so as to imply that these words were those of Numani!
Observation Three
Whilst this shows how dishonest these Nasibi are, let us also address the comments of Nadvi:
If Lamenting were Haraam why would the Prophet (s) be sad on the fact that no one was mourning his slain Uncle? Why would the Prophet (s) allow the women to do something that is Haraam? (i,e mourning for their own dead ones) If as Numani tells that this was a common practice amongst Arab women and the Prophet banned it, this prohibition would have definitely received maximum publicity.
Observation Four
Even if it is believed that Holy Prophet (s) did say ‘It is not permissible to cry over the dead’ such a statement would not effect our mourning because Imam Husayn (as) is a martyr and it is forbidden to call them dead. Such restrictions are for those who die a natural death not those who are slain in the way of Allah (swt).
Observation Five
The reference makes it clear that our Holy Prophet (s) paid gratitude to those who consoled and mourned over Hamza’s martyrdom. He approved of this act and blessed them with his prayers. Had it been a prohibited act the Prophet (s) would never have shown gratitude. This gratitude strengthens our point that the words ‘It is not permissible to cry over the dead’ has no correlation with the incident. Rather Syed Suleman Nadvi amended the statements in order to cover up Allamah Shibli Numani’s blunder.
The mourning of Hamza did not just end there; we have already cited the fact that the Holy Prophet (s) and the three Caliphs’ would visit the graves of the martyrs every year.
The next tradition in effect negates any notion of the Prophet’s (s) banning such acts…
Beating and mourning by the wives of the Prophet (s) over his (s) death
Curiously, not a single wife of the Prophet (s) ever heard of this ban (as claimed by Nadvi in the previous reference). On the contrary Ayesha regarded by Ahl’ul Sunnah as the most knowledgeable women on Qur’an and Sunnah performed the following act when the Prophet (s) left this earth.
As narrated by al Tabari in History Volume 9 page 183 (English translation by Ismail Poonawala):
Abbas narrates:
“I heard Ayesha saying “The Messenger of God died on my bosom during my turn, I did not wrong anyone in regard to him. It was because of my ignorance and youthfulness that the Messenger of God died while he was in my lap. Then I laid his head on a pillow and got up beating my chest and slapping my face along with the women”.
Ibn Katheer al Nasibi in al Bidayah wa al Nihayah Volume 5 page 420 published by Nafees Academy Karachi records the event as follows:
“Rasulullah (s) died while he was in my lap. Then I laid his head on a pillow and got up beating my face along with other women”.
1. Bidayah wa al Nihayah (Urdu), Volume 5, page 420
2. Sirah Ibn Ishaq, page 713 (declared ‘Hasan’)
3. Sirah Ibn Hisham, Volume 4 page 655
4. Musnad Abi Yala, Vol 8 page 63 Hadith 4586 (Hussain Salim Asad declared it ‘Hasan’ and stated that that the same tradition is recorded in Musnad Ahmad with ‘Sahih’ chain)
5. Irawa al-Ghalil, Volume 7 page 86 (Declared ‘Hasan’ by Al-Albaani)
Likewise we read in Imta al-Asma by Maqrezi, Volume 2 page 137:
وقد قامت أمهات المؤمنين يلتدمن على صدورهن وقد وضعن الجلابيب على رؤوسهن ونساء الأنصار يضربن الوجوه وقد بحت حلوقهن من الصياح
“The mothers of believers began to hit their chests and put veil upon their heads, while the women of Ansar were hitting their faces and their voice got hoarse due to crying.”
Do we need to say any more? Would the wives of the Prophet (s) indulge in a Haraam activity? Look at the beating ritual by the women of Madina. Ibn Katheer mentions how extreme that beating was that their faces reddened with slapping. What do the Nasibi say about these women? Were they evil Rafidi innovators lead by Ayesha?
Beating and mourning by the wives of the Prophet (s) upon the tragic news that he (s) had divorced them
We read in Kanz ul Ummal, Volume 2 page 534 Hadith 4669:
قالوا: تذاكرنا عن شأن عائشة وحفصة وشأن سودة ، فقال عمر أتاني عبدالله بن عمر وأنا في بعض حشوش المدينة فقال ان النبي طلق نساءه قال عمر فدخلت على حفصة وهي قائمة تلتدم ونساء النبي قائمات يلتدمن
They said: ‘We were talking about the case of Ayesha and Hafsa and the case of Sauda, thus Umar said: ‘I was in a garden in Madina when Abdullah bin Umar approached me and informed me that the Prophet had divorced his wives’. Umar added: ‘Then I went to Hafsa and saw her standing on her feet mourning (Taltedem) and the wives of the prophet were standing on their feet and mourning (Yaltademn)’.
In his footnote of the said tradition Bakri Hayani states:
يلتدمن: أي يضربن صدورهن في النياحة. انتهى.قاموس
Yaltademn: Means hitting on their chests and whining.
As one can see from this narration, the wives of the Prophet (s) beat their chests in unison upon receipt of the tragic news that Rasulullah (s) had divorced them. If today’s Nawasib have umbrage with the Shia practice of collective chest beating, deeming it an act of Bidah that contravenes the Sunnah, then we invite them to first issue a fatwa against the Mother of the Believers who partook in a collective chest beating ceremony.
Beating and mourning by Uthman’s wives and daughter over his death
We read in Tareekh Kamil Volume 3 page 89:
“When Uthman was killed his killers intended to sever his head. His wives Naila and Umm’ul Baneen lay over him screamed and began to beat their faces”
Narrations also record that Uthman’s daughter also acted likewise. As evidence we shall rely on the following Sunni works:
Al Bidayah wa al Nihaya, Volume 7 page 371 Tareekh Tabari, Volume 6 page 302 Tareekh Aathim Kufi, page 159
“Ibn Jareer narrates that when the killer intended to sever Uthman’s head, the women began to scream and strike their faces. This included Uthman’s wives Naila, Ummul Baneen and daughter”.
Al Bidayah wa al Nihaya, Volume 7, page 371
If the wives of Uthman can mourn Uthman’s killing in this way then the Shi’a of Maula ‘Ali (as) can likewise mourn the slaying of Imam Husayn (as) in this way.
The mourning of Fatima al-Zahra (as)
In Madarij al Nubuwwh, Vol 2, page 163, the high ranking Sunni Scholar, Sheikh Abdul Haq Mohaddith Dehlavi recorded that:
“Fatima Zahra (as) hearing the rumour of the martyrdom of the Holy Prophet (s) at Uhud came out of her house running and beating her head”.
Does it not transpire from the above that beating of head during the act of mourning for a martyr is allowed by the religion as Sayyida (as) was well aware of the religious code and was also infallible according to Ay |
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Nora ||.-- HappyPuppy |||||||||| ||| | || unrelated | | | | | `--.| `-.||| |||||||||| ||| | || | | | | `---.|| Lisa ||||.-- Girl#1 |||||||||| ||| | |`-- *RoadRuner* | | | | ||| | ||||| |||||||||| ||`-|-|-------|-----|-----|-|-|-|----.||`-- hateball -- Symonie |||||||||| ||.-' | Id0Tricks | | | | | ||| | | | |||||||||| ||| | | | | | | | ||| JTidd | | |||||||||| ||| | laugg LadyDeth | | | | ||| | | |||||||||| ||| | | | | | | ||| IHSAgirl | SiniStar |||||||||| ||| pippi BigDaddyBill | | | ||| |.-------|---'||||||||| ||`--. | | | | | `---.||| hrothgar | | j00lia ||||||||| |`-. | | AphexTwin23 | | | ||||.-|---|-|---------|--'|||||||| |.-|-|-|-----------------|--|-|---- murmur --|-|---|-|---------|---'||||||| || | | bosplaya sarahjean | | || ||| | | | | turtle `---.||||||| || | | | |.'| ||`---|-|---|-|------|-----.|||||||| ||.' | indie-goth-girl | | | | |`----|-|-. | | jook --.||||||||| ||| `-|--------------------|-|----|-|-|-----|-|-|-|-|----. |||||||||| |||.-'.---------|-|----' | | | `.| | | | ogre |||||||||| ||| | Guitarzan | CapnRat | | | `-. | || | | | |.'||||||||| ||| | | |.----|--|-|- keroppi |.-|- page!# --.| peggy ||||||||| ||| | | crash313 | | bond `-. |.-' | |.'| | || |.'|||||||| |||.-|-|--|-------|-|----|------|-|----|---|-|--|-|--|-- ghort --|-'||||||| ||||.' | | | | |.----|-'.---' | | | | | | | ||||||| ||||| windx.-----|-|----|-|----|--|-------' | | |.-|----' | ||||||| ||||| ||.-|-----|-' | |.---|--|--. | | || | dedboy | ||||||| |||||.'| | | | hitchcock --|--|--|------|--' || | | | | ||||||| ||||| | | | |.--' || | ||`--.|.-' larissa |.'| | | glynis ||||||| ||||| | | | | |.---'| | |`--.||| |.-|-|-|-' ||||||| ||||| | | | | ||.---' | `--.|||| Ladytushy | | | | | Claudette ||||||| ||||| | | | | ||| Kassandra ||||| | | | | | | `-. ||||||| ||||| | | | | ||`----..----'|||| Sugar333 | | | | | Bitterfly | ||||||| ||||| | | | | |`---. | |.---'||| | `--|-|-|-|-|---. | | ||||||| ||||| | | | | `-. | | | |.--'|| Anongirl | | | | | | |.-' ||||||| ||||| | | | | | | | | | |.-'`. | |.--|-|-|-|-|-- Juliette ||||||| ||||| | | | |.--|--|-|-|-|-|-|---|-' | | | | | | | | | ||||||| ||||`-|-|-|-|-|--|--|-|-|-|-|-|-. | | | | | | | | Phoenixx | ||||||| ||||.' | | | | | | | | | | | | | Medusa | | | | | | | ||||||| |||| | swisspope | | | | | | | | | `--|-|-|-|-|---- PrimeX ||||||| |||| |.-'| ||`--|--|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|----------|-|-|-|-|--------------'|||||| |||| || | || | | | | | | | | | cinnabon | | | | | bor -- pie |||||| |||| || | |`---|--|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|--|-----. `-|-|-|-|---|----------.|||||| |||| ||.-|- piglet -' | | | `-|-|-|--|-----|-. | | | `. lankan ||||||| |||`.||| | `----|-|-|---|-|-|--|-----|-|-|-|-' | | ||||||| ||| |||| | drworm | | | | | | | | | | |.--|--' ||||||| ||| |||| `----|-------|-|-|---|-|-|--|---. | | | | | | flicknose ||||||| ||| |||| porcupine | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||||| ||| |||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |.-|--- ed | ||||||| ||| |||| | mumbly | | | | | | | | | | | | || | | | ||||||| ||| |||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | || | nation | ||||||| ||| |||| | | rukh | | |.-' | | |.--|-|-|-|-|-'| | | | ||||||| ||`.|||| | | | | | | |.-|-' || | | | | | | | fentie ||||||| || ||||| | pumpkin | | | | | sweeney | | | | |.' | ||||||| || ||||| | | | | | | |.-' | | | | | | | | BigDaddy ||||||| || ||||| llamadragon | | | | || minerva | | | | | | | | | ||||||| || ||||| | || | | | | |`--. `-|-|-|-|-|--|-- Amber `-. ||||||| || ||||| angelmoo || | | | | | *toasty* --|-|-|-|-' | | | ||||||| || ||||| | |`--|-|-|-|-|--'| |`-----|-|-|-|----|-. Cherity | ||||||| || ||||| chaotic |.-|-|-|-|-|---' boen.-|-|-|-|----|-|--' | | ||||||| || ||||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Talan | ||||||| || ||||| wikedpixie | | | | | | `.| | | |.--' | | ||||||| || ||||| | | | | | | | wadsworth || | | | |.--|---------' ||||||| || ||||| thist | | | | | | |.'| | | | | | `-. Neve ||||||| || ||||| | | | | | | kniht | | | | | | | | | ||||||| || ||||| UberFizzGig | | | | | |.-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-- Quarex ---.||||||| || ||||| `--|-|-|-|-|----' | | | | | | | | | |||||||| || ||||`----. | | | | | | `.| | | | | | RaggedyAnne |||||||| || |||`---. | ideaman | | | | | urabanana || | | | | | | `-. |||||||| || ||`----|-|--. |.-' | | | | |.'| | | | | PointBlank | |||||||| || waar | | Pogo || | `-|-|--|----. | | | | | `. | |.-'||||||| || || | | | | || | | `--|--. | `-|-|-|-|--|---. hylonome ||||||| || || |.-|-|- hillary -|---|----|--|-|----|-|-|-|--|---|---|------.||||||| || || | | | | | | ||`--|-- spirit | | | | | | | Fiyaball |||||||| || || | | | | | | |`---|-----|-----|-|----|-|-|-|--|---' |||||||| || || | | | | | | | | photochic | | | | | | | *timx* |||||||| || || `-|-|-|--|-|-|----|-----------|-|----|-|-|-|-.| | |||||||| || ||.-|-|-|--' | `----|-- Fowlez | | | | | | || | dr0ne |||||||| || || | | | `----|------|-. | |.--|-|-|-' || | | |||||||| || || | | |.----|------' | jacquie | | | | | | ryu -- carrie |||||||| || |`-|-|-|-|---.|.----|--'|.----|-|-' | | | || | |||||||| || | | | | | *severino* RottenZ --|-|--- narya --'| nuprinboy |||||||| || | | | | | | | | | | | |.' | | | | |||||||| || |.-' | | laurak | | | | | || djbump | feival redfox |||||||| || || | | | `---|-|---' | | ||.-'.--|--' |||||||| || || | | |.---' | | `---.||| roller | steve SuperJaqs |||||||| || || | | | | Karissa poto ||||.------' | | |||||||| || || | | | | |||| | IceStorm --- tiny_tiger |||||||| || || | | | obsidian -- skateboy |||| | || `------|--|-----|-.|||||||| || || | `-|---------------------.|||| | || ginger ---' syndel | ||||||||| || || `---|-- Dravanavin renen! | || | | | ||||||||| || || | | | || | steppo | | ||||||||| || || | jamming | || | | | | ||||||||| || ||.------' | |`. | purrv jolan | ||||||||| || ||| phringe.--|-|-|-|---|----'| | ||||||||| || ||| | | | | | Gromit ---|---- kat ||||||||| || ||| annemarie TerminalPreppie | | | | |.----' |.'|||||||| || ||| | | | | | dot.grrl rodent |||||||| || ||| Tess -- avador -- weiner Fongo | | | | |`-------. |||||||| || |||.----|----------' | | someguy dannyman | |||||||| || ||| mat --- chyna --|-- *chrissie* ---' | | | |||||||| || ||| | | | | arphaxed bethunit | |||||||| || ||| jeffie --' adam | hyperpet | | | | |||||||| || ||| |.----|----------' mysti matticus | |||||||| || ||| kyst delirium | happyfarmer --' | | |||||||| || ||`--. | | voidness -- mandy *kkrazy* |||||||| || |`---|-|------ fritz | clinto.-----------------------|------'||||||| || `--- SiN13 --------|-' | |.---------------------|-------'|||||| |`--. `--------- tracy ---- seth | slimer | trep --'||||| |.--|-----------------------------|---' | `----|---.||||| || | Jenkins -- candyrain biscuit -- *netmare* --. | |||||| || | | | | | |||||| || | male_tree_fairy | | | |||||| || | *SARA GILBERT* Enchantress | | | |||||| || | | | repoman | | |||||| || | | NICK HEXUM cerridwen -- BlackCrowe -------------|-- tart |||||| || | | | | | | $t.andrew | | |||||| || | | GWEN STEFANI Intrepid tam | | | | | |||||| || | | | `-------.| fatima --' | |||||| || | DREW BARRYM0RE GAVIN R0SSDALE BILLY C0RGAN || |.--------' |||||| || | `---. |.----------' || ||.---------'||||| || | ED N0RT0N -- C0URTNEY L0VE mysl minstrelle |||.---------'|||| || |.----' | | | `-----.||||.---------'||| || | KURT C0BAIN TRENT REZN0R -- tammy `-----|------.||||||.---------'|| || | | | |`-------|--- *gweeds@!#@* -------'| || | MARY L0RD T0RI AM0S JELL0 BIAFRA |.---'||||||||`--------. | || | | |.--'||||||`--------.| | || |.----- trilobyte --- Schquimpy freqout --|-|-|---'||||`--------.|| | || ||.------|---------'| | | | |.-'||`--------.||| | || || EddieV -- amos Syphilis Nex moonlyte | | | | |`-- lydia |||| | || || | |.-' | | | | | | |||| | || sonia ------- velcro agentorange | verykoi | | | | WL pluvius |||| | || | | |`----. | | | | | | | | | |||| | || | | sate plexus | Sylvie -- neko!@ | | | | dave_rast |||| | || | | | `------. || | | | | | | |||| | || | gage `--. savvy |.--'| | Katia | | | `---. lemson |||| | || | | | | | | | | | | | | |||| | || argent | gnarf -- kirshana | bass-girl | | jess whoops ---.|||| | ||.-----------|-------------|-------|-----------|-|----|---' | ||||| | ||| fate -- rabidchild | sweetnightmare13 | | | nyar ||||| | ||| | | | | andrew | ||||| | ||| fuaim sedrick --'.----- bone-head | | | skora ||||| | ||| | | | | | mswicked ||||| | ||| beaker howie xindjoo -- ga[r]y | | | ||||| | ||| | `-----------. | `-----. | | | | ||||| | ||| Deid --|-- Wappy -- FreAkBoi -- grrtigger | | ||||| | ||| | | `---------------|-|-- psychoslut ||||| | ||| soulforce --..-- skramny | | | ||||| | ||| ||.------------- sicklove | | timo ||||| | ||| amason --.|||.-- Phaendra | | ||||| | ||| |||||.----------------------|-|-- radiohead ||||| | ||| [y] -- Rave --.||||||.-- dreamlodge | | ||||| | ||| ||||||||.--------------------|-|-- purestuff ||||| | ||| petariosis --.|||||||||.-- anthonyEID | | ||||| | ||| |||||||||||.------------------|-|-- cjtempas ||||| | ||| eihtokamok --.||||||||||||.-- DavidSKess | | ||||| | ||| ||||||||||||||.----------------|-|-- casey_hire ||||| | ||| breach --.|||||||||||||||.-- nekko | | ||||| | ||| |||||||||||||||||.--------------|-|-- lucas_zpira ||||| | ||| tofast2B --.||||||||||||||||||.-- Lunar | | ||||| | ||| ||||||||||||||||||||.------------|-|-- robosushi ||||| | ||| JsunPSU -- Haji!@#!@@!%#$#!#!@##! -- punjab | | ||||| | ||| ||||||||||||||||||||`-----------|-|-- TENSION ||||| | ||| sub655321 --'||||||||||||||||||`-- Nicufluf | | ||||| | |||.-----'||||||||||||||||`-------------|-|-- blondieggg ||||| | ||| niloc.---'||||||||||||||`-- DoorCloser | | | ||||| | ||| | |||||||||||||`---------------|-|-- msrenee9 ||||| | ||| c8lin -- Two^ ||||||||||||`-- xredbaranx | | | | ||||| | ||| |.---------'||||||||||| | | extrabob | ||||| | ||| BME -- mil0 ||||||||||`-- wtoler | | | ||||| | ||| | |||||||||`-. | | worncrazy ||||| | ||| saira ||||||||| cjf21 mgarrett --|-|------. ||||| | |||.-'|||||||| | | gogo | kathelea ||||| | ||| benjaminwarfield |||||||`-- ethnocentrik | | | | | ||||| | ||| ||||||`--------------------|-|--- joshcantyoyo ||||| | ||| Krysania |||||`-- lainmeyer1.--|-|-----' | | ||||| | ||| TESOD -----|-----'|||`--. | | | sugarandspite | ||||| | ||| EdwardS ---'|| @cc@tone eriskigal | | | ||||| | ||| | | |`-----------------. | | lshaftrountree ||||| | ||| sabine.-|-----' jgriego HipPiE311 | | ||||| | ||| | | | | | | | protozoa -- pj ||||| | ||| hellsop | | | lisab -- jlasser --|-|--' | ||||| | ||| | | | | | lillianvalencia ||||| | ||| kids | | | | | | ||||| | ||| | | | Bluerose -- *storm* -- rw- ----|-|-- knarphie ||||| | ||| fairosa | |.------'| | | | || | ||||| | ||| | | | dystonic cruz | liza --|-|---'| | ||||| | ||| tomwhore | | | |.--|-|----' deeahblita ||||| | ||| | | | bluknight cynthiana windigo | | ||||| | ||| | tao --' | | | anathema ||||| | ||| | |`------|-- erise -- puff | | | ||||| | ||| killarney | |.--|-|-- riotboi ||||| | ||`. | | | | | | ||||| | |`-|--- tanadept ---------- skywind --- XunilOS | |.-|-------'|||| | `--|-----|--|-|------------..------------------' | deds | nadyalec |||| | | siren | | Saxgod | |.--------- duatra -'.-|-|----------'||| |.--' | | | | | | | timbrel | `-------|-|-|-- GRatte ||| | | kingtrent | *cbnoonan*.-|-|-|-|-----|--|-----------|-|-' ||| | | | | || | | | | | | |.-- nineve | | random-tox ||| | | `Mandy | lex |`--|-|-|-|-|---- corp! ---------' `---. |.----'|| | | | `-----.| `---|-|-|-|-|---. |||| silicosis -- espidre ---.|| | | | angeleyes lorah | | | | |.-|-'||| | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| mudge -- shewolf -- iskra ||| | | | |.-- kumi_mick | | | | | | | | ||| | ||| | | | || `-. | | | | | | | ||| r2 -- mujahadin level6 ||| | | | ||.-- lilindian | | | | | | | | ||| `---. `-.||| | | | || | | | | | | | | |.'|| ssq teq -- vYrus | sp0t |||| | | | || |.-- Goddess4U | | | | | | | | | || `-------------.| | | |||| | | | || || | | | | | | | | | |`. anarchist --. || | |.--'||| | | DrkSphere -----------|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|------------.| || | || ||| | | |||||||`--- stephie | | | | | | | | | | | tymat -- *pinguino!##@#* ||| | | ||||||| | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| ||| ||| | | ||||||`-- CrazyLuna | | | | | | | | | | | gemmi ||| ||| ||| ||| | | |||||| | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| ||| ||| | | |||||`-- Sweetgal_ | | | | | | | | | | | is0crazy --'|| ||| ||| ||| | | ||||| | | | | | | | | | | | || ||| ||| ||| | | ||||`-- lonely_angel | | | | | | | | | | | r_avenger --'| ||| ||| ||| | | |||| | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| ||| | | |||`-- Cherriebb28 | | | | | | | | | | | ter0daktyl --' ||| ||| ||| | | ||`-. | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| ||| | | || meelah nephila | | | | | | | | | | | *apok0lyps* --'|| ||| ||| | | |`-. |.---|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-----|------------'| ||| ||| | | | Wi|dChild *gersh* | | | | | | | | | | | kamira *tribble* | ||| ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| | | | metalmuff `--|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|---- razour ---. | ||| ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| | | |.-- RainMaker | | | | | | | | | | | *databeast* | | ||| ||| | | || | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| | | ||.-- Scrollios | | | | | | | | | | | valence wirehead | ||| ||| | | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| | | |||.-- Locnar [chs] | | | | | | | | | | | mrmojo | ||| ||| | | ||||.------------'.-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-------------------|-'|| ||| | | ||||| | | | | | | | | | | | | barkode || ||| | | GyG!@ --- thx1138 | | | | | | | | | | | | klynn | || ||| | | |.----------------|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|--' | || ||| | | || applejuice | | | | | | | | | | | | pac-bell -- patch-p0 || ||| | | || |.-------------|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|--. | || ||| | | *swank* -- jewls^^ | | | | | | | | | | | | duncan | S8nsfury || ||| | | | |`--------------|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-.| | `---.| || ||| | | | BaByGrL | | | | | | | | | | | | || mari3 || skully || ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | || | | || | || ||| | | diosAmber logicbox | | | | | | | | | | | nynex -|-- rollrgirl || ||| | | |.-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|----|---|----' | || || ||| | | Pesto -- monkeygrl | | | | | | | | | | | | `---|---. | |`.|| ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |.---' | | | ||| ||| | | upzie -- dreck | | | | | | | | | | | | aernan --- shiloh | ||| ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |.---'| | | ||| ||| | | pozer -- zhix | | | | | | | | | | | *vixen* | j-rat | | ||| ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||| ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | tomgavin omnihil ||| ||| | |.---------------..---|-|-|-' | | | | | | |.-'||.-'|| | || imposter-dh | | | | | | | | | | | | mikk -- steelrat ||| || | ||.---|--------|-|---|-|-|---|-|-|-' | | | ||| || | ||.-|---|----- sarlo --|-|-|---|-' | | | | shamrock bellum.--'||.'| | ||| | | | ||`---|-|-|---|-. | | | | | | | || | | | ||| | | | |`----|-|-|-. | | | | | | jennicide tsk || | | | ||| | efpee --|-|-----|-|-|-|-|-|-|---|-|-|------' | || | | | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | luckygreen | || | | | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | || | | | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | oger Ian | || | | | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |.-----' | || | | | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | noise quisling | || | | | ||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | || | | | ||| | tis | | | | | | | | | | | | ao -.| |.-'.-'| | | | |||.' | | | | | | | | | | | | | || |.----|---|--|-|-|-' |||| deathinc | | | | | | | niala | | | wintarose |.-' | | | |||| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | || | |.--' | | |||| |
"8 1/2” is that the film that the beleaguered Anselmi is trying to get off the ground is science fiction. With "City of Women," a film largely set in the protagonist’s subconscious, the tendency is more pronounced still: viewers will argue whether it’s for better or for worse, but the train carrying Snàporaz virtually doubles as a spaceship.First off, so we’re on the same page, we need to be talking in the same terms. So, what is magic? I’d define it as anything below your current level of abstraction that you don’t understand.
I first started thinking about this topic because of this angst I felt about all this magic I was relying on. There’s so many things that I rely on every day and I have no idea how they work. As far as I’m concerned, they’re magic. As long as I think about these things as magic, they seem unknowable. I think that’s where the angst comes from. What I need to remind myself is that everything I’ve learned about software seemed like magic before I understood it, and there’s nothing that’s unknowable, just things that aren’t known yet.
This post is my attempt to come to an understanding of what this ‘magic’ is, whether it’s a problem, and how best to deal with it.
The ‘Dave’ technique
At University, I learned how to record music. We recorded onto tape, so we had to learn how a tape machine worked. To learn how a tape machine worked, we had understand hysteresis and remanence and modulation and various other things that I’ve mostly forgotten now. We also had to understand how radio worked, so we learned about amplitude and frequency modulation, and how stereo FM was built on top of mono FM with an AM difference signal on top so as to be backwards compatible, and various other technical issues. Then came digital audio with ADCs, DACs, sampling, quantisation, dithering, etc. Each of these three topics was one or two modules, i.e. a semester’s-worth of lectures, so we went pretty deep.
Did that knowledge make me a better recording engineer? Probably not. But it was a helpful basis for the latter things I learned, which did help make me a better recording engineer.
The ‘Tim’ technique
Another lecturer taught us computer audio. This started off with an introduction to computers, starting at the level of AND, OR and NOT gates, then on to NAND and NOR (and how the simpler to understand AND, OR and NOT gates can be implemented in terms of NAND and NOR), then on to the ALU, then the CPU, then adding memory and disk storage and network and MIDI connections, creating a full computer. This was all presented in two or three lectures, so inevitably certain steps had to be left out (e.g. “we put together a load of these gates and we get the ALU”).
The benefit of this approach was that we were given a vague conceptual understanding of the basis on which computer audio is built, without having to spend hours and hours learning the full intricacies.
Bottom-up
If we’re intent on uncovering all the magic, how should we learn – bottom-up or top-down? Bottom-up, right from the bottom, implies first learning enough physics to understand electronics, which you’d need to understand digital circuit design, which you’d need to understand CPU design, which you need to understand assembly language, which you need to understand C, then enough C to understand Ruby (say). You’ll also need to understand how networks work right from the bottom of the TCP/IP stack and beyond; how storage works right from the level of hysteresis in magnetic particles on a hard disk; how RAM works from the level of individual capacitors; etc.
This reminds me of the famous Carl Sagan quote:
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Top-down
Top-down is essentially the process followed by Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, at a micro and macro level. At the micro level, we are taught to solve problems using “wishful thinking”: first represent the problem using large custom building blocks, then build the pieces those blocks are made out of using language primitives. And at the macro level, the book teaches the workings of Scheme through a series of increasingly complex models.
Bottom-up vs top-down
The problem with the bottom-up approach is it would take decades of studying before you were let near an interpreted language. This approach may have worked in the fifties when there wasn’t as much to learn. But these days you won’t get anything useful done.
The problem with the top-down approach is that the levels we work at these days are so large, you can’t just learn all of your current level and then start to look at the lower levels, because you’d never finish learning all the details of the current level.
Leaky abstractions
Joel Spolsky has something to say on this matter in his piece The Law of Leaky Abstractions. This basically says that all abstractions are leaky, meaning that we cannot rely on them to shield us from the levels below our current level. So, to work at the current level we must learn the lower levels. It’s OK to work at the level of the abstraction, and it will save us time working at that level, but when it breaks down we still need to understand why. As Joel says:
the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.
Magic’s alright, yeah
Some of us don’t like the idea of magic. It feels like cheating. But it’s useful as a placeholder, something to learn about later; not now. It’s useful to delve down to lower levels, understanding how the abstractions we work with every day are implemented, but at some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in. (In some fields, we can’t even assume we’ll ever learn how the magic works. As @sermoa said, “we don’t understand exactly how quantum physics works but we accept that it does and make good use of it”.)
What we need to get to, eventually, is an understanding of the whole stack, but at greater and greater granularities as we get further away from our main level. So, if you’re a Ruby on Rails programmer, you need to know most of Ruby (but not all of it). It’s helpful to know a bit of C, and a bit of how the operating system responds to certain commands. Below that level, it’s good to have a vague understanding of how a computer works. And it’s useful to know that electrical signals can only transmit at a finite speed, and that there’s a physical limit to the number of transistors in a processor. As time goes on you can begin to flesh out these lower levels, remembring that the higher levels are generally going to be more beneficial to your day-to-day work.
Before you’ve delved deeper, those lower levels are magic. And that’s fine.
Thanks to @marcgravell, @ataraxia_status, @sermoa, @bytespider, @ghickman, @SamirTalwar and @josmasflores for their input on this post.
Also, thanks to Dave Fisher and Tim Brookes for being the sources of the ‘Dave’ and ‘Tim’ techniques.HARTLEY BAY, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Mar 14, 2017) - A new study based on an unprecedented decade of local monitoring in Gitga'at First Nation territory, has revealed a previously undetected "wave" pattern of humpback whales seasonally using different habitats in large numbers as they navigate the Douglas Channel fjord system.
The "Whale Wave" was discovered by researchers from the Gitga'at First Nation, the North Coast Cetacean Society (NCCS), Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, and the NOAA-NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Centre. The study was published in the Marine Ecology Progress Series, a top-tier marine science journal.
"This study shows just how intricate the relationship between humpback whales and their habitat is, and it raises important questions about their conservation," said Arnold Clifton, Chief Councillor and Hereditary Chief of the Gitga'at First Nation. "In light of the industrial pressures facing our territory, our Nation's reliance on the sea and the sensitivity and complexity of the area's ecology, our leadership's commitment to conservation and long-term local monitoring by our Gitga'at Guardians has never been more important or stronger."
Though annually persistent and specific in structure, the whale wave had gone unnoticed by typical marine mammal surveys, and was only revealed because of long-term, local monitoring and commitment of thousands of hours of survey time by the Gitga'at First Nation's Guardian Team and their partners NCCS.
"This wave likely results from humpback familiarizing themselves with this critical habitat over many years and developing specific behaviors, coordinated to the specific oceanography of this fjord system, that enable them to make the greatest use of its resources. This means local displacement by human impacts may have more consequences than previously supposed," said Eric Keen, a PhD candidate and the paper's lead author from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We can't expect these whales to simply pick up and go somewhere else if industrial activities, such as shipping lanes, disrupt continuity of critical habitats like the Douglas Channel fjord system. Until thorough habitat-use studies are completed, irrevocable management decisions should be treated with caution."
In addition to revealing a pattern of whale behavior that has never been seen before, the study also suggests that the whale wave is being driven by needs other than food, potentially including physical and social habitat needs such as bathymetry and acoustic properties of the fjords for communication and singing, and companionship for the purpose of traveling within a group or mating.
"Our findings suggest humpback foraging needs within this fjord system are balanced against needs other than food and that the balance shifts through the year," said Janie Wray, a whale researcher with the North Coast Cetacean Society. "This behaviour may accommodate higher densities of humpbacks in the dwindling number of relatively undisturbed coastal habitats of the northeast Pacific, than would otherwise be possible. More research needs to be done to fully understand what this whale wave means and what its implications for whale conservation might be."
Media Materials
Photos of humpback whales (credit forwhales.org): http://forwhales.org/gallery?layout=item
Animated GIF of "Whale Wave" in the Kitimat Fjord System study area: http://bit.ly/2n5ATPU
Video B-Roll of humpback whales (credit Sam Rose Phillips): http://bit.ly/2n5z1GR
Gitga'at territory encompasses approximately 12,500 square kilometres of land and water in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest. It includes most of Douglas Channel, which is the site of several proposed shipping routes linked to proposed fossil fuel exports from Kitimat.One of the things the Tories need to do in order to hold on to power is to convince those considering voting Ukip in the General Election that it is safer to back the Tories instead. To that end, David Cameron yesterday told a campaign event that he hoped such voters would return to the Tories so that Labour wouldn’t have a chance of putting the recovery at risk. He said:
‘Come with us, come back home to us rather than risk all of this good work being undone by Labour.’
Labour said this was further evidence that the Tories and Ukip were preparing to work together. But Ukip’s response gets it right, with Nigel Farage saying:
‘Neither former Labour nor Conservative voters who have switched to UKIP are going back. They’ve found a new, more authentic home, one in which they don’t get roundly abused by their hosts.’
The trouble with the phrase ‘come home’ is that it contais a rather complacent assumption that voters have a natural home and that that home is the Conservatibe party, rather than the party having to compete for votes. This assumption about people ‘belonging’ to a party led to voters turning from the Tories to Ukip, and has led to Labour thrashing around in panic in Scotland as it realises that it’s voters aren’t its voters any more.If you can hear what sounds like a faint drumroll coming from across the Pacific then it’s the sound of millions of jaws dropping on hard surfaces.
President-elect Donald Trump is a phrase journalists are regularly typing into their keyboards. That was jaw dropping enough, even for some Republicans.
But, adding to that drumroll has been the climate science community, the renewable energy industry, the conservation movement, federal environment regulators and climate change campaigners.
One Nation senator joins new world order of climate change denial | Graham Readfearn Read more
Trump has been nominating positions to the Environmental Protection Agency and other key government agencies and departments. To a man (because they’re almost all men), Trump’s picks are climate science deniers. His choice for secretary of state and lead diplomat is ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson.
Jaws have been dropping all over the place.
In the US, there is a large and well-funded network of so called “free market” thinktanks that pumps out manufactured doubt on climate change science with the help of funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Trump has been picking many his advisers from these groups, sending in climate science deniers to key agencies to prepare the ground for his administration.
Many, such as Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, have launched multiple lawsuits against the agency they’re going to soon be working for.
Trump also refuses to accept the thousands and thousands of scientific papers going back decades showing how burning fossil fuels is changing the climate.
He recently said he had an “open mind” on the issue – a position that’s about as intellectually redundant as having an open mind on heliocentrism. Sometimes minds are so open that the brain is in danger of falling out.
Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, ran the hyper-partisan Breitbart website that runs stories claiming climate change is a hoax and the “biggest scam in the history of the world” while denouncing people who accept the science as “pure scum”.
Trump has also appointed a team to prepare the ground in the EPA for the incoming administration.
Leading that group is Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Agency, alongside lawyers such as David Schnare and Christopher Horner – two individuals who have used the courts and FOIA laws to try and get access to the inboxes of climate scientists and, yes, administrators at the EPA.
Viewing this part-reality show, part-Shakespearean tragedy from Australia, some might think our own climate debate looks relatively sane. It’s not and it hasn’t been for a long time.
For well over a decade now, Australia’s climate policy has been battered, torn and held back by climate science denial and a broader antipathy towards environmentalism. The same interests and ideologies that have worked for decades to reach the current crescendo in the US have been doing the same thing here.
Neatly connecting Australia and the US is the One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, who earlier this week met with a who’s who of the climate science denial industry in Washington DC, including Ebell.
Think we’re immune to the Trump denialism? You haven’t been paying attention.
When Malcolm Turnbull lost the Liberal party leadership to Tony Abbott in 2009, it was Turnbull’s then refusal to back away from pricing greenhouse gas emissions that turned the party room against him. From that point onward, pricing carbon became a no-go zone for the Liberal party.
A chief architect of that leadership coup was the then South Australian senator Nick Minchin, who, a month earlier, told ABC’s Four Corners he didn’t accept that humans caused climate change. Rather, Minchin considered the issue a plot by the “extreme left” to “deindustrialise the world”.
After the ABC program aired, the journalist Sarah Ferguson said Turnbull had refused interview requests because he “didn’t want to face the sceptics”.
Mathias Cormann refuses to express confidence in Alan Finkel after climate criticism Read more
You might think Turnbull would have learned his lesson. But, from his latest meek surrender to the deniers in his party, it seems not. He still won’t take them on.
Earlier this month, the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said a review of Australia’s climate change policy would include a look at an emissions trading scheme for the electricity sector – the biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the Australia.
Within 24 hours, Frydenberg backed down and, soon after, Turnbull said carbon pricing was not party policy and this would not be considered – even though all the expert advice tells him that it would be the cheapest way to cut emissions and would likely deliver billions of dollars in savings on power prices in coming years.
That capitulation was another example of Turnbull giving in to the deniers in the right of the party – in particular, another South Australian senator in the form of Cory Bernardi.
Bernardi, too, refuses to accept the mountains of evidence that burning fossil fuels is causing climate change.
The recently appointed chairman of the Coalition’s backbench environment committee is the Liberal MP Craig Kelly – another climate science denier.
Going further back, Abbott’s position on climate science was heavily influenced by the mining industry figure and geologist Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth – a tome packed with contradictory arguments, dodgy citations and errors too numerous to count (actually, celebrated mathematical physicist Dr Ian Enting did count them and found at least 126).
Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most senior Roman Catholic, also took his lead from Plimer’s book.
And who can forget Abbott’s business adviser Maurice Newman and his claims that climate science is fraudulent and acting as cover for the UN to install a one-world government – the exact same position taken by Roberts and other fake freedom fighters.
Another Coalition MP seen as influential is the Queensland Nationals MP George Christensen.
Like Roberts and Bernardi before him, Christensen has attended US conferences of anti-climate science activists hosted by the Heartland Institute (that group has been heavily funded by the family foundation of Robert Mercer, the ultrarich conservative hedge fund manager whose millions helped get Trump elected and whose daughter Rebekah is a pivotal member of Trump’s transition team).
Just like the US, Australia too has its own “free market” conservative groups pushing climate science denial. Look no further than Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs (which only last year was called in to “balance” a climate science briefing to Kelly’s committee).
Fossil fuel divestment is worth $7tn globally yet Australia still clings to coal | Blair Palese Read more
How about the media? Rupert Murdoch’s outlets the Wall Street Journal and Fox News help to push themes that climate scientists are frauds, that action to cut greenhouse gas emissions will wreck the economy and that renewable energy can’t keep the lights on.
The stable of flagship commentators working on Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, led by the likes of Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Chris Kenny and Terry McCrann, are all happy to repeat and embellish those same talking points.
On the radio, the US has popular conservatives such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh pushing climate science denial. In Australia, we have Alan Jones and his stable of shouty Macquarie Radio colleagues.
At this point, some will argue Australia and the rest of the world is investing heavily in renewables. The US, like Australia, is seeing strong growth in the renewable energy sector. That’s all true.
Also true is the progress made through the international agreements made in Paris, even though the climate pledges that make up the deal still fall well short of averting dangerous climate change.
But there’s little doubt that climate science denial is on the march, backed by a conspiracy culture that’s rapidly gaining audiences online.
Trump is climate science denial’s greatest propaganda victory so far. Australia is not immune.Fire Chief Randy O’Donnell of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, left, discusses the plan for clearing smoke from a house. All-volunteer fire departments like his are finding it harder to recruit new members. The Pew Charitable Trusts
SHIPPENSBURG, Pa. — Everybody in this fire station was sleeping one recent morning when the alarms started blaring. Six firefighters hopped out of their bunks and pulled their gear over their pajamas. The sun was still coming up when they reached a house where smoke was rising from the basement.
Afterward, back in their pajamas, the young men gathered in the station’s control room. The chief’s son wrote up the report: furnace malfunction in the basement, no injuries, no damage. Then the bantering began — about girlfriends, the holidays and work.
This all-volunteer fire station and the two others in Shippensburg, a factory and university town of about 5,500 people in a central Pennsylvania valley, are vestiges of the past. Firefighters sit around on weekdays playing rummy, and people gather for bingo Friday nights. Yet, the stations are much quieter than they were decades ago, when they felt like the center of the town. And as the community’s interests have shifted from the fire stations, the number of volunteers has fallen.
“Everybody has other things occupying their time,” said Shippensburg Fire Chief Randy O’Donnell.
The number of volunteer firefighters has been falling for decades here and across the country, dropping by about 12 percent from 1984 to about 788,000 in 2014. That has spelled trouble for cities and towns — especially smaller ones in more rural areas — that have always depended on volunteer departments to save thousands, even millions, of dollars every year on salaries and benefits. Many have been forced to hire at least some paid staff.
The decline in volunteers has become more drastic in the last decade, as young people have moved out of rural areas and into bigger cities.
To stem the loss, states increasingly are offering financial incentives for volunteer firefighters, such as tax breaks. Pennsylvania passed a law in November that will give volunteer firefighters property tax or local income tax credits. Connecticut expanded a similar law last year, and Alaska and New York have similar laws in place.
Other states are choosing to forgo state revenue to give income tax credits to volunteer firefighters. Nebraska passed a law last year, and similar laws are on the books in Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, New York and South Carolina. Some of the laws also apply to other emergency responders, such as paramedics.
O’Donnell and other chiefs across the country welcome the tax breaks, which they say help offset the costs of volunteering, such as driving personal cars to and from the station. They say the incentives might convince existing volunteers to stay around longer — but they probably won’t convince others who don’t already have the desire to serve to volunteer.
It’s become harder to recruit volunteer firefighters as family and work environments have changed, said Jack Reckner of the Kentucky Association of Fire Chiefs, which for years has been advocating for a tax credit in the state.
Men — who have always been the majority of volunteer firefighters — are taking a larger role in raising children and more of their wives are working. Commutes are longer. Sports and other activities are pulling families in more directions. Volunteerism, in general, is on the decline.
“Volunteerism is one of the first things that go by the wayside, simply because people can’t afford it,” Reckner said.
Demands on Volunteers
States’ reliance on volunteer firefighters varies greatly. In Pennsylvania, about 97 percent of departments are run by all or mostly volunteers, compared to 9.1 percent in Hawaii.
As the number of volunteers goes down, the number of departments with mostly or all paid staff goes up – from 4,209 departments in 2009 to 4,485 in 2014.Ram Navami (Rama Navami) will be celebrated by Hindu devotees worldwide on Tuesday (8 April).
The Hindu festival commemorates the birth of Lord Rama, the seventh incarnation of Lord Vishnu, who was born to King Dasharatha and Queen Kaushalya of Ayodhya.
Lord Vishnu incarnated himself in the form of Lord Rama to destroy Ravana, according to Hindu mythology.
The auspicious occasion will be celebrated on the ninth day of Chaitra month (March-April) in the Hindu lunar calendar. Besides celebrating the birth of Lord Rama, the day is also observed as the marriage day of Rama and Sita.
Significance of Ram Navami
Lord Rama was the embodiment of truth and morality. He was a righteous king, an ideal son, an ideal husband and a loving brother. He is considered as an eternal symbol of human ideals.
Ram Navami celebrations begin on Gudi Padwa, which falls on the first day of the Chaitra month, and ends on the ninth day.
This year's Ram Navami falls on 8 April. Hindu devotees across the country will be celebrating Ram Navami by offering prayers to the Lord.
Several devotees would visit sacred places like Ayodhya, the birthplace of Rama and Rameshwaram among others to seek blessings from the Lord. They will make repeated chants of the holy name of Rama, which is known as the "Taraka Mantra."
It is said that by uttering Lord Rama's name, one can get rid of their sins and attain salvation. There is a belief that repeated chants of his name help one to attain purity, peace, joy and prosperity.
The Lord himself had said, "Repetition of My name once is equal to the repetition of one thousand names of God or to the repetition of a Mantra one thousand times," according to hindupedia.
How Ram Navami is Celebrated?
Many devotees celebrate the festival by observing fast on the auspicious occasion. Lord Rama figurines will be richly adorned and special prayers will be offered to the Lord. "Ramayana," the Hindu epic which involves the life of Lord Rama is read in temples.
Bhajans, songs and dances are performed on this day. People wear new clothes and prepare special dishes.
In south India, since the auspicious day is also considered as the marriage day of Rama and Sita, temple priests perform a wedding ceremony called "Kalyanotsavam."
On this day, devotees clean their house and decorate it with colours. They also adorn the entrance doors with mango leaves, which signify prosperity.
Devotees perform special prayers to the Lord and make dishes like Panakam (Jaggery mixed with water) and Kosambri (soaked lentles).
Greetings for Ram Navami
President Pranab Mukherjee has greeted citizens on the eve of Ram Navami.
In a press release, the President has sent a message saying, "On the auspicious occasion of Ram Navami, I convey my greetings and good wishes to all my fellow countrymen."
"Maryada Purushottam Shri Ram is the embodiment of selfless service and the highest moral and ethical principles. May the celebrations inspire us to model our lives on the life and deeds of Shri Ram. Let us strive to spread his noble message of righteous conduct and rededicate ourselves to building a great nation."
Vice President Hamid Ansari has also greeted the nation saying, "I convey my warm greetings and good wishes to the citizens of our country on the auspicious occasion of Rama Navmi. As we celebrate the birthday of Lord Rama, let us also emulate his ideals of righteousness, compassion and integrity, so that we build a just and harmonious society."
(Edited by Anu James)KAMPALA (Reuters) - A senior Lord’s Resistance Army commander who surrendered last week to the U.S. military in the Central African Republic (CAR) will be handed over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for trial, a Ugandan army spokesman said on Tuesday.
Dominic Ongwen, wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity, is a child recruit who rose through the ranks of the LRA, a group that first took up arms against Uganda in the late 1980s and gained a reputation for massacres and mutilating victims.
Uganda earlier said Ongwen’s fate was being discussed between Uganda, a critic of the ICC, and the United States, which is not a signatory to the court’s Rome Statute, as well as other African parties.
The Pentagon, which has been slow to confirm the identity of the person being held by U.S. troops, said on Tuesday it now had “high confidence” the man was Ongwen, but was still working to finalize confirmation of his identity.”
Army Colonel Steve Warren said Ongwen surrendered to people believed to be Muslim Seleka rebels and was later handed over to U.S. forces. He said he had seen reports from Uganda that Ongwen would be handed to the ICC, but he added it was too early for him to say what would ultimately be done with the LRA leader.
The Obama administration has notified senior lawmakers that Ongwen is in U.S. military custody, a congressional source said, but “we have been cautioned that logistics for the handover (to the ICC) are still in flux so we don’t have a timeline yet.”
The United States is not a signatory to the ICC and so cannot hand him directly to the court. As a result, another country or international body would have to do that.
Ugandan officials said the plan was that the CAR - where the LRA has been active and which is an ICC signatory - would surrender Ongwen to the court.
“It has been finally decided that Dominic Ongwen will be tried at The Hague. Victims will get justice as much as Ongwen,” army spokesman Paddy Ankunda told Reuters.
“Arrangements for his transfer are being made and it will be CAR that will transfer him,” he said, without giving details.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, however, said Ongwen will be handed to the Ugandan unit within African Union forces stationed in CAR, which will transfer him to the ICC.
Uganda, which in the past sought the international court’s help in bringing LRA chief Joseph Kony to justice, has more recently accused the ICC of seeking to target Africans, a common sentiment in Africa.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said in Nairobi last month that African states should quit the court.
Washington is not a member of the ICC, although it has cooperated with it in the past.
The arrest of Ongwen, 34, is a major success in the campaign to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has involved African troops with U.S. military support.
The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, a former choirboy who claimed to be guided by spirits only he could hear. The group has been accused of abducting children to serve as fighters and sex slaves.
In a message first broadcast on CAR radio, Ongwen called for other LRA fighters to surrender and said Museveni had promised to pardon him under an amnesty. Uganda denied this, saying such a step was not offered those accused of crimes against humanity.Nicky Hager must wonder why he bothers.
The journalist brought the Snowden documents to New Zealand in the last week, to be met with a collective shrug of shoulders. Maybe you are unmoved at the Government Communications Security Bureau spying on Pacific neighbours. Perhaps you don't care if your emails, texts and Facebook messages are hoovered up and stored in a US data bank. Or that the GCSB is little more than an outpost of the US National Security Agency. But, with a pending significant review and a likely increase in their electronic reach, there are still a few reasons to take the leaked papers seriously.
READ THE FILES IN FULL: GCSB update 2010
* GCSB update 2012
* Second Party National Identity Rules
READ MORE: * Spying on the family
* Satellites are targeted by Waihopai
*Inside the Waihopai domes
1 NO-ONE'S GOT THIS
Yes, yes, spies work in secret. That's as it should be. But to prevent abuse of the immense power offered by bulk data collection, robust oversight mechanisms are crucial. Yet, they barely exist here. Despite recent vague promises to be more open, spy agencies remain in the shadows. More than a year after her appointment - and two years after an overhaul - watchdog Cheryl Gwyn released her first report but says she didn't have enough information to determine if the agencies operate differently after an illegal spying scandal. The responsible parliamentary committee is equally toothless and Chris Finlayson, minister in charge, has dismissed public deliberation over spy legislation as "chit chat."
2 DIRTY POLITICS
In an abuse of power, Prime Minister John Key's staff used information supplied by the Security Intelligence Service in a partisan hit job on then-Opposition leader Phil Goff. Key has also selectively used intelligence to justify a controversial decision to send troops to Iraq and further boost surveillance powers. At the same time, he's refused to make public full details. Governments are perfectly entitled to argue national security as a reason for keeping intelligence secret. But it's dangerous when politicians use sensitive - and partial - snippets of information to push their own agenda. Or bully those they don't agree with.
3 THE APATHY
Key, probably quite correctly, assesses that the public care more about snapper than spying. The initial revelations from the Snowden archives actually galvanised his support. It gives Key the confidence to vilify journalists, like Glenn Greenwald and Hager. That is bolstered when other media outlets slavishly report his pre-emptive strikes, even before scrutinising their investigative work, or the evidence. But the absence of debate about surveillance is not healthy. This is where abuses go unnoticed and thrive. And it's Orwellian when Key shuts down pertinent questions with: you don't understand the detail, and the journalists are wrong.
4 THE CONTRADICTIONS
Despite the Government's regular assurances the GCSB are acting legally, with each set of revelations, come contradictions. Back in September, when asked if bulk data collection tools like XKeyscore were being used on Kiwis, Key said: "We're not collecting wholesale information. We don't have the capability for mass surveillance." The Snowden documents tell a different story: describing how emails, browsing sessions, and chat messages from 150 different locations are harvested through Waihopai, using XKeyscore. Snowden often came across New Zealanders' data while using XKeyscore in his work and Key conceded he might well be right. Whether it came from surveillance by the GCSB was never proven. We can only take Key's word that New Zealanders are not subject to mass surveillance by their own agency - and he promised to resign if it happened. But he's wrong to say the GCSB don't have the tools.On November 15, open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges begins again. Before the second act of our national healthcare drama commences, let’s review what we’ve learned in Act I.
For starters, everyone now knows that federal officials are challenged when it comes to setting up a website. But they’ve demonstrated the ability to dole out a huge amount of taxpayers’ money for millions of people signing up for Medicaid, a welfare program. And they’ve proved they can send hundreds of millions of federal taxpayers’ dollars to their bureaucratic counterparts in states, like Maryland and Oregon, that can’t manage their own exchanges. But there are many other lessons to be gleaned from Year One of Obamacare. Here are three of the most important ones.
1. Health costs jumped—big time. Huge increases in deductibles in policies sold through the exchanges were a big story in Florida, Illinois and elsewhere. While the average annual deductible for employer-based coverage was a little over $1,000, the exchange deductibles nationwide normally topped $2,000.
Notwithstanding President Obama’s specific promise to lower the typical family premium cost by $2,500 annually, premium costs actually increased. D2014 data for the “individual market” shows that the average annual premiums for single and family coverage rose in the overwhelming majority of state and federal health-insurance exchanges all around the country. In eleven states, premiums for twenty-seven-year-olds have more than doubled since 2013; in thirteen states, premiums for fifty-year-olds have increased more than 50 percent. For the “group market,” the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimated on February 21, 2014, that 65 percent of small firms would experience premium-rate increases, while only 35 percent were expected to have reductions. In terms of people affected, CMS estimated 11 million Americans employed by these firms would experience premium-rate increases, while about 6 million would see reductions. So much for “bending the cost curve down.”
2. The law reduced competition in most health-insurance markets. A limited analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that in 2014, large states like California and New York were more competitive, but Connecticut and Washington were less competitive. The Heritage Foundation conducted a national analysis and found that between 2013 and 2014, the number of insurers offering coverage on the individual markets in all fifty states declined nationwide by 29 percent. On a county level, 52 percent of U.S. counties had just one or two health-insurance carriers. In 2014, at least, the law did not deliver on its promise of more personal choice and broader competition.
3. We still don’t know for sure how many people are actually insured. Following the disastrous October 2013 Obamacare “roll-out,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that about 6 million (rather than 7 million) would enroll in the exchanges. Last April, administration officials reported that they reached and surpassed their goal, enrolling over 8 million people in the health-insurance exchanges. They then declared the health-care debate, like the Iraq War, “over.”
That declaration appears to be premature. The administration now concedes that there are 700,000 fewer persons in the exchanges. Of course, we can expect some attrition. But exchange enrollment is not the same as insurance coverage. CBO said it best : “The number of people who will have coverage through the exchanges in 2014 will not be known precisely until after the year has ended.” Exactly.
Beyond the seemingly endless surveys, estimates and guesstimates, we do have some raw data. Between October 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014, there was a net increase in individual coverage of 2,236,942, but there was a net decrease in group (employment-based) enrollment: it fell by 1,716,540. Enrollment in Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (CHIP) increased by about 5 million over that same period. We’ll know more later, as CBO said, especially how many Americans are losing their employment-based coverage.
Who enrolls is also crucial. In 2013, Obama administration officials said that their goal was for young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four to account for 40 percent of exchange enrollments. On April 17, 2014, the White House announced that only 28 percent of those enrolled through the federally administered |
other officers' actions, he's suffered "severe mental anguish and emotional distress, humiliation, embarrassment, stress and anxiety, loss of self esteem, self-confidence and personal dignity, emotional pain and suffering."
The Daily News notes that Shmurda's lawer, Derek Sells, is married to Mina Malik, the executive director of the Civilian Complaint Review Board—the agency that reviews, among other things, claims of police misconduct. Sells told the tabloid that Shmurda did not file a complaint with the CCRB. In March, the CCRB found that officers entered residences without warrants or consent in 180 reported incidents between 2010 and 2015.
Shmurda is set to appear in court on May 11th to face the charges brought against him in January, 2014. In a recent interview with Vibe, he said that "the cops that locked me up—they're dirty. I've known the cops since I was 11-12 years old...They tried to put guns on me. They tried to do a whole bunch of stuff." In the same interview, he said that "we cannot have Donald Trump as president. I'm going for Hillary."NFL Hall of Fame legend Mike Ditka doesn’t mince words.
During an interview on WABC Radio’s “Bernie & Sid Show” Thursday, the former Chicago Bears coach didn’t hold back his disdain for both former President Barack Obama and San Francisco 49er’s quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
They’re both losers. But President Donald Trump is a different story altogether.
Ditka was asked about sports journalists who try to get New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to turn his back on his friend Donald Trump.
“I think these people are — can I say this? — that they’re a**holes,” Ditka said.
Starbucks can hire all the refugees it wants, its competition vowed to hire 10 thousand veterans
He added that those protesting the new president should give Trump a chance and let him do his job.
“If he can screw it up half as much as Obama, I’ll be surprised,” Ditka said.
Later into the interview, Ditka gave this assessment of Obama.
“No leadership at all — none zero,” he said of Obama, reiterating a statement he made last year that he considered him the “worst president ever.”
Ditka also addressed Kaepernick, who’s claim to fame is taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem.
“(H)e’d be a complete unknown without the game of football… And not to respect that, you’ve got to be a pretty unintelligent person, I would think.”
Ditka’s last year of coaching was in 1999 with the New Orleans Saints. But had he been coaching today and one of his players took a knee, that player would be done.
If you thought Lady Gaga wouldn’t politicize the Super Bowl halftime show, you were sadly mistaken
“He doesn’t play for me ever again,” Ditka said.
Wake up right! Receive our free morning news blast HEREThree squirrels apprehended following 6 attacks on humans
A squirrel in Lake Vista. Photo: WWL TV Channel 4
NEW ORLEANS- Following reports of up to six attacks on humans, three squirrels have been apprehended in New Orleans.
News outlets report New Orleans Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control put out traps near St. Pius X Catholic Church last Wednesday after multiple people reported being attacked by aggressive squirrels in the Lake Vista area, with one assault caught on camera.
The victims include one man who is undergoing rabies shots after being bitten and two parishioners who were attacked in the church parking lot.
Claudia Riegel with the Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control Board said the squirrels' aggression likely resulted from people feeding the animals. She said the squirrels will be sent for testing.Why can't Americans make things? Two words: business school.
One of the themes that came up while I was profiling White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom earlier this fall was managerial talent. A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?
It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”
How did we get to this point? In some sense, it’s the result of broad historical and economic forces. Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.
After World War II, large corporations went on acquisition binges and turned themselves into massive conglomerates. In their landmark Harvard Business Review article from 1980, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” Robert Hayes and William Abernathy pointed out that the conglomerate structure forced managers to think of their firms as a collection of financial assets, where the goal was to allocate capital efficiently, rather than as makers of specific products, where the goal was to maximize quality and long-term* market share.I think the discussion on PVE is too generous. SE simply does not have meaningful PVE, either from mobs or pirate grids:I'd like to see:- Proper factions: cargo ships should be traders, pirates should be pirates, IMDC should be it's own thing, etc.- Cargo ships that meaningfully react when attacked and try to evade, or fight if they are military types.- Drones able to spawn close to planets.- Drones with meaningful combat capabilities. The assailant in particular is pathetic and actually helps the player by providing free resource.- Argentavis spawning that is triggered by player actions (attacking X many pirate ships, collecting X amount of ingots, etc) and that is a much, much more potent threat.- Other attack event types similar to Argentavis.- Completion of the IMDC assets with actual combat capabilities.- Substantial increase in the potency of the pirate bases.- Planetary random pirate spawns and encounters.- NPC trading.- Rudimentary NPC diplomacy.- Drones that can meaningfully use the fixed weapons in the game against the player.My ultimate PVE wish-list item:- Game will automatically import friends WS creations as enemies providing the ships meet block and AI requirements, these will scale with player block count so that at post scarcity you will be fighting cruisers, etc that can wreck your shit.Filling out at least some of these is really the only way I see survival approaching feature complete.For other quality of life stuff:- Remove obscuring greebles on flight blocks and either replace with integrated functional LCDs or remove entirely (flight seat, cockpits).- Turret tracking properties should be dynamically linked to turret speeds so that if/when projectile properties are modified it doesn't break turret functionality.- Better tank filling/draining logic. You should be able to set priority for how tanks will drain, the order in which they refill and the way they stockpile gas from other tanks.- Remove the various "forced out of camera/turret control" bugs that occur when some blocks are destroyed or otherwise interacted with.- A heirarchical menu system with automatic and custom collapsible menus based on the group system.- Welded blocks with context menus (flight controls, timers, sensors, vents) robustly need to inherent the settings saved in the BP and they absolutely must be able to pick up the set blocks again once these have been repaired or replaced after destruction. One of the most annoying issues in the game is that after combat damage you have to reset a bunch of menus unless everything is buried in groups.- FIX THE BUG WHERE WELDERS, ESPECIALLY WELDERS ON THE SAME GRID DO NOT PROPERLY START PROJECTED BLOCKS, OR REPLACE COMPONENTS ON DAMAGED BLOCKS!!!!!NTUC's SEED Institute will collaborate with healthcare professionals from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) to pilot the course, which will offer 100 training places when it starts this April, says Senior Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Josephine Teo.
SINGAPORE: There will be a new pilot training course for foreign domestic workers employed by families with infants from April.
NTUC's SEED Institute, which has trained many of Singapore's early childhood educators, will work with healthcare professionals from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) to pilot the course, said Senior Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Josephine Teo in Parliament on Thursday (Mar 2) during the Committee of Supply (COS) debate.
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The course will equip these helpers with the basic know-how to care for and interact with infants, with a focus on safety and hygiene, which are the "key concerns of parents", Mrs Teo added.
The course will specifically cover:
a) Understanding and supporting the development of infants
b) Infant care hygiene and safety
c) Common concerns about infants
d) Hands-on demonstration and practice
- Diapering
- Bathing
- Dressing
- Milk/food preparation and feeding
e) Partnership with family
f) Hands-on assessment
The course will cost S$310 and each run of the course, which will be held over four consecutive Sundays, will take in 20 participants. SEED and KKH plan to offer 100 training places but if the response is positive, the pilot could be scaled up, she said.
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"The course is developed to be very practice oriented. Lessons are supplemented with lots of pictorial aids and hands-on demonstration for better retention," said SEED's head of Business Excellence and Parenting Jenny Wong in a press release.
"One key feature of the workshop is a half-day partnership with families component, where the employers' attendance is required so that they can better understand the caregiving practices and also go through the practice stations with their foreign domestic worker."I’ll confess: I savored “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964,” the first of the two volumes of Zachary Leader’s new biography of Bellow, as if it were cake. Its text is six hundred and fifty pages long, with another hundred and fifteen pages of endnotes that can be read straight through like a cubistic condensation of the book. I’ll go farther: it may be the most purely delicious literary biography that I’ve come across. Leader’s calm, gradual, but serenely excited prose vibrates with the joy of his thought coalescing with his subject, Saul Bellow.
Leader’s research is prodigious—this volume carries only through 1964, when, at the age of forty-nine, Bellow rose both to fame and fortune thanks to “Herzog”—but the deployment of knowledge never feels gratuitous. Leader seems to have a thematic concordance to Bellow’s complete oeuvre (published and unpublished; fiction, nonfiction, and epistolary) in his head, and the correlations that he finds between the life and the work are often vertiginous.
It would be tempting to say that Leader discovers that almost all of Bellow’s fiction consists of romans et contes à clef and that, in this critical biography, the biographer discovers the keys and delivers them on a chain to the reader. But rather, the book conveys the feeling that it’s Bellow’s life that was lived à clef, that it isn’t the fiction that’s unlocked by the life but, rather, the life that is opened up by the fictions to which it gave rise. The book contains an exquisitely subtle, insightful, dramatic teasing-out of the thoughts and impulses below the surface of the writing, and of the literary impulses arising below the surface in the course of life. For all its wealth of information, Leader’s book is dynamic—it’s not a collection of well-ordered facts but the drama of a mind in constant, roiling action. In this way, the biography demands a musing, contemplative andante to join Leader on a stroll through byways that suddenly lead to open and mighty vistas, doubling back to look at dead ends, crawling through barely passable thickets to consider the allure of paths that Bellow probed and tested and then spurned.
The main subject of the book is the first half-century of Bellow’s life, which he himself called “a struggle of fifty years”—his infancy in Canada, his childhood and youth in Chicago, the poverty and stormy life among his parents (Russian-Jewish immigrants), siblings, and extended family. From his youth onward, he lived an amazingly full life—filled with sex and romance (sometimes together), a wide range of intense friendships and bitter disputes, intellectual adventures, political action (he was a Communist, then a Trotskyist), sudden changes in circumstance, and wide travels—many schools, many jobs, many cities, many countries. Through it all, the constant was writing. His literary calling arose while he was in high school; as an eighteen-year-old at the University of Chicago (where he didn’t stay long), he “was now open about his ambitions, always carrying a briefcase full of his stories and manuscripts...” Bellow married young and was supported by his wife and her family while he trained himself to write—but didn’t sell a story until he was twenty-five, in 1941. That story, however, was published by the Partisan Review, the leading intellectual journal of the time, which would prove to be a crucial association for Bellow.
Though Bellow published two novels in the nineteen-forties, he didn’t make a living as a writer (in fact, he wouldn’t do so until 1964, at the age of forty-nine). Throughout the thirties, forties—and, for that matter, through the early sixties, until he was nearly fifty—Bellow pieced together an income with freelance teaching jobs, freelance writing jobs, grants, fellowships, lectures, and scant advances (which nonetheless left him thousands of dollars in debt to his publisher). He married, divorced, married, divorced, and married, had alimony and child support to pay, while wrenching the time to write from his whirlwind of practical demands and emotional disturbances.
Leader gives full weight to a moment of enlightenment that’s as crucial to American literary history as the thirty-seven-year-old Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s happenstance glance at a newspaper ad en route to Vincennes was to French intellectual history: the moment when Bellow gave his voice free rein. It takes place in Paris, in 1949, when the thirty-four-year-old Bellow, sustained by a grant and an advance, was working on a novella, “The Crab and the Butterfly,” which he later described as the tale of “two men in a hospital room, one dying, the other trying to keep him from surrendering to death.” It hardly seemed a burst of youthful vigor from a writer who, though highly esteemed within the profession, was largely unknown and considered more promising than accomplished. Then, on a stroll in Paris, working glumly on this glum work, Bellow caught view of water rushing through the street from a hydrant: “I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as this running water.’”
The quote is from Bellow’s interview with Philip Roth, published in The New Yorker in 2005, several weeks after Bellow’s death, which takes its title—“ ‘I Got a Scheme!’ ”— from a childhood friend in Chicago whom Bellow recalled while watching the water flow, and who became the subject of the epochal novel that resulted, “The Adventures of Augie March.”
Along with his past, Bellow liberated his voice; the novel, as Leader details, virtually poured out of Bellow, in a great rush of demotic flamboyance. It was Bellow with the superego unlatched. The street life of the young man from a Russian-Jewish family, with his full-blown new American identity, came bursting forth (“free-style,” as in the novel’s famous first paragraph). The tumultuous passions of his own travels and travails, his family and friends—and politics and sex—were exalted as an exemplary literary subject.
The secret story is why it took so long to liberate Bellow’s voice—why the multilingual immigrant family, filled with Yiddish and French and Russian, filled with hyperbole and invective, the music of the home and of the streets, didn’t find its way into Bellow’s work until then. What now appears to be the obvious thing for the young writer, easily clichéd—the twenty-three-year-old who writes his or her quasi-autobiographical bildungsroman, about family, lovers, schools, and literary ambitions and struggles—was something that Bellow didn’t consider.
He wasn’t alone. Norman Mailer, born in 1923, who published his first novel in 1948, didn’t do it. Bernard Malamud, born in 1914, a friend of Bellow’s from the early fifties (they met in Oregon, in 1952, where both were teaching, while Bellow was completing “Augie March”) didn’t do it. But Philip Roth, born in 1933—and writing after the publication of “Augie March”—did it, thanks to Bellow’s novel. In a passage cited by Leader, Roth said, “These were Jews and Jewish families and here was a guy making literature out of them, and that was a great revelation to me.” (Roth met Bellow in 1957, at the University of Chicago, where Roth was working as an instructor.)
There’s a Roth missing from the index of Leader’s book, but it’s not Leader’s fault: Henry Roth, whose first novel, “Call It Sleep,” came out in 1934, when Roth was twenty-seven. It’s a largely autobiographical book about a Jewish boy growing up in a poor immigrant community in New York; it gives a harrowing view of tenement life, and it’s told with a rich vernacular that renders Yiddish into English. It may be one of the great literary tragedies that the book remained virtually unknown at the time of its publication; it’s easy to imagine it having, on the twenty-ish Bellow, the impact that “Augie March” had on the twenty-ish Philip Roth.
“The Adventures of Augie March” was published in 1953, when Bellow was thirty-eight. The book made Bellow’s name in the literary world (the most controversial review was Anthony West’s, in The New Yorker, which I discussed here in 2010) but it didn’t make him very much money, and the author kept up with his peripatetic academic rounds.
Though immensely sympathetic to Bellow’s work and to his literary ventures, Leader doesn’t whitewash the record of the author’s personal life; he documents lies, philandering, a haughty touchiness. It’s neither hagiographic nor reproachful. Leader includes, in his account of Bellow’s life, an array of conflicts and foibles that don’t depart drastically from the run of modern lives not lived on the literary grid. (Writers didn’t invent adultery, after all.) But Leader does open the book with the retrospective moral doubts that Bellow expressed from his deathbed—and, in considering the source of those doubts, Leader hints at his own perspective on the matter: that angels who live beyond reproach, without conflict or willfulness, are unlikely to write good novels.
The mature Bellow fused his art and his life. Whatever his life may have been, it wasn’t unexamined, and if he fiercely exerted himself to enshrine his own behavior and experiences in his books, it wasn’t in the interest of burnishing his personal legacy but of creating a literary one. Bellow’s most enduring conflict is the one at the very heart of modernity—between the visionary vortex of the inner voice and the turbulent volume of worldly experience, between the freely unhinged life of the mind and the irrefutable life of the times. For all his apparent and avowed classicism of characterized drama, for all his devotion to the realism of Balzac and Dreiser, Bellow is a modernist despite himself.Season three of crime drama looks at life after Escobar
Netflix drama Narcos is back for season three starting Sept. 1, according to a promotional video Netflix put out. The series, about drug lord Pablo Escobar and the law enforcement officers who tracked him down, was created by Chris Brancato, Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro.
Gaumont International Television produces the series, which also airs on Univision.
Season one rolled in August 2015 and season two in September 2016. Both featured ten episodes.
Just after season two debuted, Netflix ordered two more seasons of Narcos.
Season two saw Escobar killed.
The season three teaser bears the tagline “Rise of a New Empire.” It will show the rise of the Cali Cartel in the Colombian drug trade with Escobar out of the game.
The cast includes Wagner Moura, Boyd Holbrook, Pedro Pascal and Paulina Gaitan.By Femi Omojola | October 13, 2012
Here at Hipmob, we use Heroku for a number of different parts of our communication network. Using multiple loosely-coupled services simplifies scaling (which is handy when trying to provide live chat as a service to mobile apps), but (as with any distributed system with many moving parts) sometimes debugging can be a little challenging. Recently while trying to debug a customer issue we needed to be able to follow some data as it moved from our API service (implemented in NodeJS and deployed on Heroku) through our chat service (implemented in NodeJS and deployed on our own EC2 servers: Heroku, pretty please add Websocket support soon!) and then to our management service (implemented in Python and deployed on Heroku). After scuffling with multiple shell sessions and trying to visually synchronize our logging statements we decided it was finally time to actually investigate centralized logging.
Logging from Heroku to Syslog
Heroku has a pretty nifty logging system called Logplex that you can setup to send the logs from all your Heroku apps to a single location, and there are a number of Heroku addons (such as Papertrail) that use this capability to provide central monitoring of your logs for errors and other items of interest. We had a server we were already using for centralized logging so we opted to stream all our Heroku logs to that server instead of using a hosted service: we may yet choose one of those hosted services, but for now hosting it ourselves sufficed. Really, all we wanted was to be able to run tail -f {logfile} and see everything go by in the right order.
Setting up syslog
We'd previously used rsyslog on Ubuntu to capture Haproxy logs, however Haproxy uses UDP logging, and Heroku required TCP logging. There are a ton of decent guides covering this: we used Heroku's guide for this, and we were pretty happy. We lost about 3 hours to (this Ubuntu rsyslog bug) but eventually we just used on a non-privileged port and we were done.
Adding the drains
Using the Heroku client, a quick:
heroku drains:add --app api.hipmob.com syslog://{log server IP or DNS name}:{port number}
sets up the Heroku log drain that we want. We can fetch the drain details by running
heroku drains --app api.hipmob.com
syslog://{log server IP or DNS name}:{port number} (<api drain ID>)
and this gives us the drain identifier.
We do the same for each app we're interested in (in our case there are 2 of them), and then save the drain IDs for use in the next step.
Logging everything to a single file
So we finally had logs for multiple Heroku apps streaming into our logging server. What we wanted was to have a separate log file for each Heroku app (so we could look at those individually) as well as a global log file with the output of every app (so we could see all activity from a single place). rsyslog's RainierScript was a little difficult to grasp: the docs didn't quite clarify how best to use it so it took a little while to sort through. We prevailed, though: the contents of /etc/rsyslog.d/heroku.conf are below:
# api.hipmob.com if $source == '<api drain ID>' then /mnt/logs/heroku/api.hipmob.com.log if $source == '<api drain ID>' then /mnt/logs/hipmob/production.log if $source == '<api drain ID>' then ~ # manage.hipmob.com if $source == '<manage drain ID>' then /mnt/logs/heroku/manage.hipmob.com.log if $source == '<manage drain ID>' then /mnt/logs/hipmob/production.log if $source == '<manage drain ID>' then ~
This pipes each Heroku app into a dedicated file and into the global production.log file: tail -f /mnt/logs/hipmob/production.log is now a single stream of every log event from Heroku, which was exactly what we needed. The third line in each segment prevents the log lines from going into any other log files.
Adding our own logs
The last piece was getting the logs from our EC2 servers into the central rsyslog server as well: we don't have Logplex to handle it for us, so we're on our own here. This proved to be a bit messier: we use console.log and console.error statements sprinkled liberally throughout our code (we try and resist, but log spam can be very useful) and by default the Node JS console goes to system.out. Packages like Winston offer Node JS support for syslog but we like being able to use the default console for local debugging.
We're clearly not the first people who've run into this problem: Papertrail have the remote_syslog gem. But: its in Ruby, and we're already using NodeJS on our servers, so we wanted to stick to a single stack (which simplifies our deployment). On our EC2 servers we have Upstart init scripts that redirect the output of the Node processes to a log file: why not just run tail -f on that file and then send THAT to the remote syslog?
Introducing: pipe-to-syslog
And so we did. The source is in github for your viewing pleasure. Setting it up is pretty straightforward (once you've already got Node and the syslog server setup). The instructions below are for Ubuntu: it shouldn't be too messy to run them on another Linux distribution.
Setting up pipe-to-syslog
Check out the pipe-to-syslog project from Github and copy the configuration template git clone https://github.com/Hipmob/pipe-to-syslog.git /var/local/pipe-to-syslog cd /var/local/pipe-to-syslog Install all the dependencies. npm install Add it to Upstart. cp pipe-to-syslog.conf /etc/init By default we drop privileges and run as a user other than root, so create that user and group here. useradd -M --shell /bin/false node NOTE If you don't create this user and group (or want to use a different user/group), you will need to edit the /etc/init/pipe-to-syslog.conf file to update or remove the --user and --group parameters.
Create the local log file folder. mkdir /var/log/node NOTE If you don't create this folder the service will not start. If you want to log to a different location edit the /etc/init/pipe-to-syslog.conf file.
Setup the configuration file. cp conf.js.template conf.js Edit conf.js: we've tried to keep it pretty simple. You can have as many unique entries in the self object. For each entry you can specify an arbitrary number of sinks (log output destinations): each sink describes the specific file that should be read (using the channel field) and the syslog level, facility and tag. For the entry you can specify the hostname to be sent to the syslog server (you'll need to make a note of this when you're configuring the syslog server), and then the actual syslog server IP address/DNS name and port number. function get_config() { var self = {}; self['web'] = { sinks: [ { channel: { type: 'tail', file: '/var/log/node/out.log' }, level: 'info', tag: 'web', facility: 'user', }, { channel: { type: 'tail', file: '/var/log/node/err.log' }, level: 'error', tag: 'web', facility: 'user', }], hostname: '{hostname}', server: '{syslog server IP address or DNS name}', port: {port number} }; return self; } module.exports.get_config = get_config; For every sink the service will spawn a tail -f process and will watch it.
And, you're done. Start it up. service pipe-to-syslog start You can send the service process a USR1 signal to get it to restart the tail -f processes (useful if you rotate logs). A USR2 signal will force it to kill all the tail -f processes and re-read the configuration file. And the venerable TERM signal will make it exit.
And...we're done
Finally on the rsyslog server we add the /etc/rsyslog.d/ec2.conf : this uses the hostname from step #6 above.
# hostname if $source == '{hostname}' then /mnt/logs/aws/{hostname}.log if $source == '{hostname}' then /mnt/logs/hipmob/production.log if $source == '{hostname}' then ~
And now we have a single log stream in /mnt/logs/hipmob/production.log, with everything in it.
Now, this didn't particularly help us with the original problem (we didn't want to keep the client waiting THAT long), but a couple of days later we needed to look at a different issue, and we were ready!
Hope it helps: if you have any questions, suggestions or comments email/call/chat with us!
Update: comments/discussion on Hacker News.
P.S. If you're building a mobile app and want first-class, integrated, in-app support chat or direct messaging between users you should check out Hipmob!
Get started with HipmobEngland international Stewart Downing has been arrested after allegedly punching his ex-girlfriend in a nightclub row.
The Liverpool star is reported to have punched the woman, with whom he is thought to have a child.
Downing, aged 27, was arrested at the Cross Keys club in Yarm, near Middlesborough, at about 1am this morning.
The Daily Mail reports:
A local source told the Mail Online that there had been an incident between the two of them. “She went over to one of his friends and said something that she shouldn’t have,” the source said. “He butted in and they were arguing.” It’s then that the source alleged that he hit her. The source continued: “Police got there as they were thrown out. He caused a scene outside the club as well, when he realised they were going to take him in.”
Police confirmed that a 27-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman had both been arrested on suspicion of assault and remained in custody.Property valuation is an important piece of the commercial real estate transaction puzzle. But how exactly does it work?
There are many elements at play when it comes to commercial real estate valuation, each of which depend upon specific property characteristics, property history, data points, and external market conditions. In this post, we’ll take a look at the property metrics that matter most, along with the three most common methods that appraisers use in determining CRE property value.
Why is Property Valuation important?
The value of a property is simply the more probably price at which a property should bring in, in a competitive and open market with buyer and seller each acting prudently and knowledgeably, assuming price is not affected by undue stimulus.
As an investor, value is related to the specific purpose for which you have purchased a property. Essentially, the investor is trading their investment dollars for the property’s income. The value is determined by the net operating income divided by the desired return. Income properties should produce a cash flow that covers all expenses but also reduces the debt necessary to acquire the property as well as provides a return on your investment.
The Metrics that Matter
A property’s estimated value takes into consideration a variety of key data points, in addition to current market conditions and political and social trends. The four primary elements of property value are as follows:
Demand: the desire or need for ownership supported by the financial means to satisfy the desire.
Utility: the ability to satisfy future owners’ desires and needs.
Scarcity: the finite supply of competing properties.
Transferability: the ease with which property ownership rights are transferred.
An accurate appraisal depends on the methodical collection of the commercial real estate data points that influence these elements and characterize a particular property. Metrics of particular importance include capitalization rate, net operating income (NOI), rental rate, lease terms, TI allowance, and rent escalations, each of which play a key role in the appraisal methods outlined below.
The Methods Appraisers Use
There are three commercially recognized valuation models for real estate: the income approach (cash flows), the sales comparison approach (comparable market analysis), and the cost approach. The method or methods commercial real estate appraisers employ to determine a property’s value varies depending on the type of property in question. Each approach has its advantages, and when used together, the various methods give you the best idea what the property you are analyzing is worth.
Income Approach
The income approach is the primary method used to appraise income-producing properties like multifamily apartment complexes, office buildings, and retail centers. While this approach is considered to be the most meaningful and accurate gauge of CRE property value, it is also the most complex. The two principle methods are Direct Capitalization, based on one year of income, and Discounted Cash Flow, based on multiple-year projection period and reversionary value. The only properties that this approach cannot be used with is for-sale real estate investment like condos, single family or land development.
The first step in using the income approach is to determine a property’s NOI, or the revenue that a property generates minus necessary operating expenses. Determining NOI is often an exceedingly detailed process in which an appraiser creates an entire profit and loss statement for a property, factoring in details like projected maintenance expenses and vacancy rates over an extended period of time.
Simply, the process for calculating a Pro Forma or NOI is a projection of cash flow. This is used to determine value using common investment ratios and eventually a discounted cash flow analysis.
In creating the cash flow analysis, there is a specific format that is followed:
Gross Scheduled Income: The sum of the expected rent for a particular property. In an apartment building, it would be the sum of rents from each unit.
Vacancy and Collection Loss: Vacancy is calculated as rent loss due to empty units. When underwriting, the lenders usually use 5% or the market vacancy factor.
Effective Gross Income: This is the difference between the gross scheduled income and the vacancy factor.
Operating Expenses: Includes things like taxes, utilities, management, maintenance, insurance. Any expenses that are necessary for normal building operations. Whether these expenses are handled by the tenant or the owner are often decided by the lease.
Net Operating Income (NOI): This is the difference between effective gross income and the operating expenses.
Once the NOI has been assessed, the appraiser will survey other similar-earning properties in the same area to determine the current market value of the property in question. Capitalization rate can then be calculated by dividing the NOI by the determined market value. The capitalization rate is a complex term, but very simply it is the ratio of net operating income to a property’s value and represents a return on investment in a given year before accounting for capital costs, amortization, depreciation, taxes etc.
Finally, the appraiser divides the property’s NOI by its cap rate to arrive at a value estimate.
The simple steps are:
Calculate the Net Operating Income Determine the appropriate Capitalization Rate Divide the Net Operating Income by the Cap Rate to arrive at an estimated value
Because it takes into account so many essential metrics, the income approach is largely regarded as the most valuable and information-dense CRE appraisal method. But for the same reason, this method requires close attention to detail, as an incorrect assessment of any factor can dramatically alter the resulting valuation. While steps are simple, it can be difficult to determine the right NOI and the most appropriate cap rate.
Supplementary Approaches
Although the income approach is generally perceived as the most comprehensive gauge of a property’s value, other approaches can be used to great effect in specific circumstances.
Sales Comparison Method
The sales comparison approach, sometimes called the market data approach, is a way to determine market value by comparing a particular property to properties with the same or similar characteristics. This method is typically required if the investor is seeking conventional financing. Commercial real estate appraisers using this approach must select comparable properties, ideally sold within the last year and within the same market considerations, and take into account seemingly both major and minor considerations. This includes basic things like area and square footage, along with more nuanced aspects like quality of construction and property conditions. Location also has a big effect on the property’s market value.
Qualities that adjust comparable sale prices:
Age and condition of buildings
Terms and conditions of sale (such as seller under duress)
Location
Date of Sale
Physical features such as lot size, landscaping, construction quality, number of rooms, lot size, etc.
Accurately determining like properties and accounting for differences requires extensive research, knowledge of an area, as well as industry experience. The appraisal process often analyzes at least 3 or 4 comparable properties. The resulting valuation reflects the idea that a property’s value is worth the net value of all of its features, which can be helpful for particular kinds of property — for instance, a multi-condo property. More frequently, the sales comparison method is used for residential properties.
Cost Approach
Appraisers can also use the cost approach method by evaluating the costs of creating a property exactly like the subject. This approach operates on the assumption that a reasonable buyer would |
they going to start living an open life now and be truthful to each other, or not? They could do it. He could say, “We’ve never talked about this. Is this something you really want to talk about today?” This may be the time, whatever their beliefs about what happens after death. Or he could say, “Look, we’ve got a very short time together, and whatever we’ve done in the past, if it doesn’t bring us joy now, let’s leave it behind.”
Harris: It’s interesting—there seems to be an odd intuition working in cases like this, which I only just noticed in myself: If we shorten the time horizon down to a few days, or a few weeks, or even a few months, it seems to put pressure on the rationale for living truthfully. Many people seem to feel that if we only have two weeks left together, it’s probably better to live a consoling lie, but if we have 20 years left, then we might want to put our house in order and live truthfully.
Howard: I look at it another way: No matter how much time I’ve got left, I want to live a life that I have no regrets about.
Harris: I agree. But I think that there might be a moral illusion creeping in here. When you dial the remainder of one’s life down to a very short span, people begin to wonder, what good could possibly come from telling the truth? In my view, one might as well apply that thinking to the whole of life.
Howard: Absolutely. This gets to the very foundation of what we’re talking about here, which is how you want to live your life and care for the people in it. My father used to talk about someone being a man of his word, and I guess maybe it’s sexist these days, but I never hear that anymore. Clint Korver, my doctoral student who has helped me teach my course and write our ethics book, was once introduced at a conference, quite correctly, as “the guy who always tells the truth.” I find it absolutely shocking that anyone would need to mention that. It’s like saying he doesn’t steal or murder people. Why not say, “and he breathes, too”? “He’s lived for many years, and he’s been breathing all this time.” Great. Glad to hear it.
Harris: It just indicates how commonplace lying is. It’s ubiquitous, and most people don’t even consider what life would be like without it.
Another difficult case comes to mind, also from a reader: You’re having sex with your wife or husband and fantasizing about someone else. Later, your spouse has the temerity to ask what you were thinking about when you were having sex. The honest answer is that you were thinking about someone else. But let’s say that you know your spouse will not do well with this information. He or she will view it as a real breach of trust, rather than just a natural consequence of having a human imagination.
Howard: Well, that’s another case in which, when you first suspect this, it’s probably time to have a conversation. Just what is okay? Is it “whatever turns you on”?—you know, “I could be the pirate and you could be the helpless maiden…” and so forth. Is that okay? Or is it “Oh, my god, you’re not seeing me as I really am.” People will obviously differ in this area, but couples just need to have an honest conversation about it. I think honesty really is all that matters. It just transforms the situation.
Why would you want to live a lie in your sex life? It just seems silly to live a life of pretense, and it’s okay to have fantasies. Why not say, “Look, if it turns you on to think that I’m Brad Pitt, it’s going to be more fun for me when you’re turned on, so go for it. Because that’s why I’m here in the first place, right? I love you, and I want to have the best life with you that we can have.”
Harris: I can feel our readers abandoning us in droves, but I agree with you. Let’s return to the case in which you are in the presence of someone who seems likely to act unethically. Can you say more about honesty in those situations?
Howard: Well, I’d make a distinction between the maxim-breakers—in other words, a person who is harming others or stealing—and those who are merely lying or otherwise speaking unethically. Lying is not a crime unless it’s part of a fraud. If someone asks for directions to Wal-Mart, and you know the way but you send them walking in the opposite direction—it’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s not a crime. Imagine if they came back with a policeman and said, “That’s the man who misdirected me.” You could say, “Yeah, I did. It just so happens that I like to watch people wandering in the wrong direction.” That’s not a crime. It’s not nice behavior. It might be reason for someone to boycott your business, or to exclude you from certain groups, but it’s not going to land you in jail.
I make a careful distinction between what I call “maxim violations”—interfering with peaceful, honest people—and everything else.
Harris: Yes, I see. It breaks ethics into two different categories—one of which gets promoted to the legal system to protect people from various harms.
Howard: In fact, there are also two categories in the domain of lying. The first is where people acknowledge the problem—people obviously get hurt by lies—and then the other cases where more or less everyone tends to lie and feels good about it, or sees no alternative to it. That’s why your book is so important—because people think it’s a good thing to tell so-called “white” lies. Saying “Oh, you look terrific in that dress,” even when you believe it is unattractive, is a “white” lie justified by not hurting the person’s feelings.
The example that came up in class yesterday was, do you want that mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-who’s-the-fairest-of-them-all device, or do you want a mirror that shows you what you really look like? Or imagine buying a car that came with a special option that gave you information that you might prefer to the truth: When you wanted to go fast, it would indicate that you were going even faster than you were. When you passed a gas station, it would tell you that you didn’t need any gas. Of course, nobody wants that. Well, then, why would you want it in your life in general?
Harris: However, there are some arguments, from both an evolutionary and a psychological perspective, that suggest that having one’s beliefs ever-so-slightly out of register with reality can be adaptive and psychologically helpful. I’m sure you’re familiar with the research that shows that if you bring a person into a room full of strangers and have him give a brief speech, a depressed person will tend to accurately judge what sort of impression he has made, while a normal person will tend to overestimate how positively others saw him. It’s hard to know which is cause and which is effect here—but it does seem like an optimism bias could be psychologically advantageous.
Howard: It might have allowed people to survive a lot better in the past.
Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception could have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all—and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, obviously there are many things that may have been adaptive for our ancestors—such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia, etc.—that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I’m wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one in which the wellbeing of all participants fails to be maximized. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us?
Howard: This gets back to distinctions I make between prudential, ethical, and legal principles. Is the statement “Honesty is the best policy” a prudential statement? In other words, is it merely in your interest to be honest? That’s different from saying, “I am ethically committed to being honest,” because you could probably find individual circumstances where dishonesty gives you an advantage.
I think that growth is encouraged by accurate feedback. Telling children they are always accomplishing wonderful things regardless of their actual accomplishments is not going to serve them when they face the world. Having a positive mental attitude toward life is prudential, but being overconfident in your abilities is not.
A student yesterday said that he had recently bid for something, and he told the guy that he didn’t have enough money to pay the full price. But this was a lie. He really had the money, but he said, “I only have X,” and the seller said, “Okay. I’ll give it to you for X, if that’s all the money you have.” So my student was feeling pretty good about this negotiation because, from his point of view, he saved money by telling an untruth. But it’s also possible the seller could have said, “Sorry. I’ve got other offers at the price X+1,” in which case my student would have been exposed in his lie if he really wanted the item and said, “Okay, I’ll pay X+1 too.” This all gets to the question of whether you have repeated relationships. Do you view your life in terms of relationships or transactions?
If you’re bidding on eBay, truth isn’t an issue. This is a completely transactional situation. If I’m dealing with my mechanic on an ongoing basis, it’s not a transaction. It’s a relationship, and he will make judgments about me and about my reliability as a person. And I will make these judgments about him, and these judgments will have long-term effects for both of us. This alters the prisoner’s dilemma: If you have a relationship with a person, you’re going to have different beliefs about the prospect of him selling you out than you would if he were just some guy the experimenters grabbed and put in the situation with you.
I don’t think you can get from “is” to “ought” in the coarse sense of saying that ethical people make more money, are always happier, etc. That would be to prove that it is always prudential to be ethical. Now, I personally believe it generally is, but I can’t prove that.
Harris: I agree. But you seem to have a very strong intuition, which I share, that we should consider honesty to be a nearly ironclad principle, because it is to everyone’s advantage so much of the time, and it allows us to live the kinds of lives and maintain the kinds of relationships we want to have.
Howard: And I believe it also extends to truths about oneself. Self-deception isn’t of any value either. For instance, I was never going to be a professional singer. If I didn’t understand this fact about myself, people could have said, “Oh, you’re a great singer. You ought to quit your job and start recording.” But that’s just bullshit. You’ve got to be honest about who you are—about what you know and don’t know and about what you can and can’t do—and still be willing to try things and experiment. To me, it’s pretty simple.
Harris: And, needless to say, it makes sense to want to be in touch with reality. Given that your every move in life will be constrained by whatever the facts are, both out in the world and in the minds of others, being guided by anything less than these facts will leave you perpetually vulnerable to embarrassment and disappointment. When your model of yourself in the world is at odds with how you actually are in the world, you are going to keep bumping into things.
I think where people get confused, psychologically and ethically, is when they consider that part of reality that exists in other people’s minds. The question is, do you really want to know what other people think about you—about your talents and prospects—or do you want to be deceived about all that?
Many people imagine that they want to be protected from the knowledge of what is really going on in the heads of other people, because they think their own performance in the world will be best served by this ignorance. I think they’re mistaken, but it’s interesting to consider cases where they might be right.
Howard: It is—and that gets down to the question of what your view is towards life as a whole. I tend to go back to something like the Buddha’s eightfold path. I remember hearing a Buddhist speaker once give a talk, and at question time a woman said, “I was raised as a Christian, where the idea of charity is built in, and yet you haven’t mentioned charity at all. So I’m having trouble understanding your ethics.”
And he said to her, “Well, when you were doing all these charitable things”—which she said she regularly did at church, helping people all over the world, sending them baskets and stuff—“did you really care about these people you were doing these things for?” The woman was silent for a moment and then she said, “No. I hadn’t really thought about that.” And the teacher said, “Well, when you care, you’ll know what to do.”
That’s so different from saying, “You’ve got to be charitable.” When you actually care about the experience of other people, you tend to know what to do. The conversation you and I are having now is kind of like writing a manual for unenlightened people like ourselves, so we all won’t make too many mistakes along the way.
I sometimes use a metaphor of the guy who never knew he had to put oil in his new car, because no one ever told him. He never read the manual, and now after three years the engine is burned out. He takes the car into the shop and the mechanic says, “Hey, you have to put oil in these things. Now your engine is ruined.” And the man says, “Oh, if only I’d known!” You see, he had no intention of creating this problem that he now has to solve. Well, in speaking about ethics, you and I are trying to raise everyone’s sensitivities, so that we all can live in a preemptive way, as opposed to saying, “Oh my god, what was I thinking?” later on.
Harris: That’s what I felt when I first took your course at Stanford. It was as if I had been given part of the user’s manual to a good life, and by following the simple principle of always telling the truth, I could bypass most of the needless misery I read about in literature and witnessed in the lives of other people. I remember leaving your course feeling that I had discovered a bomb at the very center of my life and had defused it before it could do any damage. It was a tremendous relief.
I’ve begun to wonder, however, at what level the ethical problems we see in the world can be best addressed. The level we tend to speak about, as we have here, is that of a person’s personal ethical code and his individual approach to life, moment to moment. But I suspect that the biggest returns come at the level of changing social norms and institutions—that is, in creating systems that align people’s priorities so that it becomes much easier for ordinary people to behave more ethically than they do when they are surrounded by perverse incentives. For instance, a person usually has to be a hero to be a whistle-blower, given that he will likely lose his job for telling the truth. But in a culture of honesty, it becomes much easier to be truthful. I’m interested in those changes we can make that will cause all boats to rise with the same tide.
Howard: Right. And in my own life I know that I don’t want to do business with people that I’m not on the same ethical wavelength with, so to speak. No matter how attractive the deal looks, if I don’t trust these people—in the sense that you and I are talking about—I don’t want to do business with them, no matter how profitable it might be.
But the problem is that a lot of our life today is transactional. I just bought something from Amazon.com, and there was nobody there, so to speak. It was just credit cards and button clicks. If you go to the supermarket today,the laser system tells you what the price is and the checker bags it for you. In the old days it might be, “Oh you bought a lot of spaghetti. Do you have sauce for that?” There’s no feeling that the checker is a partner in this experience of buying something.
I have this example of what I call the hardware store hammer: A woman is in a hardware store and picks up a hammer. When she is checking out, the shop owner says, “What are you going to use this hammer for?” And she says, “My husband told me to buy a hammer. We’re putting up some pictures in the kitchen.” The owner might say, “Okay. But this is a professional carpenter’s hammer. For your purpose, that one over there would do just fine, and it’s a third the price.” That’s the difference between a relationship and a transaction. If you have a concern for other people doing well for themselves, then I think you want this level of honesty. But our society might be losing that.
We have a great technological advantage, but it’s not like when my father ran a grocery store. If the kids didn’t arrive with enough money, he knew who was who, and it was not a problem. They could just bring the money next time. You don’t see much of that today. Now, you’ve got your credit card, and the idea of extending that kind of trust and courtesy just doesn’t come up anymore. So certain kinds of relationships seem less possible.
Harris: Yes, a system-wide change can either facilitate our ethical connections to other people, or erode them. This brings me to a related question: Are there some things that are important to do—that is, ultimately ethical to do—but which require that the person doing them sacrifice his ethics? I brought this up briefly in my book where I talk about spying. The position I take in the book is that there are certain jobs that I know I would not want to do, and I suspect that they are intrinsically toxic for the person who has to do them, but I can’t say that I think these jobs are unnecessary. I’m thinking of things like espionage, or research on animals. I know that I don’t want to be the guy who saws the scalps off rats all day, but I’d be hard-pressed to say we shouldn’t be using rats in medical research. So, assuming you are going to grant that espionage is occasionally necessary, what do you think about the lifetime of lying entailed by working at the CIA?
Howard: You could also consider what it’s like to be an undercover police officer.
Harris: Yes, that might be an even simpler case. Assuming the laws he is working to enforce are good ones. I know you and I agree on how harmful the war on drugs has been. If an undercover cop were deceiving people to enforce drug laws, I think we would both question the ethics of that line of work.
Howard: Exactly. I’d want to first make sure the cop is enforcing good laws. If it’s a serial rapist found, that’s fine. I’m happy to have police who are out there finding those people and bringing them to justice. We all pay a huge price for living in a world with people who are maxim-breakers. I wish we could live in a world where no one had to use passwords, for instance. But we have passwords and burglar alarms and keys… If you go out in the country, people say, “You mean you don’t leave your key in the car? And you lock your house?”
That’s why I want a very strong system to deter maxim-breakers that is based on restitution. In other words, some of these things that you do are imposing costs on everyone else. I’ve never been burglarized, but I’m paying the price for people who commit burglary, through insurance and other costs. If you engage in that sort of behavior, you ought to pay the criminal overhead for it. But that’s a longer story.
Harris: I completely agree with that as well.
Howard: The trouble is that we can’t separate these things when we get into the kind of discussion we’re having now—What kind of crimes are there in society, and how do you find the people who are perpetrating them? What kind of judgment do they get, and what are the penalties for having done these things? etc. This is a book all in itself, but it’s extremely important.
Harris: No doubt. Well, Ron, this has been great, and I think that readers will find your thoughts on all these topics very useful. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. And let me say again, in case I never fully expressed it, that the courses you taught at Stanford were probably the most important I ever took. It’s rare that one sees wisdom being directly imparted in an academic setting. But that is what you did, and have continued to do for decades. So I just want to say, “Thank you.”
Howard: You are very welcome. And it was great to have this conversation.Three of the good Samaritans (via CBS) got caught in a three car accident in Brooklyn last night—but she is still alive today thanks to the efforts of several good Samaritans who worked together to lift a car off of her. Fourth grader Tawaiian Holmes was on the sidewalk with her mother when a livery cab struck a sedan and an SUV at Livonia and Rockaway Avenues in Brownsville. The little girl was pinned underneath one of the cars: “She just kept saying, ‘Mommy, I love you. Help me. I don’t want to die. Am I going to see my friend,’ ” her mother, E-Zara Paul, told The Post.
Thankfully, at least 7 good Samaritans rushed over immediately to help her: “I ran cause I saw the little girl under the car and she was just yelling, ‘Please help me, please help me’ and her mom was saying, ‘My baby, my baby,’” Michael Ward told CBS. It wasn't easy at first: “I couldn’t pick it up, I got on my back and tried to push it with my legs,” Rusty Greene said. “The first time we tried to lift it we couldn’t get it up, but the second time we lifted it, we got it up and her mother slid her out,” good Samaritan Keith Anderson said.
Tawaiian suffered two broken legs and a broken pelvis; five other people were taken to the hospital with injuries due to the accident. The driver of the livery cab was arrested, and charges are pending. But Paul is just happy her daughter is alive: “I think the men who helped are awesome,” she said. “I thank God they were there because she could have died. She was pinned under the car from her neck to her toes.”---------------------------------
CTXT ha acreditado a cuatro periodistas --Raquel Agueros, Esteban Ordóñez, Willy Veleta y Rubén Juste-- en los juicios Gürtel y Black. ¿Nos ayudas a financiar este despliegue?
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En nuestro país, cuando se ha pretendido dedicar calles y honores a perpetradores de atentados y agresiones contra víctimas de otros tipos de violencia, se ha legislado para impedirlo, y la intervención de la Justicia y de los responsables políticos ha sido inmediata y contundente. Las víctimas del franquismo seguimos soportando el insulto y la humillación de ver calles y plazas de nuestro país dedicadas a los asesinos de nuestros padres y abuelos; a quienes nos encarcelaron y nos torturaron. Creemos -coincidiendo con las recomendaciones al Estado español de los organismos internacionales de derechos humanos - que las víctimas del franquismo son merecedoras del reconocimiento legal y de la consideración que se les niega, simplemente la misma que es exigible hacia las víctimas del terrorismo o del Holocausto, por ejemplo.
La Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria lleva años reivindicando el cambio de toda calle, en cualquier lugar del Estado español, que rinda homenaje a los militares perjuros; a los torturadores y a los criminales de guerra; a los dirigentes del partido único fascista; a los jerarcas del régimen que mantuvo secuestrada por la fuerza la soberanía nacional durante 40 años. Una retirada que debería extenderse a toda la simbología franquista y a los honores concedidos por las instituciones: alcaldes honorarios, hijos predilectos, hijos adoptivos…
La llamada Ley de Memoria Histórica de 2007 hizo abrigar ciertas esperanzas en que se diese una solución definitiva a esta cuestión, pero la ausencia de desarrollo de la misma- fundamentalmente un Reglamento que estableciese una tipología clara de elementos a eliminar, unos plazos, y un régimen sancionador contra las administraciones que incumpliesen la Ley- consiguió que esas esperanzas resultasen defraudadas. El avance de las fuerzas políticas conservadoras en las elecciones municipales de 2007 y 2011, hicieron más difícil aún una solución satisfactoria.
La llegada de los llamados “ayuntamientos del cambio” en mayo de 2015, ha abierto amplias expectativas, que parece que en muchos casos no van a resultar frustradas. Conocemos diariamente noticias sobre cambios de nombre en los callejeros y la eliminación de monumentos franquistas.
De la solución que dé la capital a su siniestro callejero depende lo que pueda pasar en muchas otras ciudades y pueblos
Aunque una década larga de reivindicación del movimiento memorialista ha conseguido poner este tema en la agenda y los programas políticos, las resistencias siguen siendo enormes, y no sólo por parte de muchos ayuntamientos conservadores que se aferran a las deficiencias de la Ley de Memoria para incumplirla. Un claro ejemplo de las dificultades existentes es el Ayuntamiento de Madrid, con las célebres controversias sobre actuaciones municipales, la campaña en contra de la Cátedra de la Complutense y la constitución de un Comisionado de Memoria Histórica, unánimemente criticado por las asociaciones memorialistas y de víctimas del franquismo. Obviamente, de la solución que dé Madrid a su siniestro callejero depende lo que pueda pasar en muchas otras ciudades y pueblos.
Hemos observado con preocupación las presiones mediáticas y políticas que recibe el equipo de gobierno del Ayuntamiento de Madrid para impedir la retirada de la simbología franquista, con argumentaciones falsas y demagógicas que sólo pretenden mantener la injusta situación actual. De cualquier modo, el equipo de gobierno del Ayuntamiento y los grupos políticos que lo respaldan, deberían ser conscientes de que políticas de apaciguamiento no van a conseguir frenar las agresiones.
¿Qué interés puede tener la derecha mediática y política en mantener el callejero franquista? ¿Son compatibles Franco, Yagüe, Maurrás… con una derecha democrática y europeísta? ¿Tan en deuda se sienten con ellos? ¿Por qué ese afán de defender la permanencia de la Plaza de Arriba España, la del Caudillo, o el monolito a los Alféreces provisionales? Exigen consenso quienes han incumplido sistemáticamente la ley; quienes ni han ofrecido ni buscado el consenso durante 24 años de gobierno de la ciudad de Madrid.
No debería ser necesario recordar al equipo de gobierno y a las fuerzas políticas que lo sustentan, que la primera obligación del Ayuntamiento de Madrid es, en primer lugar, cumplir la Ley vigente por insuficiente que sea esta. Por otro lado, existe un claro compromiso programático adquirido con las ciudadanas y ciudadanos de Madrid en las elecciones de mayo de 2015.
La primera obligación del Ayuntamiento de Madrid es, en primer lugar, cumplir la Ley vigente por insuficiente que sea esta
También pensamos que esta es una oportunidad única para hacer pedagogía democrática y de los derechos humanos dirigida a los vecinos y vecinas de Madrid, incorporando a las calles que han de retirarse los nombres de personas y hechos que representen esos valores, especialmente de víctimas del franquismo, funcionarios municipales represaliados, y luchadores por la democracia contra los fascismos español y europeo.
Diversas organizaciones hemos convocado el domingo 20 de noviembre (coincidiendo con el 41 aniversario de la muerte física del dictador) una manifestación en Madrid, con el fin de continuar exigiendo la retirada completa de la simbología franquista, así como los nombres en el callejero madrileño de golpistas de 1936, criminales de guerra y jerarcas de la dictadura.
Estamos convencidos/as de que este tema se solucionará más pronto que tarde de manera satisfactoria, en la ciudad de Madrid y en cada una de las poblaciones del Estado español. De cualquier modo, no cejaremos en exigir la retirada completa de toda la simbología, honores y nomenclatura urbana vinculada al franquismo y a los fascismos europeos, con el fin de que dejemos de ser una anomalía con respecto al resto de países democráticos.
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Arturo Peinado Cano @apces, presidente de la Federación Estatal de Foros por la MemoriaAdvance In Human Embryo Research Rekindles Ethical Debate
Enlarge this image toggle caption Gist Croft, Alessia Deglincerti, and Ali H. Brivanlou/The Rockefeller University Gist Croft, Alessia Deglincerti, and Ali H. Brivanlou/The Rockefeller University
Scientists have been able to make and study human embryos in their labs for decades. But they have never been able to keep them alive outside a woman's womb for more than about a week.
That limitation meant scientists were unable to conduct a range of detailed research into early human development.
But now researchers say they have discovered a way to keep human embryos alive in the laboratory about a week longer than ever before, and through a critical period of development.
It's a step they say will yield important insights into human development and could lead to a better understanding of the factors that cause miscarriages and birth defects.
"All of this research which we do in the lab should have enormous benefit," says Magdelena Zernicka-Goetz, a professor of developmental biology at the University of Cambridge in England who helped conduct the research.
But the advance is reviving a debate about the ethics of conducting experiments on human embryos in the laboratory.
Specifically, the move has raised questions about whether to change a long-standing rule that has limited research on human embryos to the first 14 days of their development.
The research, published Wednesday in two papers in Nature and Nature Cell Biology, builds on a recent discovery by Zernicka-Goetz's group showing how to keep mouse embryos alive longer in the lab.
The researchers developed a specific mix of amino acids, hormones and growth factors that "would allow embryos to feel as good as they would feel in the body of the mother," Zernicka-Goetz says.
The next big question was: Would the same mix work to keep human embryos alive longer? Until now, the upper limit for human embryos was about seven days.
Zernicka-Goetz's group and a separate team at Rockefeller University in New York decided to try.
And it worked. Human embryos kept developing in the lab for about another week.
Zernicka-Goetz says being able to go past the previous limit is "extremely important" from a scientific point of view.
That's because the seventh day of development is the time when the human embryo becomes embedded within the body of the mother — when it becomes implanted in the womb.
Scientists had thought embryos could only keep developing if they were safely in the womb and receiving instructions from the mother's body.
But the embryos in the studies implanted in the dish as they would in the womb. Then they started organizing themselves into the very early stages of different complex organs and tissues and structures in the body, the researchers report.
An Embryo At Six Days Different cells types are shown in an early human embryo, six days after fertilization. Cell boundaries are indicated in white, cells of the inner cell mass (which will give rise to the embryo proper) are in green, and trophoblast cells (which will give rise to extra-embryonic tissues) are in purple and magenta.
"That was a big eureka moment in the lab," says Ali Brinvalou, an embryologist at Rockefeller University in New York.
"All the information necessary and sufficient to have the embryo move forward is already contained within those handful of cells," he says. "That was a very big surprise to us and to the field."
Researchers know relatively little about how a tiny ball of cells that makes up an embryo starts to become a complex human.
It's been a complete "black box," Brinvalou says.
"I find this to be alarming and I find it to be a bit embarrassing," he says, "because I know more about the fruit fly and the frog and the fish and the bird than I know about my own [human] development."
The advance should help scientists investigate many long-standing questions, including: Why do so many pregnancies end in miscarriages? How could infertility treatments be improved? What causes birth defects? How do embryonic stem cells really work?
"We will learn things we cannot even imagine," Brinvalou says. "It's as if you say: 'If I look at new sets of Hubble Space Telescope pictures that I haven't seen yet, what will I learn from them?' It's difficult to say until you look at them."
Other researchers agree the advance is very promising. In a commentary accompanying the research, Janet Rossant of The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto says the work could "provide important information" to researchers.
And that leads back to the current status of the 14-day rule.
"If there's no other way to retrieve valuable information that could be good for humankind, I think it's definitely worth discussing the possibility of renegotiating where that stopping point ought to be," says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University.
For those who think experimenting on human embryos is morally wrong, going even further is deeply troubling.
"The 14-day rule has kept it pretty limited in terms of what scientists could do. Once that goes, then it begins to sort of say: 'It's open season on human embryos. Anything goes,' " says Daniel Sulmasy, a doctor and bioethicist at the University of Chicago.
"The question has to be: 'Are there any limits to what we will do to human beings in order to gain scientific knowledge?' And then who counts as a human being?" says Sulmasy.
The 14-day rule was established at a time when it was impossible to keep embryos alive in the lab even that long.
In the current research, both groups of scientists stopped the embryos from developing past 14 days because of the long-standing rule. But the new work suggests they could have kept the embryos alive longer.
The 14-day mark was also picked originally because it was thought that was about the time when embryos tend to form the "primitive streak," which is a structure that starts to give the embryo more of a structure and individuality.
"Policymakers and others have looked at that developmental time point and thought: That might actually be significant for peoples' moral beliefs if they think that's when you get a unique individual who finally appears for the first time," Hyun says
But Hyun argues in an article accompanying the new research that the latest advance means it may be time to rethink that rule.
"Now there will be further questions about whether or not there would be good scientific reasons for moving that line out a little bit farther," Hyun tells Shots. "What is the purpose of the 14-day rule in today's scientific environment and do we want to keep it?"
Hyun stresses, however, that any change to the 14-day rule would require the same kind of careful, coordinated international debate that created the rule in the first place, to satisfy moral qualms.Lyft may be Planning Return to Columbus Market
For a short time, Columbus was home to two ride sharing services. Uber launched in late 2013 while competitor Lyft got started in early 2014. Lyft’s run was short lived, as the service went on an indefinite hiatus in January 2015, citing “mounting legal pressure from local regulators” that made it difficult for their peer-to-peer platform to operate.
That hiatus may soon be over, as signs are pointing toward a return. Columbus Underground reader Patrick Riley forwarded a message to CU last night that came as a response to his application to become a driver, which states that “Lyft is gearing up to head back to Columbus.”
Lyft spokesperson Mary Caroline Pruitt did not officially confirm the return of service, but hinted that it was likely.
“While we don’t have any immediate news to share at this time, with Ohio’s recent legislation passage, we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to return to Columbus soon,” she stated.
When Lyft left town last year, Columbus Public Safety Assistant Director Amanda Ford said that state legislation had not changed that would cause specific problems for them to operate in the City of Columbus. Lyft currently operates in five other Ohio cities: Akron, Bowling Green, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo.
Pruitt was likely reffering to Ohio House Bill 237, which provides statewide updates to insurance provisions and other regulations for ride sharing transportation services. The legislation is scheduled to go into effect on March 23rd, and will override local level regulations here in Columbus.
As of this morning, Ford said that she hadn’t heard anything about Lyft planning to return to the Columbus |
programmed into an attitude that all other makes and models are inferior,” Terrance told me over text.
Terrance seems to be confusing being a snob and being a criminal. In his case, he’s both. I remember the one time I told how I’d love to get a ’72 Plymouth Road Runner. Terrance scoffed and said, “Hope you don’t plan on turning. Those things are only good for going in a straight line.” That might have been the first and only time I’d ever heard Terrance make a smartass remark.
Steven Weber has a 1968 Chevy Camaro SS. I ask him about it every chance I get and have taken more than a few photos for my own personal enjoyment. I told Steven about Terrance’s Road Runner remark, and he laughed because he could relate: “Sometimes I’d go over there and look at his car, and we’d talk an hour about one [BMW]. Then I’d be pulling up in my Camaro, and I’m walking out, and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, he’s going to follow me out and check out my car.’ And he would stop before he got to my car and go, ‘See you later!’ And I’d say, ‘Wow! Okay.’ So, yeah, in his mind, he didn’t see any other car like the BMW.”
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This struck me because while Terrance tries to takes some cover under the rationale that dishonesty and obsession are an accepted part of car culture, a lot of Terrance’s behavior is actually antithetical to it. Steven put it this way: “As car lovers...part of the thing you have when you’re sitting there, visiting with somebody about their car, [is that] you share their joy with their car, and you share your joy with your car. And you just share back and forth and you learn from each other, and you just share each other’s joy. That’s why I always say there’s never a bad vehicle. If you like it, it’s a good vehicle.”
For Terrance, BMWs weren’t so much about joy or enthusiasm, but pure, unadulterated obsession and addiction. And now, he seems to regard cars as a sort of kryptonite; or how an alcoholic views a pint of beer.
Terrance’s pastor tells me how Terrance won’t attend activities that have to do with cars.
Steven tells me how “the pendulum” has totally swung in the other direction. And he confides in me that they can no longer talk about cars together.
Nowadays, Terrance not only attends services at church, he is counseled at church. He also attends Bible studies at church. He is also a “Stephen Minister” at his church, counseling others. But rather than simply stop at being a Stephen Minister, Terrance is completing the training to be a lead minister. And there’s more. He recently completed an exhaustive 25-week long financial training course, because he now wants to lead a financial seminar at his church.
So to say Terrance is now “active” in his church would be a little like saying Terrance “liked” BMWs. And that’s exactly what I got to wondering about as I spoke with Terrance and his pastor.
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I asked Pastor Bill Hanlin if it was possible that Terrance was doing the same thing with his faith that he had been doing with other earlier obsessions like bicycles, audio equipment, and BMWs. I can only assume the pastor did not enjoy this comparison. But he answered me.
“I think Terrance is Terrance,” he said. “That same passion, that same note for detail, that same make-it-happen is always going to be with him.”
I put the same question to Terrance. “To some degree, yes,” he said. “The difference is, with the stuff I’m doing at church, my focus is on other people. Not myself.”
Terrance says he currently owes close to $1 million in restitution, both civil and criminal, plus interest. It’s an amount that he may very well never be able to fully pay off. Byron Chrisman certainly doesn’t think so. “My personal belief is that he will never even pay the interest, let alone pay the principal back,” he told me. “It’s so much money. I can’t imagine he will ever make enough money.”
But his ultimate goal is to be reunited with his family. He now has two grandchildren, and he hopes badly that someday they will come to visit him at his apartment. But his son hardly speaks to him, and his daughter does not speak to him at all. Terrance still wears his wedding band. But from what his ex-wife has said to Terrance, she does not want to reconcile. Still, he’s hopeful.
If there’s any hope for a reconciliation, Terrance will have to surely show how much he’s changed. And that’s why I was so eager to ask him my last question: what is he driving now?. I expected him to tell me he wasn’t driving anything that he walked or took the bus everywhere. So I was surprised when he told me that he does have a car. And it’s a BMW. Not a 2002, but a station wagon, an older 5 Series.
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At first, he downplayed it. “That car sat at a friend’s house for the two and a half years I was in prison and at a halfway house. It was pristine when I put it away. But because it sat in a driveway, it’s weathered. The paint is peeling on it. It’s got door dings on it. It looks like it belongs in a junkyard.”
But I remembered the station wagon from back when we were neighbors. Wasn’t there something special about this station wagon, I asked him. Yes, he told me. “When it came out, it was the fastest station wagon in the world.”
We went outside and took a look at the car, and I snapped a few pictures on my phone. It did not look like a car that belonged in a junkyard.
We stood next to each other like we used to. Just two guys looking at a car. “I’ve held onto my mistress,” Terrance said.
He still had a BMW.
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David Obuchowski’s essays and features have appeared in The Awl, Gawker, Deadspin, and the Daily Beast. His short story “Field Guide For Roadside Memorials” was recently published by the Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal. He’s also the guitar player of Publicist UK (Relapse Records), guitar player and singer of Goes Cube (Old Flame Records/Greenway Records), and other projects.John Eblan is a master model maker. He’s so good, in fact, that he’s worked for ILM, creating vehicles seen in movies and television shows, and also for QMx – Quantum Mechanix – building high-quality collectible replicas and serving as the company’s chief model maker. His team’s latest piece for QMx is a stunning Enterprise Refit Artisan Replica that will be available starting today. Click HERE for more information about both the Enterprise Refit Artisan Replica of the TMP/Wrath of Khan/Search for Spock-era NCC-1701 and the NCC-1701-A variant from The Voyage Home, The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country, and read on for our exclusive interview with Eblan.
What was your mission when it came to building this Enterprise?
Eblan: I think, really, my job was to convey, in a three-foot replica, the spirit of the Enterprise, so that when a fan or collector sees the replica, when they have it, they feel that they have something that really embodies the Enterprise as a physical presence. I think that the filming miniatures in the shows and the movies have always played a strong role in the success of Star Trek. When the filming miniatures are seen on screen, people know that there’s something there taking up physical space, that it’s real, that it exists. So, when they see it, they’re seeing a character, and everyone has their own perception of what that character is and what it means to them. What we’re trying to do is, when they own they replica, we want them to have that same feeling. We want them to feel that the replica they’ve got is an accurate reproduction of what they see on screen.
The Enterprise is about as iconic as could be. Take us through the process of building a scale model as exacting as this one.
Eblan: It comes down to the colors and the details, which for us can be tricky because in some scenes of some of the movies, the colors are different from others. They reused the filming replica through the first couple of movies and then they had some subtle changes through the rest of the movies. So everyone has their own idea of what the Enterprise is supposed to look like. Two people in the same room can have different ideas of what certain colors are supposed to be. In this case, it was up to us to capture the essence on those colors, on the surfaces textures. One of the things that’s important in a scale-replica is to make it not look like a toy. Subtle things like dulling down some of the colors so that they’re not bright and glossy. Adding just a touch of weathering to certain areas of the ship. The ships are nice and pristine and kept in very good shape, obviously, but in order to convey the scale of a three-foot replica that’s supposed to represent a 1,000-foot ship, there are certain things that we’ve got to do that are very artistic, so to speak.
I mentioned dulling down the colors. We add to the paint what we call atmospheric haze, so that there’s no true black on the ship, no true blues, because if you look at black up close, it looks black, but if you look at a black car 100 feet away from you, it no longer looks black. It’s got more of a lighter tone to it. So it’s things like that that we have to do to give the model a sense of scale, so that what people see is, in every sense, a filming miniature. That’s what we’re trying to get to is that filming miniature.
How many people actually worked on this, and what were your responsibilities as chief model maker?
Eblan: My job as chief model maker here in the shop is to make sure that we’re producing an accurate replica. There’s a half-dozen of us here that work in the shop and we all play different roles in getting the replica from a pile of parts to a completed piece. We’ve got some very talented painters. We’ve got other folks who install the electronics on the ship, and they make sure all the electronics are properly installed for longevity purposes. As the chief here, I make sure everything is flowing smoothly, that we’re all on the same page, that whatever reference we have is the latest, most-up-to-date reference. And I am also a model maker. One of the things that I love about this is that I love building. I love constructing. I love taking a handful of parts, of pieces, and turning it into a completed piece. It’s a lot of fun. It’s also cathartic and rewarding.
You’re a hardcore Trek fan. What element of this did you most geek out about?
Eblan: Once we started putting the signage on, the 1701, that’s when she came to life. When we put the hull lettering on and it says U.S.S. Enterprise, it’s the completion of her. That’s when it goes from being a replica to being the Enterprise. Anything you’re working on, whatever it is, once you name something, it gives it life. People like to name their cars, their computers, all these inanimate objects, but once you name it, all of a sudden it’s something, it’s real. For me, once the numbers and the name went on, I thought, ‘There’s the Enterprise, right there.”
You have worked on models for movies and models for collectors. Which do you get the bigger rush from, knowing that millions of people see your work in a movie or on a TV show or that the person who bought a limited-edition model loves and cherishes his or her purchase?
Eblan: Honestly, it’s the collectible, and there are 1,000 reasons why. It’s fun to work on a film, to build a model, to see it on screen and to know that millions of people will see it. But that person’s vested interest is in the movie and all that it takes to make the movie: the actors, the dialogue, the models, the scenery, the direction, the cinematography, all of it. A movie is more than the sum of its parts. If you were to remove a model I made for that movie from the movie, it’d still be the same movie. It wouldn’t make that much difference unless you were talking about removing the Death Star from Star Wars. I didn’t work on the Death Star, but you get the idea. But when a person decides to purchase a replica, they’re taking a vested interest in that person’s art and making an investment in something they’re going to see, most likely, on a daily basis, and that they’re going to share with people.
I love hearing stories from clients about how they called their friends and said, “Come look at this Enterprise.” They’ll turn off the lights and turn on the Enterprise and it’ll be like, “Wow! That’s impressive.” And then they’ll show them the details. I’ve heard people tell these stories and I’ve heard the happiness in their voice as they spoke about moments they’ve had showing their ship to others. I love that. That’s why you do it. There’s pressure making something for someone, and when you get that phone call and you hear that giggle sound in their voice or you can tell how much they enjoy what you did for them, there’s not much that’s a lot more rewarding than that in this business, other than that person coming back and saying they want to buy another piece from you.
Last question. If you had your choice, what’s the next Star Trek vehicle you’d get to build for QMx?
Eblan: It’s probably less canon than most, but it’d be the NX-01 Refit that was recently posted out there by Doug Drexler. The NX-01 ship is beautiful. She’s all metal. She’s a joy to paint because she’s so metallic, with the brass and pewter and the bronze. To do the refit version of that, to add that next step, would be a lot of fun to work on, maybe for purchase, but even as a fan, as a model maker. That would be my ideal next Star Trek vehicle build, the NX-01 Refit.
This ship is available for pre-order starting today.Former Taylor's Furniture building. (BlackburnNews.com File Photo by Briana Carnegie)
New Market Coming To Downtown Sarnia
A welcome new development is coming to downtown Sarnia.
Local businessman Rob Fleischer and his wife hope to open the Sarnia Downtown Market in the former Taylor’s Furniture Store in the first part of July.
They’re looking for local farmers, food producers, craftspeople and artisans.
The building has been renovated with two roll-up garage doors to access Christina St.
“It’s a beautiful building located right in downtown Sarnia and we chose it because of the historical significance and the beauty of the building,” says Fleischer. “We were thinking of doing some things with this building but when we started looking at the market concept and spoke with a number of people downtown, they all said we need a mini grocery store style market downtown. So we thought, ‘why not design one that brings different vendors in to get this thing going?’, and we’ve had a super response so far.”
More local food suppliers, farmers, craftspeople and artists are still needed.
Fleischer says hours aren’t set in stone yet, but they’ll tentatively open Thursday and Friday afternoons and evenings and then part of the day Saturdays and Sundays, likely in the first week of July. You can contact sarniadowntownmarket@gmail.com if you are interested.Civilians escaping Hasakah after tensions intensified between Kurdish forces and pro-regime militias. Photo: ARA News
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Islamic State claims bomb attack that killed several Asayish police in Hasakah
Rojava hosts thousands of displaced Iraqi civilians as war on ISIS intensifies
Syrian Kurds accuse US officers of supporting Turkey’s attacks on the SDF
Kurdish President Barzani discussed airstrikes and Mosul operation with US coalition envoy
Syrian Kurds call for international support to deal with influx of Mosul refugees
Kurds reject Iraqi alcohol ban, say Baghdad should focus on real problems
ARA News
AMUDE – Hundreds of displaced people arrived in the Kurdish city of Amude escaping the ongoing clashes between Kurds and Syrian regime troops in Syria’s northeastern province of Hasakah.
After clashes erupted in the city of Hasakah this week between Kurdish forces and pro-regime militias, thousands of civilians fled the city looking for a safe haven.
Speaking to ARA News, the coordinator of UNHCR center in the city of Amude, Tarik Alsaid, said that nearly a thousand IDPs from Hasakah have arrived to Amude city, since the clashes broke out in the northern province.
“In response to the emergency humanitarian case, a relief committee has been formed by the UNHCR, the local council of Amude city and the Kurdish Red Crescent to receive the displaced people from Hasakah –most of whom were children and women,” he said.
Alsaid said that the UNCHR opened two shelter houses, but more could be opened if the fight continues between the Kurdish and regime forces.
Jeen Khalef, 17, a displaced citizen from Hasakah, told ARA News that they never wanted to leave their hometown. “But due to the increasing clashes and airstrikes, we were forced to escape, and leave to a safe place,” she said.
Neiyma Mohammed, 45, also displaced from Hasakah, said that fierce clashes erupted, with regime deploying snipers shooting civilians.
“There is no difference between the regime and ISIS, they both kill civilians,” she told ARA News. Thanks to the help of our friends [the People’s Protection Units], we were able to survive. Everthing is available for us in this shelter, and we feel as if we are home.”
Shaker Ibrahim, who works in the local administration’s office for humanitarian affairs in Amude, told ARA News that international organizations are providing food and support for the displaced.
“First we received the displaced families and set up tents in collaboration with the Amude municipality, then shelters have been opened,” he said.
“The administration has allocated huge budget for our office to provide basic supplies to the displaced people of Hasakah. Also, the local relief organization of Rojava provided support due to the increased number of the displaced,” Shaker added.
Reporting by: Jan Mohammed
Source: ARA NewsFigures show that one-in-six people aged 16 to 24 was considered “NEET” – not in education, employment or training – in the first three months of the year.
According to the Department for Education, some 954,000 people in the age group now fall into the category – up by three per cent compared with the first quarter of 2011.
The figure is a record high for this point in the year and a 15 per cent increase on the total five years ago.
The disclosure represents a new blow to the economy and suggests school and university leavers are still being hit hard by the shortage of public and private sector jobs in the recession.
It comes on the day that figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that the British economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2012 – more than originally forecast.
Today, a spokesman for the DfE admitted that the number of NEETs had been “too high for too long”.
But he claimed that the Government was taking action by investing almost £1bn in the Youth Contract scheme – incentive payments to encourage companies to employ young people – alongside an increase in the number of apprenticeships.
“We are driving up standards right across the schools system to bring the numbers down,” he said. “We are also overhauling vocational education, so all employers can be confident about the skills of our young people and the rigour of our qualifications."
Today's statistics showed that 954,000 young people – almost 16 per cent – were classed as NEET in the first three months of the year, compared with 958,000 in the final quarter of 2011.
But the figure was up from 925,000 in the same quarter of 2011 and represents a record high for the first three months of the year. In 2007, 829,000 people in the age group had effectively nothing to do.
Figures show that the jobless rate is highest among 19- to 24-year-olds – including those out of sixth-form college but without a university place – where 18.5 per cent are classed as Neet.
Labour described the figures as "very worrying", accusing ministers of "kicking away the ladders for the next generation".
Karen Buck, shadow education minister, said: “The Tory-led Government’s cuts in education are the biggest since the 1950s.
"Its economic strategy, which has resulted in a double dip recession made in Downing Street, is hurting and not working. It is families that are paying the price with incomes being squeezed and long-term unemployment at a 16-year high.
"By cutting too far and too fast, it’s clear that this Government believes today’s levels of youth unemployment are a price worth paying for its out of touch policies.”San Antonio celebrity Spurs Jesus brings suspected Southtown burglar to justice
Jose Medina, 19, faces a charge of burglary of a habitation. Jose Medina, 19, faces a charge of burglary of a habitation. Photo: Bexar County Sheriff's Office Photo: Bexar County Sheriff's Office Image 1 of / 88 Caption Close San Antonio celebrity Spurs Jesus brings suspected Southtown burglar to justice 1 / 88 Back to Gallery
SAN ANTONIO — A man suspected of trying to break into a home in Southtown probably never imagined a brush with divinity would be what landed him in jail.
A San Antonio resident known commonly to the South Texas masses as Spurs Jesus was doing laundry inside his home around 3:20 p.m. when he heard a noise coming from a second floor window, according to a San Antonio Police Department report.
The Spurs home-game fixture, who dresses up like Jesus Christ to root for the Silver and Black, was already on edge that day due to an incident the week before in which a stranger walked into to his bedroom while his girlfriend was lying in bed.
“She ran into the bathroom in a panic and asked if anyone should be in the house,” he said.
The local celebrity ran outside to see if he could find the intruder, but there was no one in sight.
“All weekend long we had been concerned and on-edge about it,” he said.
RELATED: 10 things Spurs Jesus is thankful for
So, on Monday, when the Spurs super fan heard suspicious sounds in his house, he tracked them to an upstairs window and threw open blinds.
“There was somebody by the window on the second story of our house with their fingers under the window pane,” he said.
The document said the suspect, identified as Jose Roberto Medina, 19, was surprised and took off toward the River Walk.
Spurs Jesus gave chase and pushed Medina to the ground, but he managed to jump into the river and swim across to get away.
Once he had made it to the other side, however, he realized that his bike was back with his pursuer.
“He yells at me across the river, ‘I need my bike back sir,’ he said. “Obviously, in a very adrenaline-filled way, I basically said come and get it.”
RELATED: Spurs Jesus calls on Facebook to ressurect his page
He said the man decided to cross a bridge on the river, apparently thinking that his victim was going to return the bike.
“The whole time I’m on the phone with police as he is walking toward me. I told 911 he was standing right there, and I would hold him down until they arrived.”
When the suspect heard that, he took off again, sparking yet another brief chase that ended abruptly when he was tackled.
RELATED: Spurs Jesus greets the masses at the Denver game
While on the ground, a second suspect ran up to the pair and tried to grab Medina’s backpack, which he had tried to throw into the river during the chase, according to the report.
Medina managed to shake free from Spurs Jesus' grip as he tried to call police again, but just as he did, officers arrived at the scene.
The report said Medina jumped into the river again and tried to hide in tall grass when police arrived, but officers were able to track him down and take him into custody.
Medina is currently being held at the Bexar County Jail. He faces a charge of burglary of a habitation.
mdwilson@express-news.net
Twitter: @MDWilsonSAThis is a freelance / remote role ideally suited to an individual developer
Flow XO is a platform that allows users with no technical experience to build sales and marketing workflows on top of their existing cloud applications. You can get a good idea of how Flow XO works by signing into the service, and by reviewing some of our YouTube videos.
Your time will be spent working on integration of our product with other cloud based apps, using our purpose built SDK. Specifically, you will be assigned a service - such as Trello, MailCimp or Insightly (These services are already completed) - and will be expected to build a node.js module for that service with the SDK.
You'll be building in a constant stream of individual services. That means you'll have a specific cut off for each engagement - regular pay on completion of a milestone - which is delivery of a module.
You should take a look at the Flow XO SDK readme here.
An example of the work required can then required can be seen here - This gives an example of building some Trello methods as a node.js module through the SDK.
From your investigations, you'll realise that your work is a vital part of our app - without the services you develop, we'll have no product! You'll have a central role and lead from the front.
We know you'll need flexibility - our concern is that you deliver on the specification. Your work pattern is up to you. We want to work on the basis of trust.
You might have a full time role, and you want to complement that with some out-of-hours work - we look forward to seeing what you can bring to the team.Matt Krol speaks to protestors and citizens about the Flint Water Crisis on Sunday at Flint City Hall in Flint, Mich. Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
As the crisis over the water in Flint, Michigan, rolls on, we’re learning more and more about the irresponsibility and callousness of officials and politicians in charge.
The mix of austerity politics, environmental racism and sheer ineptitude makes for a shocking brew, yet the physical conditions that have made it literally toxic for Flint residents are neither as exceptional nor as recent as much of the media coverage suggests.
Long before that fateful decision two years ago to turn to the Flint River for the city’s drinking water, pipes made of lead had threaded throughout the city’s underbelly. Flint shares this historical legacy with thousands of other cities, suburbs and towns across our country, and most likely this is not the first time, even in Flint, that these pipes have conveyed tiny amounts of the toxin into homes and children.
Over the past few decades, our environmental laws and agencies have met with much success in curbing some of Americans’ exposure to lead, a damaging neurotoxin. Yet they have struggled to contain this continuing danger precisely because it is literally built into our water systems.
Given that lead has been known as a poison for centuries, why did our forebears in the 19th and early 20th centuries rely on it to carry so vital a fare as drinking water? The answer to this question explains why there are many more Flints waiting to happen.
Lesser Evil
Doctors offered virtually no resistance to this decision. After all, they themselves were turning to lead to treat diarrhea or trigger abortions. They recognized only those symptoms of lead poisoning that by today’s standards seem extreme: the severe stomach aches, muscle weakness, kidney failure, seizures and even death that can ensue when lead in the blood rises past 60 micrograms per deciliter – 12 times the current standard.
While lead pipes did occasionally produce “epidemics” this dramatic, health officials remained far more worried about diseases like typhoid, which they knew piped-in water could prevent. As a result, as much as half of the water pipes laid in America’s burgeoning metropolitan areas during the early 20th century were made of lead.
It is also worth noting that lead pipe made up a relatively minor portion of the burgeoning flow of this toxic metal into early 20th-century factories, homes (through paint pigments) and automobiles (through leaded gasoline).
Spurring it along, the lead industry grew rich and powerful. In the time before the advent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it sponsored its own health research. Some investigators even advanced a thesis that levels of lead in the blood and environment that, in retrospect, seem quite high, were “normal,” a not-so-worrisome condition of modern life.
In fact, the health and behavioral effects of lead from the early to the mid-20th century, as suggested by recent extrapolations from our current knowledge, were likely enormous. It’s estimated leaded pipe alone increased infant mortality by as much as 30 percent in some cities, and led to as much as a 25 percent rise in homicides.
Federal Laws
As investigators of lead’s effects gained greater funding and independence and honed their methods, our understanding of its subtler and longer-term effects grew.
Research on children has shown behavioral disorders, learning difficulties and lowered IQ’s turning up at blood and environmental levels far below what was earlier thought safe. Over the past 30 years, the CDC’s recommended blood levels for lead in the young have dropped precipitously, with no level now acknowledged as really safe.
With greater knowledge of lead’s damaging effects, a concerted campaign against lead started in the 1970s. A ban on its usage in paint in 1978 and a phase-out from gasoline into the 1980s have had considerable impacts.
A 1974 law to control lead in drinking water had less success, however, because it focused on what got pumped into pipes rather than what showed up in people’s faucets.
After an EPA study in 1986 showed one in five of the nation’s drinking water systems carried more lead than considered safe, Congress passed a new Clean Water Drinking Act the same year. This law is still the basis for our current efforts to control the lead that can leach from our water pipes.
Michigan Republican politicians, including Governor Rick Synder, have borne much blame for the Flint crisis – and some of them continue to invite more. But their party was instrumental in the genesis of this act.
It was Ronald Reagan who signed the bill that finally banned the use of leaded pipe and high-lead soldering. And it was George H. W. Bush’s EPA that implemented it, through a 1991 Lead and Copper Rule that required “high-risk residences” to be monitored, with further measures if 10 percent of households exceeded unsafe lead levels of 15 parts per billion (ppb) in their tap water.
Dropping Anti-Leaching Agents
The lead poisoning in Flint recalls a similar water emergency from the early 2000s in Washington, D.C. that highlights the risks of relying on anti-leaching chemicals.
That crisis began in 2001 when the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (WASA) rather suddenly discovered lead levels in its testing that exceeded EPA’s action level.
The fact was, however, that by 2003 the dimensions of the crisis had become unmistakable. Nearly two-thirds of the water sampled (in “high-risk” homes) exceeded the action level – this in a water system of a half million customers, far bigger than Flint’s.
As with Flint, reports from some homes ranged much higher, upwards of thousands of parts of lead per billion, surpassing levels in wastes deemed officially “hazardous.”
In Washington, D.C., as in Flint, excess lead in faucets owed much to a decision to abandon anti-leaching agents, in this case by the Army Corps of Engineers, whose aqueduct furnished the water for WASA. Cost was part of their rationale, but apparently less so than in Flint; they and the EPA officials who vetted their decision were more worried about high levels of bacteria. What then drew out the lead from existing pipes was a new set of disinfectants also applied by the Army Corps, called chloramines, which had a powerful leaching effect on the lead in the system’s old pipes and joints.
Spotty Monitoring
In Washington, an early CDC study failed to find any link between leaded water and blood leads. It was only after the crisis was over that a congressional investigation found the agency to have withheld some critical results. A further study connected D.C.’s water crisis to higher rates of miscarriages and fetal deaths.
In Flint, by contrast, a peer-reviewed study published just last year in the American Journal of Public Health has demonstrated a clear and unequivocal connection between lead levels in the water and those in people’s blood.
What both these experiences make clear is just how risky it has become to rely on monitoring that remains spotty and on chemical treatments, which can be easily abandoned.
We’d now do well to consider the ultimate cause of this type of lead poisoning: the built-in legacy of America’s last leaded century, those old, ever-dangerous conduits by which so many of us still get our drinking water.
Currently, their replacement happens only sporadically, in the wake of crises, if then.
From 2003, the Washington, D.C., government has spent millions digging out and replacing its toxic piping. The mayor of Flint has called for a similar project there, yet so far, promises of support have failed to materialize.
An estimated three to six million miles of lead pipes across our country still carry water, and most all of them are vulnerable to similar dangers, whether at the hands of short-sighted and prejudicial bureaucrats or politicians whose ideology or opportunism leads them to blithely dismiss well-established science.
The best solution would be to replace our lead lines systematically and proactively, not just one crisis-beset city at a time. Until we do so, it’s a safe bet that more Flints lie on our horizon.
This article was written by Chris Sellers, professor of history, Stony Brook University, for The Conversation. It has been republished here with permission.The world's major greenhouse gas emitters have agreed on a roadmap that - if followed - would lead to a global pact to tackle climate change with "legal force" by 2015.
Reached after a bruising 14-day conference in the South African city of Durban, it is the first time China, the US and India have said they were prepared to make commitments to combat global warming under a single legal agreement.
The deal was struck nearly 36 hours after conference was scheduled to finish amid concerns it could collapse without a deal on whether work should start on a legal treaty.
If reached, the legal deal would not start until 2020.
Australia and other delegates at the conference welcomed the agreement as a breakthrough, but environmentalists warned it would do little to slow emissions in the short-term and left the world on a path to potentially dangerous effects of climate change.Earth is pretty insignificant. Though once thought to occupy the hallowed center of our universe, researchers now know our planet is just one of billions upon billions out there. But it gets worse. A new study strengthens the notion that our home galaxy is breathtakingly remote in the universe. As Ethan Siegel reports for Forbes, we are likely floating within a cosmic void that spans roughly one billion light years across.
The idea that we live in the “celestial boondocks” was first proposed in 2013 when University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer Amy Barger and her then-student Ryan Keenan found that the density of the nearby universe is lower than other parts of the universe. As Siegel explains, when examined on the grandest scale, the density of the universe—all the galaxies, gas clouds and other space stuff—is pretty uniform. But if you zoom in on smaller and small sections of space, it is organized more like cosmic Swiss cheese, with matter pulled into dense filaments full of galaxies. Between these filaments are large voids which are not completely empty, but are much less densly packed. The giant cheese-hole that we may live in is called the KBC Void, named for Keenan, Barger and astronomer Lennox Cowie.
The new research, presented last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society by Barger’s student Ben Hoscheit, strengthens the evidence that we live in a big old hole. Hoscheit tells Smithsonian.com that to test this cheesy idea, he looked at the tension between two measurements of something called the Hubble Constant, which describes the rate at which the universe is expanding.
As a physical constant, the number should be same throughout the universe. But when astronomers measure it by looking at the movement of type 1A supernovas—or exploding stars—relatively close to Earth they get one number, known as a “local” measurement. Whereas when they measure the constant using the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, a leftover from the Big Bang that pervades the universe, they get another result, known as the “cosmic” measurement.
Hoscheit says that the study, which he is currently preparing for publication, suggests that living in a giant void resolves the difference between the local and cosmic measurement. “The constant is higher using the supernova method,” he says. “This is in accordance with how we would expect a void to effect the Hubble Constant. Gravity from higher density areas is pulling things out of the void at a faster rate than we would otherwise expect.”
Siegal explains that if we were located into a more metropolitan area of the universe, say along one of the filaments, the apparent expansion of the universe might look slower since higher amounts of gravity would effect how quickly local objects move.
This study was a kind of quick check to ensure the void concept made sense with what we already know. “We |
playmaker than what Travis Wilson showed over his four-year career.
Defense will keep the Utes in every game and give Utah a realistic shot at another 10-win campaign. If the offense can evolve into an above average unit, Utah will be a nightmare for opponents all season.
Related: 5 Reasons Why Utah can be a Dark Horse Pac-12 Contender in 2016
Steven Lassan (@AthlonSteven)
Utah is coming off its best season since joining the Pac-12 and is a dark-horse contender to watch in the South Division this year. The Utes will use a familiar formula to push USC and UCLA, as a strong defense and ground game should carry this team to eight or nine wins. However, making the next step from third place in the South to claiming a spot in the conference championship game depends on the development of the passing game. Junior college transfer Troy Williams could provide a spark, but the receiving corps needs a few playmakers to emerge. A few road trips – at California and Colorado – could be tricky for this team.
Bryan Fischer (@BryanDFischer)
Last year's impressive 10-win campaign seemed like a breakthrough in Salt Lake City but it will be interesting to see if Kyle Whittingham and company can keep the momentum going in 2016. They lost a ton of key pieces but I wouldn't underrate the Utes at all however. The defense will continue to be salty and, while there should be some regression on offense, I don't expect a huge step back. The schedule should allow for a start that moves them into the Top 25 but it's how the team finishes late in the year that will ultimately determine how successful this season will be.
Related: Pac-12 Not Focused on Missing College Football Playoff
Kyle Kensing (@kensing45)
Utah's ascent in recent years speaks to the power of patience, and trusting in a plan. Though the Utes hit eight wins in 2011, their Pac-12 debut can be attributed more to the dismal state of the South division than an immediate preparedness for their new-found Power Five status. Hence, two losing seasons in 2012 and ‘13.
But with nine wins in 2014 and 10 a season ago, Kyle Whittingham has overseen a successful transition from the Mountain West to Pac-12, leaving only a divisional then conference title as the final benchmarks for the program to reach. Impressively, Utah's done so without compromising its vision of being a stout defensive team, building around that instead of offense.
That defense will carry the Utes into contention for the South once again. How well the offense fares after losing a four-year starting quarterback (Travis Wilson) and a one-time Heisman-contending running back (Devontae Booker) determines whether Utah has a close-but-not-quite finish like 2015, or reaches a new frontier in the program's growth.
Related: Top 12 Pac-12 Non-Conference Games of 2016
Josh Webb (@FightOnTwist)
Utah is one of the trickiest teams in the nation to predict. It’s really hard to gauge last year’s opening win over Michigan because it was so early in the season and the Wolverines went on to handle their business in an impressive way, while the Utes sort of tailed off after the beatdown in Los Angeles. But do not discount the fact that they obliterated Oregon in Autzen Stadium like nobody has before in many years, beating the Ducks by 42 in their own house. Head coach Kyle Whittingham should expect a healthy mix of good and bad this year, too.
This season presents new challenges for the Utes, but there are plenty of winnable games on their schedule. Unfortunately for Utah, there are some tough games early and USC should get the best of the Utes at the end of September, but the first week of October sets up nicely for an emotional letdown at Cal, which has gotten much better on defense (in theory). UCLA beat Utah last year and QB Josh Rosen will only be better in his sophomore season. And you know Oregon will have Utah circled from the first kick of the season. If the Ducks do nothing else, they’ll avenge that loss to the Utes when they visit Rice-Eccles Stadium in late November.
Related: Ranking the Toughest Games on USC's College Football Schedule in 2016CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Indians in a show of support for Mike Aviles and his daughter are shaving their heads.
"It's a team thing," said second baseman Jason Kipnis. "It started with Mike's daughter because of what she's going through. Unfortunately, she's going to be losing her hair soon from chemotherapy and we all wanted to join in."
Four-year-old Adriana Aviles was diagnosed with leukemia earlier this month. She is being treated at Cleveland Clinic. Aviles has three daughters, Adriana, her twin sister Maiya and Kyla.
"It started with a couple of guys and has spread throughout the whole clubhouse," said Kipnis.
Members of the coaching staff have joined in as well.
After his daughter was diagnosed, Aviles missed eight games from May 8 through May 17. The Indians placed him on the Family Medical Emergency list and then moved him to the restricted list.
He rejoined the Indians on May 18.
"Mike is one of the best clubhouse guys there is in this entire league," said Kipnis. "He's been a great person and a great teammate. I think all the guys have done a good job of stepping up to make him feel welcomed and back at home and that nothing has changed.
"Numerous guys have told him that if he needs anything at anytime that they'll be there for him. I think baseball has been a good distraction for him."
Aviles is hitting.368 (7-for-17) with a home run and two RBI since rejoining the team. When he has talked to reporters, it has been with the understanding that he wouldn't talk about his daughter.
"I think it's good for him to be back because he's definitely been producing and contributing," said Kipnis.The energy storage market is one of the most exciting and fastest growing new industries in the utility space right now. The market grew by several hundred percent last year, and it looks likely that it will grow by a similar amount again this year.
Still, this is a market in its infancy and many market participants are still figuring out the economics. Those economics are set to get a boost thanks to an energy storage tax bill that is making its way through the U.S. Congress right now.
The bill in question is co-sponsored by Democrat Martin Heinrich from New Mexico and 8 other members of congress including Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican. Under the bill, energy storage would get the same set of tax incentives that have helped to fuel the meteoric rise of clean energy sources like solar power. That means that Lithium Ion batteries for instance would be eligible for tax incentives when used in utility grid connections at residences and businesses. Flywheels, compressed air, pump hydro, and other storage solutions would also get a tax credit.
The bill could change of course, but at present it looks like a 30 percent tax credit would be applied to energy storage provided that the storage levels meet certain thresholds. In particular, residential batteries would need to have at least 3 kwh of capacity, while commercial storage would need to have at least 5 kwh of capacity. Related: ‘’The Worst Is Behind Us’’ Schlumberger CEO Sees Reason For Optimism
It is very difficult to predict what bills Congress will choose to act on, but the current bill is particularly interesting because of the existing tax credits for energy storage. At present, energy storage does qualify for a 30 percent tax credit, but that credit is subject to the IRS’ typical set of arcane regulations. In particular, the storage only qualifies for the credit if at least 75 percent of the power comes from clean energy sources rather than from the grid. Also, the storage credit is limited by the percentage of renewable input. If 90 percent of the storage charging energy is derived from solar panels, then the storage is only eligible for only 90 percent of the ITC. In other words, to get the energy storage credit, companies and individuals have to keep insane amounts of records and documentation related to their equipment and how it is used. Of course, that’s a pretty good descriptor for many of the IRS’ rules.
The current bill would greatly simplify an otherwise byzantine rule that is very difficult to follow and actually does little to promote the development of the energy storage market or on a related basis, clean energy. As a result, Congress should look at the new bill as an opportunity to clean up an existing IRS morass rather than seeing the bill as creating a new set of tax incentives. From that perspective, the bill should be much more politically palpable on both sides of the aisle.
Investors should keep an eye on the outcome of this bill – if it does pass that would be a significant boost for many of the new tech companies in the energy space. Tesla in particular would benefit significantly thanks in large part to both its energy storage business and the exposure it is taking on in the solar market through the acquisition of SolarCity.
By Michael McDonald of Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:Going by Samsung’s usual launch schedule, the Galaxy Note 5 would be less than two months away from getting an official announcement at this point of time. Going by recent rumors, however, the time before the Note 5 is unveiled would be even shorter. Well, it looks like the latter is what we will have to believe in, as our insiders have revealed today the the Galaxy Note 5 will be announced on August 12, and go on sale around two weeks later on August 21.
We have also learned that the Galaxy S6 edge Plus will be launched as the Galaxy S6 edge+, and will be announced alongside the Note 5 on the same date (Update: it will also go on sale on August 21.) Samsung’s plan to launch two big handsets at the same time (and risking one device eating into the sales of the other) was leaked by a report out of the Korean press a few hours ago, and we can confirm that it is indeed what the company intends to do. The two devices will also be accompanied by the official launch of Samsung Pay, at least for the US market.
Now, let’s move on to a few details of the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+. First, Samsung’s next phablet flagship. Let’s get one of the most important aspects of the phone out of the way: The Note 5 will not have a microSD slot, something we had guessed would be the case earlier this month. In terms of design, the phone will basically be a blown-up version of the Galaxy S6. But like the Galaxy A8, the Note 5 will have extremely thin screen bezel, a design change that might come in handy in terms of ergonomics keeping in consideration the new metal and glass design that the Note 5 is expected to feature.
The S Pen will also be seeing a few design changes. According to the information we’ve received, the stylus will look more like a pen this time around (and apparently feel like one, too) and will have the same color as the color of the device. Speaking of colors, the Galaxy Note 5 will be offered in silver, gold, black and white options; these are the same options we’ve seen on the Note 4, though the glass construction on the Note 5 is sure to make these same-old colors look considerably better.
When it comes to the Galaxy S6 edge+, there’s really not much to tell. The device will be a phablet version of the Galaxy S6 edge, with a curve on either side of the screen and the same color options as the Note 5. We can, however, confirm that the S6 edge+ will be powered by the Exynos 7420 instead of a Snapdragon 808, and have 3GB of RAM. Oh, and as we said yesterday, the Note 5 will certainly become the first Samsung phone to feature 4GB of RAM. We’re guessing storage options would be the same as the Galaxy S6 lineup, though it would be great if Samsung would make the 64GB variant the base model to make up for the lack of expandable storage.
Provided all the information we have been given turns out to be correct, Samsung’s next UNPACKED event could be one of its biggest yet, if only because of the number of things it will announce on a single day. The August launch seems too early to be true, but with numerous rumors pointing at Samsung moving faster with the Galaxy Note 5, it certainly looks like we will be hearing everything from the horse’s mouth in under a month from now.I’m from Green Bay; my high school colors were green & gold and I am part owner of the Green Bay Packers from when they sold stock after the 1997 Super Bowl victory. So, it took quite a bit to get me to boycott the NFL, but they managed it. Until the owners require their players to stand for the national anthem, or sit for the game, I won’t watch a minute, and I’m not alone.
Since Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the anthem in a misguided protest against police violence, the NFL has been hemorrhaging fans. Both TV viewership and attendance at stadiums are well down and once people find other ways to spend their Sundays, they may not come back.
Let there be no doubt, the NFL is a business and the owners of those billion dollar plus franchises have a problem. A bunch of their players want to play social justice games, but their core audience, the folks who pay the bills, just want them to play football. And we really don’t like the disrespect shown to the anthem, the flag and those who fought for our country including those who came home in coffins with that flag draped over them.
This Veterans Day weekend there was quite a duality. The NFL went whole hog saluting the military and trying to mend fences. Historically the league, and most of the players, have been very supportive of the military. Part of that was the tens of millions of tax dollars the military paid them to put on displays with the flag and flyovers for the recruiting value, but there was also a genuine bond for the most part.
But at the same time there was a push to boycott the NFL. I did my part on social media:
Like many others, seeing a bunch of pampered millionaires stealing the moment when we should all come together in thanks for the freedoms we enjoy, and yes for those who safeguard them, well that just flat pisses me off.
They say the protests are not against the anthem or the flag or the military for that matter. But that is garbage because the effect is to disrespect all of those things so they can virtue signal their solidarity with the radical left. They could do their social justice pandering whenever they want, and they made a conscious choice. By choosing to put the spotlight on themselves instead of the symbols of what makes this country great.
That just doesn’t sit well with those of us who served, or have family who did or who just want to enjoy a football game without politics. We get plenty of bitter arguments and displays of partisanship all day every day. Football was a time to forget all that and just remember how much the Bears still suck. They took that and even worse did so with divisive anti-police grievance mongering to a crowd with a heavy component of Blue Lives Matters sentiment.
We will see if the NFL charm offensive worked, although the pictures of half empty stadiums should sure give the owners cause to worry. It’s pretty simple to fix, tell the players to stand up for America or the rest of us may sit out…permanently.The Tsawwassen First Nation has rejected plans to build an LNG export facility just north of the B.C. Ferries terminal.
In a vote on Wednesday night, 53 per cent said 'no' to allowing the 32-hectare project on the nation's traditional land.
"What would you rather have, more money or a better environment?" asked Tsawwassen First Nation member Nick Gurniak. "No need to do more damage to the environment than has already been done."
The proposed LNG facility has been a contentious issue for the 430 band members, 139 of which cast a ballot.
Tsawwassen First Nation member Nick Gurniak says he voted against the LNG project because the environment is more important to him than money. (CBC)
It was expected to produce between three million and five million metric tonnes of LNG per year, and would have resulted in four to five LNG tankers travelling from the facility per month.
The proposed Tsawwassen facility would have consisted of storage tanks, liquefaction units, and a power substation. A pipeline to the marine terminal at nearby Robert Banks would also have to be built.
The project promised 1,000 jobs during the construction phase, and 50 to 100 permanent, well-paying jobs during operations, according to proponents.Fresh off of a first place finish after beating ENCE last night 2-0 in the grand final of ESEA Premier, MK's hottest asset Kamen "bubble" Kostadinov talked to us about his personal performance, the team's struggles, as well as some of the Bulgarians' hopes for the future.
bubble stepped up his game in the first half of 2016
MK's first LAN of the season will come on the 27th of August, when the Bulgarian side will take part in ESEA's Global Challenge LAN, a tournament where they will be amongst the top favored teams to take the trophy home.
First of all, I wanted to congratulate you on your steady progress as a player since being considered MVP at the first Minor in Bucharest (despite being on the losing team!) Your stats have skyrocketed since the last quarter of 2015 until now, to such a point where you are now the top rated player on MK above dream3r. Could you talk a little bit about how your game has improved in that time?
Hello and thanks for the congratz!
I did an experiment with myself. So as you know I love to go to the gym, and one day I said to myself: "okay let's try something different." During the beginning of 2016 I stopped going to the gym and I focused 100% on the game, because sometimes I felt exhausted and didn’t have the energy to be 100% focused. After about six months without going to the gym and playing better than I ever have, I found a regimen to feel confident in the gym and in the game, and now I’m doing these two things I love to do!
MK were around the 20th spot for a long time during the E-Frag.net times, but you guys fell out in May of this year and haven’t been able to jump back in. Why do you think that is?
The game has been out three years now, and everyone is stepping up a lot more than before. We were in really bad shape for a while, which is why we fell off the top 20 list, but we're much more motivated to rise as a team now, because it's harder. Everyone in the top 30 can beat each other.
Do you think coming from a region that doesn’t have so much Counter Strike tradition, your team has had a harder path than others?
When I decided to play at a high level, I gave up a lot in my personal life, but I also gained a lot.
It's hard in Bulgaria because we're in our little and poor country (which is full of haters) and it's really hard to get opportunities, which ends up taking a toll mentally. We started from nothing and won the qualifier to ESWC 2014, which is what gave us the motivation to rise up the ranks as a team and reach a higher level.
It has been unveiled that the next Major won’t be until next year. How do you feel about your chances in the next Minor?
First of all, I hope one day someone will check the case of dream3r's VAC ban, because he is innocent. Then we will qualify for a Major, I’m 100% sure. Everyone knows it’s hard to play with a stand-in. As far as our chances in the Minor, they are no smaller than before.
And if you do make it past the Minor, how do you feel about the insane amount of talent in the next Major’s qualifier (including NiP, fnatic, G2, etc.)?
As i said above in the top30 everyone can beat everyone. We believe in that, and if we play our game we can beat whoever comes in our way.
After E-Frag.net, you played in Orbit, but not for long. You haven’t been able to find a steady organization to play for since. How come? Are you still waiting for offers to come or will you have a home soon?
We already have had some really good offers but we are not in a rush to take the first offer we recieve, we already made that mistake a few times and we're really looking forward to finding a stable and known organisation which we can trust, work together without any problems, and benefit from each other. We are still open for any offers so anyone who is interested in me and my teammates can contact us via email at: nkrustev93@gmail.com / mdavid@gorgn.com / Kameneto91@gmail.com
This is the question that comes around every time, but… do you think you have real chances playing with dream3r? It doesn’t seem as though his ban will be lifted any time soon, and having to play with different rosters in different tournaments must no doubt be detrimental for you. Have you thought of playing with a different lineup?
If I’m not mistaken Virtus.pro and us are the only two teams which haven't made changes in the past two years. We feel stable with this lineup. We have our five, and if one of them missing it won’t be the same team. We believe dream3r's VAC ban can be removed as long as Valve don't say it's permanent. dream3r is irreplaceable, he is the young talent in the team. It’s harder to play with a stand-in, but for now this is how we work.
Have you ever thought that you might have a better chance reaching a higher level of play in a different team, possibly in North America or another European team?
It crossed my mind, but I believe in MK and that we can achieve everything. That’s why I’m still in.
How important for you is it to play in MK with the same group of guys you have played with for so long? Have you received any offers from other teams?
We have a different play style and I love it. We are not just colleagues, and what could be better than this to play the game you love with your friends? Plus our friendship helps the team a lot. And Yes, I have had offers from other teams, but never accepted.
Valve dropped a bomb today, not allowing coaches to speak to their players during gameplay. As far as I know, you guys have never had a coach, but what are your thoughts on the changes?
Well we have spyleadeR, he is a mega mind which is why we don’t need a coach :D. I do feel sorry for the teams in which the coach is the in-game leader. My personal opinion is that this rule is wrong.
MK is a team known to put in massive amounts of hours into the game. However, it seems you can never quite make that extra push to reach the next level. What do you think you need in order to compete on that next level?
To reach the next level I think we have to fix little things in the team and dream3r's VAC issue.
Does everybody on MK live off of CS, or do you guys need other jobs?
Everyone in the team lives of CS:GO. None of us are deprived of anything.
You guys just won ESEA Premier very convincingly, and had qualified for the ESEA Global Challenge. What are your goals for the end of 2016?
ESEA Global Challenge LAN Finals start on August 27th, where we will do our best to win! Second is to qualify for ESWC, where dream3r can play. We are focused on the tournaments we can play with our full roster.
Anything else you would like to add?
I would like to thank our fans for supporting us in our bad and good days.
We have big plans and goals for the team in the future. We want to reach top10, and for that we must stick together as a team. And now there are circumstances that violated the integrity of the team. dream3r is a young promising player, which he proved and it would be unfortunate that this great game would lose this player's shine. When the VAC ban gets removed, the dream will come true.Introduction by James McAllister, Williams College Dale Copeland’s Economic Interdependence and War is an ambitious book that should receive close attention from both international-relations theorists and diplomatic historians. The author’s main objective is to offer an alternative explanation of the relationship between commerce and international conflict, one that challenges both liberal and realist theories. In his view, liberals are correct to believe that increasing trade and investment flows can enhance the prospects for peace, but realists also have solid grounds for believing that increased economic interdependence can lead to conflict and war. It is because both theories are plausible, Copeland argues, that it is necessary to consider an additional variable that he defines as “a state’s expectations of the future trade and investment environment” (2). When states have positive expectations about the future trade and investment environment, they are unlikely to resort to war. But if a state has negative expectations about the future, it is going to be more willing to consider war as an attractive policy option. It is this argument that Copeland tests against the historical evidence of great-power conflict from 1790-1991 and also applies to the future of U.S.-Chinese relations in the twenty-first century. All the reviewers have some degree of praise for Economic Interdependence and War. Richard Maass argues that the book “is a landmark example of how diplomatic history and statistical findings can be productively married in the pursuit of a persuasive answer to an important question.” Benjamin Fordham suggests that Copeland “advances the sensible argument that state leaders worry about future access to vital markets, and that their efforts to insure this access can lead them into conflict with other states.” Patrick Shea emphasizes the methodological contributions the book offers to the field; in his view Copeland “provides a methodological bridge between those who favor a statistical approach and those who use case-driven approaches…his forty case study, medium- N approach is a methodological achievement.” To be sure, it is also true that all the reviewers have some important criticisms and concerns about various aspects of Copeland’s argument. Shea is concerned that Copeland does not really answer the all-important question of how far states look into the future when making decisions related to war and peace. Maass identifies a variety of issues that he has with Copeland’s theoretical chapters, which he suggests “overemphasize several factors that ultimately leave them less satisfying than they should be.” Fordham, by far the most critical of the reviewers, argues that Copeland’s “ambitious theoretical and methodological claims make for arresting reading, but they are not persuasive.” In his detailed response, Copeland responds to these and other criticisms while also noting important areas of agreement among the contributors to the roundtable. H-Diplo/ISSF thanks Professor Copeland and all the reviewers for contributing to a roundtable that will be of great interest to both international relations theorists and historians. Participants Dale C. Copeland is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Origins of Major War (Cornell University Press, 2000) and numerous articles on international relations theory and security affairs. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Commerce, War, and American Foreign Policy, 1790 to the Present Era. Benjamin O. Fordham is Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY). He is the author of Building the Cold War Consensus (University of Michigan Press, 1998), as well as articles on foreign policy and international political economy in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Journal of Politics. Richard W. Maass is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Evansville, where he is working on his first book manuscript, “Annexation: Domestic Constraints on International Ambition and the U.S. Rise to Power.” He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2013, and has published research in Diplomatic History, International Security, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Historical Methods. Patrick Shea is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. His research focuses on the political economy of conflict processes. His previous work has appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and International Studies Quarterly.
Review by Benjamin O. Fordham, Binghamton University International trade and investment have always been important issues in international politics. The end of Cold War ideological conflict and the rise of contemporary globalization have arguably increased scholarly interest in untangling the complicated relationship between economic interaction and political-military conflict. Dale Copeland’s ambitious new book contributes to this effort. Economic Interdependence and War advances the sensible argument that state leaders worry about future access to vital markets, and that their efforts to insure this access can lead them into conflict with other states. It presents a range of case studies that illustrate how this process works. I share the author’s intuition that economic issues are central to world politics, as well as his interest in international history, but I have some concerns about both the book’s theoretical argument and its empirical research design. The book’s central argument is that major foreign policy decisions rest on state leaders’ expectations about future commercial opportunities in their relations with other states. In the author’s account, state leaders care about these economic relationships mainly because of their contribution to national power rather than the wealth that commerce provides to their societies. When they expect increasing benefits from a particular relationship, they will pursue cooperative policies toward their international partner. On the other hand, when they expect the benefits of commercial interaction to decline, they may adopt aggressive policies to avoid the costs associated with this outcome. Concern about the future reliability of a trading partner can produce a self-reinforcing “trade-security spiral” in which states attempt to reduce their dependence on one another. Once the spiral begins, states may use the leverage that trade itself provides, as well as political and military means, to reduce their dependence or to maintain economically important relationships. The book sets out six factors that might change states’ trade expectations and produce such a spiral (43-6). These range from concern about third parties, including small states as well as other major powers, to internal processes within the trading states that may make them unreliable partners in the future. Historical case studies intended to test this argument comprise most of the book. It introduces “a new approach to qualitative historical analysis for rare events research--one that minimizes the problems of selection bias and generalizability by covering the essential universe of cases for a chosen historical period” (13). The book summarizes 40 cases of major power crises and wars between 1790 and 1991 in Table 2.7 (80-90). The author writes that a close reading of the archival record in each case is critical because “[i]n-depth documentary work provides us with a window into the thinking of key decision makers as they make estimates of future realities, grapple with trade-offs associated with feedback loops and escalatory spirals, and adjust their behavior to alter the factors that will serve their ends” (75). The book uses this evidence to support not only its theoretical argument about trade expectations, but also broader generalizations about the relative importance of international trade and domestic political processes in shaping major-power conflict. It concludes that trade is critically important but that domestic political processes “hardly ever” matter in decisions about war and peace (14). The book’s ambitious theoretical and methodological claims make for arresting reading, but they are not persuasive. The difficulties fall into two categories. The first concerns the evidence the book presents. The case studies are engagingly written but they are yoked to a research design that does not support the book’s broader conclusions. The second concerns the logic of the theoretical argument. Here the book’s critique of liberal arguments about trade and conflict, along with its concomitant effort to link its argument to the realist tradition, undercuts its otherwise reasonable claim about the importance of expected future trade. The book’s claims about research methods are as ambitious as its substantive claims about world politics. The book’s “new approach to the qualitative study of rare events in international relations” (71) seeks to analyze documentary evidence in “pretty well every important case period since 1790 involving two or more great powers” (431). This plan is bold but unrealistic. In light of the number of cases and the volume of archival evidence available about each one, as well as the considerable linguistic and contextual knowledge required to interpret all this material, it is probably beyond the reach of an entire scholarly career, let alone a single book. In fact, while the book covers some cases in great depth, it sets others aside in a few sentences. For instance, on the strength of two citations to the work of other political scientists, it states that European conflict between 1792 and 1801 “was a war to reestablish the system’s ideological homogeneity, pure and simple” (321). Accuracy aside, the trouble with such summary judgments is that they do not provide enough evidence to support the claims in Table 2.7, which lists the principal stakes in each case period, the primary and secondary causal factors leading to conflict, and the overall importance of economic interdependence (80-90). To be fair, specific coding rules for making these broad judgments might be impractical. They might instead have to rest on the varied and often unique pieces of historical evidence available in each case, knit together by a thoughtful analyst with a lot of knowledge about the historical context. Nevertheless, if this is so, brief accounts of each case like those the book often provides are bound to be inadequate. The book has difficulty in consistently defining the cases it hopes to cover. It provides no explicit definition of a ‘great power,’ a necessary prerequisite for identifying the relevant wars and crises. The cases it actually examines do not clarify matters. The status of China is especially puzzling, since it counts as a great power for purposes of the Opium War of 1839-42, as well as for its conflicts with Japan in 1880-95 and 1931-37, but not for the Korean War of 1950-53, which is listed only as a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Similarly, the book provides no rules for delimiting each ‘case period.’ For example, why divide the Cold War into 11 case periods, while the Napoleonic Wars and the Wars of the French Revolution each constitute only one case? These definitional issues are important because some of the author’s conclusions are based on the aggregate characteristics of the cases, particularly his claim that trade expectations theory finds support in 86.7 percent of the cases (93, 431). The book acknowledges the logical problem of “sampling on the dependent variable,” the practice of examining only cases where the class of event one wishes to explain took place, and no cases where it did not. Unfortunately, the book’s proposed solution to this problem creates other difficulties. “In addition to examining the immediate outbreak of a crisis or war, we can look at the periods leading up to the crises and wars of interest, to see if planning for conflict, levels of tension, and probabilities of war changed as the core independent variables changed” (77). The trouble with this approach is that it defines a biased sample of state interaction: one consisting exclusively of crises/wars, and periods that ended in crises/wars. It omits cases involving major powers that had little or no political-military conflict, such as relations between the United States and Britain after the Venezuelan Boundary Crisis of 1895-6. If the rising opportunity cost of conflict due to trade helps account for these instances of peaceful relations, the book’s approach will underestimate the importance of this process. When the book gets into the documentary evidence in particular cases, the results can be illuminating. There is no denying that the in-depth qualitative study of particular historical cases is a valuable endeavor, revealing important nuances that are not always considered in more general theoretical arguments. Yet even in these instances, the evidence does not always support the book’s broader claims about matters such as the unimportance of domestic politics for decisions about war and peace. This particular claim appears to rest on the paucity of evidence that policymakers explicitly discuss domestic political pressures. The inference reveals a limited notion of how domestic political pressures might influence policy choice. These processes affect not only the range of considerations policy makers actually discuss but also the selection of the decision-makers themselves. If selection pressures are strong, producing a homogeneous group with common assumptions and priorities, their actual deliberations may be less important. For instance, Japanese decision-makers may not have discussed domestic pressures in making the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, but many less-than-subtle selection processes, including assassinations, were also at work. These processes helped create an uncompromising group of decision-makers who considered Japan’s status as a great power so important that they were willing to embark on a war that many thought they would probably lose in order to maintain it (230). Perhaps another group of policymakers would have made a different decision. I leave judgments about the importance of the selection process in this case to those more deeply immersed in the evidence. The point here is that it merits discussion before dismissing the causal importance of domestic political pressures. The book’s central theoretical claim, that scholars should pay more attention to policymakers’ expectations about future trade, makes sense, but the broader argument in which it is embedded is problematic. Many of its difficulties stem from an effort to associate the book with the realist tradition and to distance it from similar research in the liberal tradition. The author sharply distinguishes his contribution from liberal accounts of the conflict-reducing effects of trade, writing instead that his argument is essentially realist. “While it sometimes aligns with the liberal prediction that commerce can give states an incentive for peace, the deductive reasoning behind this prediction differs significantly from liberalism” (6). On closer examination, the book might better be characterized as a variant of recent research in the liberal tradition. The most important liberal claim about trade and war concerns the impact of trade on the opportunity cost of conflict.[1] Military conflict usually destroys or curtails commercial relations among the belligerents. As the economic relationships become more valuable, military conflict becomes more costly, and state leaders have a greater incentive to avoid it. Although scholars frequently use the current value of trade to measure this opportunity cost, this measure proxies the expected value of future commercial interaction. To consider the expected future value of trade and investment is actually to specify the opportunity cost correctly, and is an improvement over simply assuming current interactions are an adequate guide to those expectations. This expected value could change for a variety of reasons even if the current value of |
would be contradicting his appeal testimony, under oath, in front of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on June 23.
Brady remains firm on his settlement terms: He will accept a fine, but no suspension, and he will not admit guilt in the matter, sources say.
It appears highly unlikely that Tom Brady and the NFL will reach a mutually-agreed-upon settlement regarding his four-game suspension for his role in Deflategate. Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports
Goodell and the league's lawyers, meanwhile, on Wednesday morning met with U.S. District Judge Richard Berman for about 15 minutes before the start of a scheduled court hearing in Manhattan.
Brady sat and waited with five lawyers at a long table, then went in to meet with Berman after Goodell was finished.
Brady's settlement hearing came after Goodell ruled to uphold his four-game suspension on July 28. The NFL moved quickly to have the suspension confirmed in U.S. District Court in New York. Brady had hoped to have the case heard in Minnesota, but because the NFL filed first in New York, the case landed there and was assigned randomly to Judge Richard M. Berman.
Berman, 71, ordered the sides to have settlement discussions multiple times, most recently calling for more "good faith" discussions on Tuesday. He called the sides together at 10:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday to be briefed on any progress in advance of the 11 a.m. scheduled hearing.
The NFL commissioned attorney Ted Wells to investigate the New England Patriots' use of underinflated footballs in the AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts on Jan. 18. The report was released May 6 and concluded that it was "more probable than not" that Patriots personnel deliberately deflated footballs during the game, and that Brady was probably "at least generally aware" of the rules violations.
Goodell suspended Brady for the first four games of the 2015 season for his role in the incident, which Goodell said violated the integrity of the game.
In a 15-page brief filed to Judge Berman on Aug. 7 stating the NFL's position, the league said Brady was more than "at least generally aware" of the rules violations, writing that Brady was suspended for having "approved of, consented to, and provided inducements in support of" a scheme to tamper with game footballs. The league also wrote that Brady "willfully obstructed the subsequent investigation."
Brady and the NFL Players Association said in briefs filed to Berman that Goodell doesn't have the authority to suspend Brady for such a violation (there is nothing in the collective bargaining agreement that allows a player to be suspended for underinflating footballs), while also declaring the investigation and process that led to Brady's suspension was unfair, among other things.
The NFL countered by saying that Article 46 of the collective bargaining agreement gives the commissioner the authority to suspend those he deems violated the integrity of or public confidence in the game of football. The league also said there is nothing in the collective bargaining agreement that ensures Brady must have an "independent" investigation.
Berman has scheduled a second day of settlement hearings for next Wednesday. If a settlement is not reached, Berman has been asked by all involved to make a decision by Sept. 4, which would be one of the Patriots' first days of practice in preparation for the NFL opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sept. 10.
Information from ESPN.com's Mike Reiss and The Associated Press contributed to this report.ROME — He seemed stunned, if immaculately tailored in a dark suit that sheathed him like armor.
But the Silvio Berlusconi who stood before the Italian Senate on Wednesday was no longer invincible. His brazen attempt to bring down Italy’s coalition government had provoked a mutiny in his own party. Most startling, Mr. Berlusconi, the powerful former prime minister, was reversing himself and bending to the rebellion.
For all the Shakespearean elements of pride, betrayal and hubris displayed on Wednesday during the political theatrics, the government survived a confidence vote with unexpected ease. The more significant news was that moderates promising deep reforms scored an unusually decisive victory in the most unstable of the euro zone’s big economies.
At a time when several major countries, notably including the United States, are paralyzed by partisan political warfare, the defeat for Mr. Berlusconi was greeted by many as a welcome, if still tentative, sign that Italy could carry out long-delayed changes to its political system and take steps to revive its sclerotic economy. “We are seeing the long twilight of the Berlusconi era,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political analyst in Rome.
Mr. Berlusconi’s attempt to bring down the government was intended to resuscitate his endangered political career as he faces a pending prison sentence, analysts say. Instead, it fractured his center-right movement in Italy, which was threatened with a wave of defections. Standing in the Senate, Mr. Berlusconi, 77, was forced to reverse himself and pledge his party’s support for the same government that he had failed to topple."Listen, son, you're in a heap of trouble here," the detective stubbed out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe, and settled in across from me. "We've got you on charges of trespassing, vandalism, burglary, kidnapping, attempted bestiality, and grand theft tiger. We had to make that last one up just for you, kid. You know how rare it is to have to make up a crime for one person? I have literally never even heard of that. That's how much trouble you're in; you've created entirely new crimes of which you are incredibly guilty," he let that last part settle in for a few minutes. "I don't even know where to start," I began, picking what I hoped was fur from between my teeth. "Well, let me tell you what we have down, and you can tell me if any of it sounds familiar. You entered the zoo at 10:30 on the morning of March 24, 2009..." ***
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If you stay and fight the WereEskimo, turn to page 2.
If you jump the line and bolt for the zoo, turn to page 3.
The smell of cotton candy and popcorn mixes with that of hay, manure, and the four Sparks you downed in the parking lot. The large woman in front of you is wearing leopard print stretch-pants that have long since abandoned the category of "pants" and ventured into the realm of "ass shrink-wrap." The elastic quivers, as if longing to be released. You barely suppress the urge to snap the waistband, which would surely set off a tsunami of fat that would kill all those surrounding yo- "Excuse me," the beast turns on you, "are you...are youfucking talking about me? You're like, the biggest asshole in the entire world! I weigh 125 pounds, dickhead, and I'm standing right in front of you! I can hear you!" Were you saying all that out loud? "Did the spandex-monster pick up your thoughts somehow? You try to decipher her words, but all that comes out is the sound of incessant chewing and the slap of fat on fat as her lips impact each other," are you still speaking aloud? The mix of caffeine, alcohol, and cough syrup blends the lines of your internal consciousness. "You fucking ass!" She screams, "My boyfriend is going to kill you." As she storms off toward what appears to be a particularly large, hairy Eskimo, you realize that you are ill-prepared to fight, but still nowhere near the front of the line.
PAGE 2
Hey, you're the one that chose to fight him.
You turn to the approaching man-mountain with fists raised, your body humming with the burst of manic energy and the complete lack of coordination that the alcohol/codeine-psychosis has inspired in you. You decide to throw him off guard by doing something completely unexpected. Maybe you can make him think you're crazy. You charge at him, screaming, but at the last moment duck beneath his swinging fist. Your flying kick hits the zoo's mascot, Honey the Bee, square in the crotch. As he crouches in pain, uncharacteristically swearing and gagging into his headpiece, you know your course of action was a total success; nobody would have ever expected that. You idly wonder what exactly you were trying to achieve when attacking a stuffed bee was an imperative, but you have long since forgotten. As the hulking arms fold around your neck, your second to last thought is "oh yeah, the Eskimo." Your last thought, before the blackness comes, is unfortunately "I can never remember who did song that goes likeTransfer News: Newcastle defender Steven Taylor could go out on loan in January
Steven Taylor: Newcastle defender would be willing to go out on loan
Taylor has been forced to watch from the sidelines in recent weeks as Newcastle have embarked on a winning run in the Premier League.
The 27-year-old has even found himself left out of Alan Pardew's matchday squad in the last six games despite being back to fitness after injury.
Taylor has not featured since the defeat by Manchester City on the opening weekend of the season and is frustrated with his lack of first-team opportunities.
Taylor, who has been promised a new deal by director of football Joe Kinnear, could now be made available on loan for January or even for a cut-price fee of £1.5million.
The player's agent, Willie McKay, confirmed Taylor could go out on loan in search of first-team football.
"Steven is now fully fit, but he is frustrated not to be playing as that is what he loves doing," McKay told Sky Sports.
"He has not been involved for the last six games and of course it is frustrating.
"Steven fully understands that the team have been on a good winning run and the manager does not want to change a winning team.
"Joe Kinnear has promised Steven a new deal in January and he could be made available for loan if he is not going to be playing for Newcastle."The Road to Russia 2018 kicked off last week as the first 12 teams out of FIFA’s 209 country members began their qualification processes by taking the field in the first of two legs; second legs will be completed tomorrow on March 17. The teams are from the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and are the 12 lowest ranked teams in the confederation. In alphabetical order, those teams were Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Chinese Taipei, India, Macau, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste and Yemen. Below are last week’s first leg results:
India 2 – Nepal 0
Yemen 3 – Pakistan 1
Timor-Leste 4 – Mongolia 1
Cambodia 3 – Macau 0
Chinese Taipei 0 – Brunei Darussalam 1
Sri Lanka 0 – Bhutan 1
All eyes in the opening round of qualifiers were on India, with a population of 1.2 billion people, good for second highest in the world, and last year’s launch of a second soccer league, the pressure is on India to begin to get results. They won handedly 2-0 at home to Nepal and are prepared for the away return leg, where current head coach, Stephen Constantine used to manage. Constantine has added that, “If you ask me, 2-0 is a very deceiving score line. If Nepal score, the game changes. I have said this from the very beginning that this will be a very difficult task for us. The game is still available for both teams.” Failure to qualify for at least the second round by India would be a huge step back for the national team and their fans.
The shocker of the week was the tiny nation of Bhutan getting their first World Cup Qualifying win 1-0 over Sri Lanka in their first ever qualifier. They are currently the last ranked team in the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking, and pulled off the stunner in the 84th minute by young 19 year old, Tshering Dorji. The return leg will be played in Bhutan where a win or tie would guarantee passage to the second round in what would be a historic celebration.
Brunei Darussalam got an unlikely win on the road last week as they compete in only their third ever World Cup Qualifiers while Timor-Leste and Cambodia earned big home victories before the second leg matches.
Unfortunately, due to the bombings of two churches in Lahore on Monday morning, FIFA has suspended the return leg between Pakistan and Yemen. No details as of this writing were available as to when the return leg would be played, but Pakistan will need a 2-0 win in order to advance after losing 3-1 in Yemen last week.
The winners of this round will advance to the next round where they will join the 34 remaining AFC teams in eight groups of five teams. Round 2 in AFC qualifying begins this June.
Next week CONCACAF region kicks off their 2018 qualifying campaign as the 14 lowest ranked teams in the region start their campaigns.AUSTIN, TX—Stoner Mike "Gonzo" Dornheim, 37, a freelance carpenter and part-time drummer, is the favorite uncle of his six nephews and nieces, family sources revealed Monday.
Despite being the object of unspoken resentment from his siblings, who see him as the family's "black sheep," the habitual marijuana user has nevertheless cornered the market on nephew/niece affection.
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"Uncle Gonzo isn't like my other uncles, who just talk about work all the time and won't let us make noise in the house," said Brad Dornheim, 8, who, like his siblings and cousins, is unaware of his uncle's marijuana use. "He makes us these awesome banana smoothies. And he has the coolest backyard, with these robot bird sculptures he made out of scrap metal. He even gave me one, but Mom said it has to stay in the garage. I want to be just like him when I grow up. Uncle Gonz rules!"
Niece Caitlin Halloran, 6, agreed.
"Uncle Hank [insurance executive and avid golfer Henry Dornheim] and Uncle Jer [tile salesman and devout Presbyterian Gerald Pivarnik] are totally boring," Caitlin said. "They wear ties every day, even outside church. All they ever do is read the paper and fall asleep in chairs. Uncle Gonzo makes mud pies and builds us tree forts, and he jumps in the leaves with us. I wish all my uncles were like Uncle Gonzo."
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Caitlin went on to cite other reasons for Dornheim's favorite-uncle status, including his love of playing Frisbee, his blacklight Pink Floyd posters, his tattoos, and his vast collection of classic Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Despite their disapproval of his lifestyle, Dornheim's siblings cannot find fault with his behavior around the family's younger generation. Dornheim has always been careful never to discuss drugs with the children, and he keeps his basement grow-room securely padlocked when they come to visit. Dornheim also always makes sure his "big people stuff"—including his three-foot glass bong, collection of Bettie Page girlie-photo books, and supply of nitrous-oxide "whippets"—are kept stashed away in a secret compartment built into his vintage 1977 waterbed.
The never-married Dornheim, who for more than a decade has been in an on-again, off-again relationship with a 44-year-old massage therapist and renaissance-fair hobbyist named Guinevere, has no children of his own. As a result, he enthusiastically enjoys the company of his nieces and nephews.
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Dornheim's sisters, Pam Halloran and Robin Pivarnik, begrudgingly admitted that he has a way with the children.
"They love his giant fish tank," said Pivarnik, 39. "And he's the only one who is even remotely competitive with the kids at PlayStation 2. He's also the only one who can stand watching SpongeBob SquarePants. As much as I hate to admit it, he seems to be an attentive, responsible caretaker."
Much to his siblings' chagrin, Dornheim is also the uncle of choice for helping the kids with school projects.
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"Uncle Gonz helped me with my science-fair entry, and I got an A," said nephew Sammy Pivarnik, 11. "He showed me how to mix baking soda and water to make this cool liquid that turns solid when you squeeze it, then melts back into, like, milk when you let it go. You can play catch with it without spilling a drop!"
"It really blew the teacher's mind," Sammy added.
Dornheim, who, unbeknownst to his nephews and nieces, was nicknamed "Gonzo" by his stoner buddies because of his longtime admiration of gonzo journalist and countercultural icon Hunter S. Thompson, also ranks ahead of his fellow uncles and aunts for his love of pets.
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"Uncle Gonzo has four doggies," said 4-year-old niece Emmy Dornheim, carefully counting to four on her fingers. "Their names are Zowie, Zappa, James Tiberius, and Ignatius J. Reilly. They're nice and always want to play. Not like Uncle Jer's dog Bill, who's old and bites and can't come in the house."
Added Emmy: "Uncle Gonzo has lots of strawberry ice cream, and he never mows his lawn, so we can play Tarzan, and he sings the song about Jeremiah The Bullfrog with me. All his couches and chairs are all different colors. I love Uncle Gonz!"
In spite of his daughter's love of Uncle Gonzo, Henry Dornheim still resents his older brother.
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"I don't know what kind of example he's setting," Dornheim said. "The other day, he picked up Emmy after school because I had a meeting. When he dropped her off after a few hours at his ramshackle house, Emmy said he let her paint his dog blue. Imagine it! Painting a dog! So what if it was just food coloring and it'll wash out? They're painting an animal!"
Unfazed by their parents' disapproval, the kids still regard "Uncle Gonz" as their favorite.
"The only other uncle I like is Uncle Steve," 12-year-old nephew Henry Jr. said. "Whenever he visits, he always plays us funny old show tunes and bakes awesome rhubarb pies. He doesn't have any kids, just like Uncle Gonz. I wish we could see Uncle Steve more, but he lives far away in San Francisco with his roommate Gary."2 Comments
Is This Toyota Ad Sexist?
A Toyota car advertisement in Australia has been taking flak for being “sexist.” The ad is a banner that was on display at the Thredbo village and ski resort to promote the Toyota Kluger, known as the Highlander in the United States.
The banner, which you can see in the image above, matched three different ski runs with different family members: green (easy) for kids, blue (intermediate) for moms, and black (hard) for dads. The ad has recently fallen under attack for “[suggesting] that women are only capable of doing the intermediate run, whilst men can do the harder ones,” according to The Australian’s Women’s Weekly and various angry Facebook comments, and has since been pulled by the automaker.
However, this seems to be more of an overreaction borne out of a desire to take offense that puts reason on the backburner than a legitimate critique of the ad.
A Toyota spokeswoman explained that the intent of the ad was to “highlight that Thredbo, much like the Kluger, has something for everyone” (emphasized by the “coffee for everyone” symbol on the banner). She also pointed out that the campaign had been going on for more than a year and hadn’t received any negative attention until this week. Yet suddenly, as soon as it became trendy, everyone was offended (or rather, a vocal minority on social media while everyone else who saw the banner simply didn’t care and went off skiing).
I sincerely doubt that anyone at Toyota thinks women aren’t capable of going down black diamond ski courses. Since they wanted to show that everyone had a difficulty level that would suit them, they just had to choose a name to put above each symbol, and because kids usually start at the lowest level and men are statistically far more likely to take risks than women, the association Toyota chose is the one that best reflects the real world, even if it doesn’t account for all possibilities and, apparently, sensibilities.
The Twitter user above expressed how she felt about the banner by photoshopping it to show “Mum + Dad” above the black symbol, but ignoring the blue symbol negates the ad’s goal of showing that there’s “something for everyone.” Besides, wouldn’t blatantly ignoring the blue symbol imply that there’s something shameful about going down the intermediate slopes? What if mum doesn’t want to tackle the hard course? What if dad doesn’t? Wouldn’t they feel pressured by an ad that shows them both associated with the black diamond?
In fact, if the ad is sexist because it implies that women aren’t capable, isn’t it also sexist because it implies men should be capable? For all one knows, there could be plenty of families at Thredbo where the kid is the one tackling the black course and the dad is cowering in fear at the beginner slopes. Maybe the ad should say “Kids + Mum + Dad” next to the black diamond to appease all of their egos.
And what about single parents—shouldn’t they feel marginalized too? Isn’t it possible that kids and their single moms would fall to their knees in front of the ad and burst into tears because dad didn’t stick around for coffee? Shouldn’t you be offended because I suggested the dad would be the one to leave and not the mom?
Everything can be offensive or sexist if you try hard enough to interpret it that way. If the words “dad” and “mum” had been switched around, do you think anybody would have cared? I bet it would have been hailed as “empowering.”
Source: The Australian’s Women’s WeeklyTo what degree does Barack Obama or Donald Trump influence your moral judgment? Does a murder abroad carry the same moral weight as one committed at home?
Related Content Support for the Death Penalty May Be Linked to Belief in Pure Evil
Philosophers and psychologists studying moral reasoning have long argued that certain pillars of morality are largely fixed and apply universally across time and space. But work conducted by an international team of researchers now suggests that people's moral judgments are far more flexible than previously thought. The study offers insight into the ways people respond to morally troubling events, from rape to slander, and may yield clues to the level of outrage expressed by a given community.
“Human societies all have higher-order punishment, which means that we don’t just punish wrongdoers, we punish people who fail to punish wrongdoers,” says co-author Daniel Fessler, a professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. “So it is costly not to be outraged when you should be.”
According to Fessler, the long-standing tradition in philosophy is to understand moral judgment by reasoning about it in the abstract. “But instead of sitting in the philosopher’s armchair, attempting to infer the nature of the human mind, our research team was interested in finding out how people really think and then use that evidence to address the philosophical literature,” he says.
For instance, most Americans would say that slavery in the South was morally wrong, says Fessler. “But when asked about slavery in ancient Greece, you quickly get the feeling that people think this is not as bad. This raises the question, where is the difference for people’s intuition coming from?”
Fessler and his team sought to test this hypothesis by probing the moral judgments of diverse populations from around the globe, ranging from metropolitan Los Angeles to rural Ukraine to the remote island of Fiji. The researchers were careful to choose locations that were geographically disparate, historically and culturally unrelated and that covered a wide spectrum of technological development, socioeconomic status and population size. In particular, they focused on smaller societies that more accurately resemble the civilizations that characterize 99 percent of our evolutionary history.
More than 200 subjects listened to seven stories that described an action that would be considered highly immoral, such as stealing, battery or rape. After completing a comprehension test, they were asked to rate how good or bad they perceived the specified action to be. The participants were then asked to reassess their morality rating after learning that an influential leader in their community approved of it, and to consider if the action took place a long time ago or if the action took place very far away.
For each condition, members of nearly all the societies judged the previously egregious actions as less morally problematic, even when accounting for various factors such as age, sex, education level or the specific moral situation they assessed. The team presents their findings this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
So what causes this shift in attitudes? According to Fessler, moral judgments are the products of an evolved psychology that motivates people to follow and enforce a set of rules. Although it can be costly in terms of time and energy, this community-oriented psychology confers benefits upon individuals who establish a moral reputation. People seen as highly moral are more likely to be included in future cooperative ventures in the community, such as a hunt or a barn raising, that enhance their ability to survive.
But there is a time and place when it comes to enforcing moral codes. “There are few payoffs for caring a lot about things that happened far away or long ago, because passing judgments on these things is cheap talk, and the local community is not better off for the policing of those actions,” says Fessler.
Instead, someone can only obtain “moral capital” when the situation is relevant to the community and there is an actual cost to the enforcement of a moral code. Fessler gives an example in which football players illegally park in handicapped spots because they are closest to campus. Since the players pose a physical threat, anyone willing to stand up and call them out on shady behavior would receive a huge boost in moral reputation.
But when individuals continually express outrage at events far removed from the present, they dilute their moral potency and lose reputation. “Those evolved psychological mechanisms that are governing the production of moral judgment are sensitive to the payoffs,” says Fessler. “They make us feel outraged when it has positive consequences for the judge, and those are going to be things in the here and now … not something far away.”
Along similar lines, people of high importance in their respective communities, whether a tribal leader in Fiji or Majority Whip in the U.S. Congress, largely shape the interpretation of moral norms in their respective environments. That means the same psychology that seeks to boost moral reputation should also be finely attuned to the opinions of important leaders.
Fessler stresses that understanding this behavior is by no means a justification for it. “The moral psychologists and philosophers are completely right,” says Fessler. “If you think something is wrong, then you should think it is wrong everywhere and anytime. But empirically, it is the case that people are in fact morally parochialists, even if that position is philosophically indefensible.”
Inspiring people to be more universal in their sense of moral outrage may involve one of the most powerful forces currently driving social change—the Internet. Photography, video and other social media can turn our planet into one common neighborhood. There is strong evidence these tools tap into our inherent psychology and give people the impression that morally unjust events happening far away are in fact happening locally—just ask the U.S. dentist at the center of the controversy over Zimbabwe's Cecil the lion.
“We really are one global community now and we have to act like it, because if we don’t, we are all in trouble," says Fessler. “Happily our psychology is already geared toward thinking about a single community. We just have to convince one another that the whole world is that community.”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
The sixth man to walk on the surface of the moon has made the astonishing claim that aliens came to Earth to stop a nuclear war between America and Russia.
Edgar Mitchell, a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, told Mirror Online that top-ranking military sources spotted UFOs during weapons tests.
The astronaut has been outspoken about his belief in aliens ever since he landed on the surface of the moon, becoming one of the most prominent figures in the worldwide UFO community.
He told us military insiders had seen strange crafts flying over missile bases and the famous White Sands facility, where the world's first ever nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945.
Mitchell grew up in New Mexico near both the bomb testing zone and Roswell, where believers think one of the world's most famous UFO encounters took place.
"You don't know the area like I do," he said in an interview with Mirror Online.
"White Sands was a testing ground for atomic weapons - and that's what the extraterrestrials were interested in.
"They wanted to know about our military capabilities.
"My own experience talking to people has made it clear the ETs had been attempting to keep us from going to war and help create peace on Earth."
(Image: NASA)
Mitchell also suggested he had heard similar stories from people who manned missile bases during the most tense parts of the 20th century.
"I have spoken to many Air Force officers who worked at these silos during the Cold War," he continued.
"They told me UFOs were frequently seen overhead and often disabled their missiles.
"Other officers from bases on the Pacific coast told me their [test] missiles were frequently shot down by alien spacecraft.
"There was a lot of activity in those days."
(Image: NASA/ RR Auction)
We asked Nick Pope, a former Ministry of Defence UFO researcher, whether he believed Mitchell's claims.
"Edgar Mitchell is an honourable and truthful man, who I've had the privilege of meeting," he said.
"But so far as I'm aware, most of his information on this issue comes not from things he's experienced himself, but from things he's been told by others.
"Clearly, because of who he is, he's had access to government, military and intelligence community personnel at the highest level, but because - quite understandably - he won't name his sources, we can't be certain these people were being straight with him, or indeed that they were privy to any classified information about UFOs."
Pope said the "idea that peace-loving extraterrestrials are here to warn humanity about our destructive ways" is popular with those who take a New Age view of the UFO phenomenon.
"It's a nice thought, but if I'm being sceptical, I'd point out that it's almost exactly the plot of the classic 1951 sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still," he continued.
"There have certainly been some intriguing UFO sightings around nuclear facilities, and around military bases more generally, but an alternative explanation is that some of these sightings are attributable to espionage activity involving secret spy planes or drones.
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"Given that the Universe is around 14 billion years old, if we're being visited, it's unlikely we're dealing with a civilisation just a few hundred years ahead of us, so stories of aliens managing to disrupt a few of our weapons tests are far-fetched.
"Chances are they'd be millions of years ahead of us and could do anything they wanted to."
So what do you think? For more extraterrestrial activity check out our UFO news.What is the Lean-Agile Roadmap?
Why a Roadmap Is Needed
The Principles of Lean Software Development
Knowing the Territory
Our Roadmap's Destination
Symptoms of Being Off the Road
Common Detours
How to Get Started
Continuing Your Journey
What Is the Lean-Agile Roadmap?
The Net Objectives Lean-Agile Roadmap is a proven method to achieve agility at Scale. We use Lean-management and Lean-flow to a business driven approach for stakeholders with a combination of Scrum and Kanban at the team. Net Objectives has the longest track record of success of any consulting company in the world. Our Lean-Agile Roadmap is what we've used to help our clients achieve dramatic success in Agile methods across the enterprise. The Lean-Agile Roadmap can provide guidance to avoid the stagnation after initial team success that so many companies hit. While this page is where to start and get an overview of the roadmap, detailed information on different parts of the roadmap is available on our Enterprise Agility Roadmap Essentials.
Why A Roadmap Is Needed
While there is no one-size fits all, there is a set of basic practices that virtually all companies must do to maximize their effectiveness. But knowing what these are is only half the battle - getting there is the other. Merely saying "Use this structure," or "Do these practices," won't work for several reasons. First, too much change is difficult for most people. Non-managers know all too well how to outlast management initiatives. Second, while companies need to achieve certain results, the way to achieve them will be different for different companies. Applying someone else's best solution to your company may work, but will certainly involve more pain and cost than is necessary and will certainly not be the most effective way of doing things. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this change is occurring while the organization needs to meet current commitments. Change must be managed so that improvements are certain and continuous.
These issues require a roadmap, so to speak, of going from where one is to where one wants to be. The roadmap will layout the changes necessary for the organization and the order in which to achieve them. This order is established by a combination of several factors:
Degree of technical difficulty of change
How current culture of organization will foster or hamper the changes
How each affects subsequent actions (do those first that will help others later)
Degree of investment required (small changes at first, bigger changes later, in particular, look for trim-tabs or low-hanging fruit)
Benefit of the change (ROI)
Who is sponsoring the transition must also be considered. When anyone short of the CEO is the sponsor, creating visibility of what is needed to those above the sponsor is essential.
Knowing the Territory
This page starts with the main principles of Lean Software Development. Understanding these is essential to create the context for the practices described. People often ignore the importance of mindset in implementing practices. We call our approach “Lean-Agile” for a particular reason. ‘Lean’ provides the context, the big picture, the theory, the management style, the science of the approach. ‘Agile’ means the methods (Scrum, Kanban, XP) the teams, within this context, use. This top-down context (Lean) bottom-up implementation (Agile) is essential. An only top down approach creates a command-and-control mindset that fosters micro-management. An only bottom-up approach leads us to the lack of cross-team success we see so rampant in the Agile world today.
After understanding these principles, I’ll describe the high level actions that must be recognized and implemented for Agile at scale to be effective. Later I'll be adding the practices that enable all of this.
The key insight is that there are methods required for effective software development. The trick is getting there. That requires a bigger view and a roadmap.
The Principles of Lean Software Development
Optimize the Whole Eliminate Waste Build Quality In Deliver Fast Defer Commitment Create Knowledge Empower People Focus on Flow (of Value) Continually Improve
Optimize the whole means
to focus on the realization of business value
take a systemic thought process.
to take an holistic view.
Taking a systemic view means that one must attend look to the system within which people operate to understand why people are achieving the results they are. Changing the system will help improve their results. Effective results require good people and good systems.
Systems thinking implies taking an holistic view since systems are more than the sum of their parts. This is one of the big differentiators of Lean and Agile. One must understand that the development team is only a part of the process. Many of their challenges are due to upstream problems. If we can see the whole we can more easily change behavior of those upstream of the development team.
Eliminate waste by removing delays, only working on things of value that you know how to achieve and only starting work you know you can complete. We must remove delays in our workflow because these literally create additional work to be done – redoing requirements, finding errors (while the fixing cost often stays the same, but finding bugs found late increases dramatically), integration errors (caused by the delays from when teams get out of synch until they are discovered in the integration process.
Removing delays requires not working beyond the capacity of your teams as this injects delays into the workflow because people have to switch between projects and are often waiting for other people working on other projects. People often point to the cost of task-switching here, which, while considerable, pales in comparison to the additional work created by the delays themselves.
Build quality in means to avoid errors, not test them out. Shortening feedback loops is a big help here. In particular, the adoption of acceptance test-driven development is a method that virtually every team we’ve run across in the last dozen years would benefit from.
Deliver fast is essentially the same as time to market. Not a new concept. But Lean adds the insight that if we focus on shortening the time of delivery by removing delays and focusing on quality, our productivity goes up and costs come down. Quick delivery also allows for quick feedback and can help avoid building features that aren’t needed.
Defer commitment means to make decisions when you have the right information yet always attend to the cost/risk of making decisions too early or too late. Too many decisions are made too early. Deferring commitment requires taking steps so that delaying the commitment does not incur more risk while achieving better decisions when more information is available later.
Create knowledge means to create, capture, update, and put to use the knowledge learned from product value. Measure cycle time, work-in-progress, and which work-items have value.
Empower people to make decisions which they are best able to make. Teams must be given clear boundaries within which to work, however. It also means to recognize the psychology of people. People are tribal, have a psychology that is sensitive (and averse) to significant change. People also often identify with their work, so changing roles can be very difficult for them emotionally.
Focus on flow of value. We accomplish this by managing our queues so work flows from concept to consumption smoothly. Managing work-in-progress (WIP) is an effective way of doing this. In particular, we must pay attention to delays, which literally increases the amount of work to be done |
, it seems that a certain ceiling has been reached.
In my own archdiocese, although we offer the Traditional Latin Mass in five different locations, we've never been able to attract more than a total of about a thousand people. That’s only one-half of one percent of the total number of Catholics who attend Mass in this archdiocese each Sunday.
One of our parishes generously offers a Solemn High Mass once a month on Sunday afternoon, a Mass that I myself have celebrated for over 25 years. But we have gone from seeing the church almost full, to two-thirds full, to now only about one-third full.
Explanations abound among the traditional Catholics I speak to about the lack of growth in attendance at the Traditional Latin Mass. Some say that it is because more options are now available. But one of the promises was that if parishes would just offer the Traditional Latin Mass each parish would be filled again. Others say there are parking issues, or that the Mass times are not convenient, or that the Masses are too far away. But these things were all true 20 years ago when the Solemn Mass was thriving.
It seems that a ceiling has been hit. The Traditional Latin Mass appeals to a certain niche group of Catholics, but the number in that group appears to have reached its maximum.
Some traditional Catholics I speak to say, “If only the archdiocese would promote us more,” or “If only the bishop would celebrate it at all or more frequently.” Perhaps, but many other niche groups in the archdiocese say the same thing about their particular interest.
At the end of the day, for any particular movement, prayer form, organization, or even liturgy, the job of promoting it must belong to those who love it most. Shepherds don't have sheep; sheep have sheep.
And once again we are back to the fundamental point: numbers matter. Groups that seek respect, recognition, and promotion in the highest places need to remember that numbers do matter; it's just the way life works. If we who love the Traditional Latin Mass want to be near the top of the bishop’s priority list, we're going to have to be more than one-half of one percent of Catholics in the pews.
All of this is also background to a sad but instructive story that came out of a large archdiocese in this country. I don't wish to mention the diocese or the name of the parish. If you want to read the details, the story is available here: Church to be Demolished. For the purposes of this article, though, simply note that the church in question suffered a rather devastating fire. The particular church was home to the Traditional Latin Mass community and was rented from the diocese. The community was permitted to undertake renovations, but given the fact that the parish had closed there was no insurance on the building. Further, as a general rule, dioceses are “self-insured,” which is a way of saying that it is really the diocese (or a cooperative of dioceses), not some huge insurance company, that must pay the damages. Due to the heavy damage sustained in the fire (the roof collapsed), the cost to restore the building was determined to be prohibitive. The diocese in question has chosen to demolish the structure instead.
It is a tragic loss, both historically (it is a one-hundred-year-old building) and for the community.
This is another situation in which numbers matter. The congregation attending the Traditional Latin Mass in this large urban diocese numbered only about 200. Given the typical pattern of Catholic giving, this is not a number that can sustain any parish, let alone one with an older and larger building.
Nevertheless, many bitter recriminations are being directed against the diocese and its bishop. Because many of the complaints are circulating on the Internet, it is not at all clear that the critics are even among the parishioners or clergy of that parish.
But at the end of the day, it really is about numbers. It just doesn't make sense to plow millions into repairing an old building where only 200 people worship; it is not good stewardship. And ultimately, bishops are not responsible for church maintenance—congregations and people are. Congregations need to pay their insurance and maintain their facilities. Simply having a building is not enough. It must be maintained as well.
Further, simply offering a Traditional Latin Mass is not enough, as I try to show above. People aren’t just going to pile in, relieved that the “silliness” is finally over. Even traditional Catholics have to evangelize.
The stories related in this post are painful. Whether it’s about closing schools in changing inner cities or closing parishes with dwindling congregations, numbers do matter. Numbers don’t matter when it comes to the truth of the faith; but when it comes to institutions, buildings, organizations, liturgical preferences, and so forth, they matter a whole lot.
This is why evangelization and effectively handing on the faith to the next generation is so critical. Simply having a beautiful liturgy, or a historic building, or a school with old roots in the community, is not enough. Attracting, engaging, and evangelizing actual human beings who will support and sustain structures, institutions, and even liturgies is essential. No one in the Church is exempt from this obligation.
If we who love the Traditional Latin Mass thought that it would do its own evangelizing, we were mistaken. It is beautiful and worthy of God in many ways. But in a world of passing pleasures and diversions, we must show others the perennial value of the beautiful liturgy.
The honest truth is that an ancient liturgy, spoken in an ancient language and largely whispered, is not something that most moderns immediately appreciate. It is the same with many of the truths of our faith, which call for sacrifice, dying to self, and rejecting the immediate pleasures of sin for the eternal glories of Heaven. We must often make the case to a skeptical and unrefined world.
Evangelization is hard work, but it is work that matters if we want to maintain a viable presence going forward. The lovers of the Traditional Latin Mass are not exempt.
Evangelize or else close and die. It’s a hard fact, but numbers matter. Too many in the Church today demand respect and support without showing the fruits that earn respect and that make support prudent and reasonable.
If we care, we who love tradition ought to work tirelessly to show forth the fruits of tradition. Surely it will come, by Gods’ grace, but we are not exempt from the work of evangelizing.Of all the injustices of childhood, being mocked for your voice has a particular sting. If you’re meticulous, you can choose what you say and how you say it. But when you let your guard down—and who can keep it up forever?—your real voice waits patiently to slip out.
I was born in England to American parents, and lived there long enough to have an English accent for much of my adolescence. Because I was incredibly small, had buckteeth, and couldn’t pronounce the letter “r,” I sounded like a small, shrill hybrid of Elmer Fudd and Julie Andrews. Now, watching home videos, I find it hilarious. At the time, though, it was humiliating. The first time I remember being teased for it was when I moved to Colorado. This wasn’t motivated by patriotic disdain for the UK, so much as a kid’s ability to isolate anything peculiar and mock it. I made a concerted effort to sound American in response. But something residual, something non-geographical, continued to haunt me. I never could say “s” fast enough. I said “like” a lot. I always uptalked, and my friends said I always sounded “nice”. In high school, when I was mocked for speaking the way I did it had nothing to do with sounding outlandish. Mine was a voice everyone was familiar with, and they knew what it signified: That I was gay. It was true. My voice knew who I was before I did.
I suspect many queer people will identify with being bullied not only for what they say, but how they say it. Virtually every parody—malicious or otherwise—of gay men includes a nasal, lisping, high-pitched vocal timbre. Even though sexuality itself is interior, one’s behavior and mannerisms are used to infer with whom they like to go to bed. Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary by filmmaker David Thorpe opening this week at IFC, probes the history, science, and cultural significance of the gay male voice. The film is structured around his personal quest to get rid of his “gay voice”—recently single and middle-aged, David Thorpe began to find his voice a source of anxiety, worrying it turned off potential lovers—which grounds what could otherwise have been a disparate web of academic theories and talking heads. “When I started I wasn’t even really thinking of making a movie. It was more of a personal project,” he told me when I met him recently. That spurred him to look more systematically at the gay voice itself; eventually he realized he’d found something significant to say about the subject, a catalogue of people reflecting about the history, prevalence, significance, and science of the voice itself.
My voice knew who I was before I did.
It’s clear from his enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge that Thorpe, a writer with an inquisitive personality and a voice I found entirely pleasant, has enough material for a whole series on the subject. “It was always a tough call editing, trying to give each topic the right amount of time,” he told me. “I was kind of running down this long hallway just opening doors all over the place.” In the film, Thorpe consults a speech therapist, a voice coach, several linguists and anthropologists, a film historian, gay actors, and famous queer celebrities including David Sedaris, Dan Savage, Tim Gunn, Don Lemon, George Takei, and Margaret Cho. Thorpe also interviewed pedestrians, his friends, and children who have suffered bullying for their voices. Seeing so many people reflect about their own voices—where they think they came from, what they mean, and what annoys them—helps establish that Thorpe is working with something bigger than a personal affectation.As Donald Trump declared once and for all Friday that Barack Obama was, in fact, born in the United States, the mainstream media, and Hillary Clinton are still complaining that he peddled the conspiracy for the last five years. But another revelation on Friday confirms what Trump has said all along, that the Clinton camp started the rumors in 2008.
According to Breitbart, Clinton’s short-term 2008 campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, admitted that a campaign staffer circulated what became known as the “Birther” theory that Obama wasn’t born in the USA and therefore was ineligible to be elected president.
On Twitter, Doyle said it was a “rogue staffer” who sent out an e-mail and “was fired pretty damn quick.” Later on CNN, Doyle told Wolf Blitzer, “The campaign nor Hillary did not start the Birther movement, period, end of story there. There was a volunteer coordinator, I believe, in late 2007, I believe, in December, one of our volunteer coordinators in one of the counties in Iowa — I don’t recall whether they were an actual paid staffer, but they did forward an email that promoted the conspiracy.”
Trump rightly stated on Friday, “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the Birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again. Thank you very much.”
Yet, the MSM is still attacking Trump for starting the Birther movement. The Washington Post says, “Trump admits Obama was born in U.S., but falsely blames Clinton for starting rumors.” The Chicago Sun-Times ran an Associated Press story on Trumps admission but chided him for blaming Clinton’s campaign, “an assertion which is not true,” it states about “the most prominent ‘birther.’”
Injustice Watch’s James Asher, as noted by Mediate, also weighed in with a few tweets addressing this issue:
@HillaryClinton So why did your man #sidblumenthal spread the #obama birther rumor to me in 2008, asking us to investigate? Remember? — James Asher (@jimasher) September 16, 2016
President Obama also bears some responsibility by allowing his literary agent back in 1991 to claim Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia” which was printed inside a promotional booklet about the young author and future president that circulated for years.If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member. If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.
A clandestine satellite owned by the National Reconnaissance Office has been raised atop its United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, for liftoff Jan. 10.
Already encapsulated inside the Delta 4’s payload fairing, the spacecraft was recently transferred from a nearby processing facility and hoisted by a crane inside the mobile gantry at Space Launch Complex 6 nestled between hills and the Pacific Ocean near the southern edge of the military base on California’s Central Coast.
Ground crews deftly guided the payload atop the Delta 4’s second stage and completed its attachment to cap assembly of the 217-foot-tall (66-meter) rocket.
The mission for the NRO, the U.S. government’s spy satellite agency, is known by the codename NROL-47.
The Delta 4 is expected to loft a radar surveillance satellite to gather all-weather, day-and-night imagery for analysis by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The rocket slated for launch Jan. 10 will use the Delta 4’s “5,2” configuration five-meter-diameter payload fairing and two solid rocket boosters attached on each side of the hydrogen-fueled first stage. That version of the Delta 4 has flown only twice before, and analysts who track space activities believe both launches — in 2012 and 2016 — hauled so-called Topaz radar reconnaissance satellites into orbit.
The flight was pushed back from Dec. 10 to complete software validation on a new common avionics system designed to fly on ULA’s Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rockets. The upcoming mission will be the first time the common avionics suite has flown on a Delta 4.
It will be the last launch of a medium-lift, single-core version of the Delta 4 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. ULA is retiring the “single-stick” Delta 4 family in favor of the less expensive Atlas 5, before eventually replacing both rockets with the next-generation Vulcan launcher.
Two more single-core Delta 4s are slated to launch from Cape Canaveral.
The heavy-lift version of the Delta 4, comprising three of the rocket’s first stages bolted together, will remain in service through at least the early 2020s to deploy the NRO’s most massive satellites. Those payloads weigh too much for the Atlas 5 or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the two other launch vehicles currently certified to haul costly U.S. military and intelligence-gathering satellites into orbit.
Photos of the NROL-47 payload’s arrival at Space Launch Complex 6 and attachment to the Delta 4 rocket are posted below.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.Long-distance relationships suck, right? Luckily for those with loves in far-off lands, a new invention might make things a bit easier – that is, if you can stand to use it.
Soon, you may be kissing your distant beau via the Internet, courtesy of the??Kajimoto Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications in Japan, DigiInfo TV reports.
The device is supposed to simulate the feelings of kiss by recording one user’s tongue movements and reciprocating them to another user, who can be any number of miles away. And if you’re already feeling weird about this idea, just wait until you hear how it works.
The kiss simulator is a small box with a rod sticking out of it. To make it work, you rotate the rod with your tongue, and its movement is mirrored in the other device. Apparently, the two devices together effectively simulate the feeling of being kissed.
But it sounds like a pretty bad kiss to me. Or at least a pretty weird one.
And that’s not all. Researchers hope to create an even more realistic kiss simulator that would not only recreate users’ tongue movement, but also would simulate their breath patterns, taste, and tongue moisture. Is it just me, or does the device sound even grosser with each new advancement?
Of course, I could just be old-fashioned. Check out the video below and decide for yourself if cyber smooching is the next big thing in dating.NEWARK -- As the Bridgegate case moves along toward its Sept. 12 trial date, issues over the whereabouts of Gov. Chris Christie's cell phone, deleted text messages and the investigation leading to the charges in the case have arisen just in the past few days.
Awaiting trial in the case are William Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Bridget Anne Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to the governor. The two were indicted in connection with the abrupt shutdown of local access lanes at the George Washington Bridge in September 2013, in what federal prosecutors say was a deliberate scheme to tie up traffic in Fort Lee to punish Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee who declined to back Gov. Chris Christie in his 2013 re-election bid.
In briefs filed this week, more questions than answers have arisen about the status of Christie's cell phone. Here are five new developments:
1. No one is claiming to know where Christie's cell phone is.
A brief filed in the case late Tuesday by the law firm representing the governor's office says that lawyers took the cell phone Christie used in 2013 and examined it for evidence it was required to turn over to defense lawyers. The law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said it "returned" the phone.
But the governor has said he doesn't have it.
Prosecutors say they never had it.
It's critical to see the cell phone, defense lawyers say, because it could still contain text messages that could reveal what the governor knew while other state and Port Authority officials were testifying in late 2013 about the lane closures.
Michael Baldassarre, the attorney representing Bill Baroni, one of the defendants, said the situation is "suspicious and outrageous."
2. Prosecutors said there was no probable cause to issue a search warrant for the cell phone in the course of their investigation.
Matt Reilly, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, said the office followed a practice that is "typical in grand jury investigations:" letting outside counsel review records, including those on computers and mobile phones, and then providing relevant material to the office.
"We just don't have the legal authority to go and grab every single one of their communication devices," he said, adding that the office would need a search warrant and probable cause to take a computer or cell phone.
Further, the U.S. Attorney doesn't have the resources to seize and search so many electronic devices, he said.
3. If the defense cannot examine the phone, it will ask the judge to tell jurors during the trial that they should make the assumption that deleted text messages would have been favorable to the defense.
Lawyers for Kelly are asking for an "adverse inference instruction" to jurors. An earlier investigation found that Christie exchanged a dozen texts with former Director of the Authorities Unit Regina Egea on Dec. 9, 2013, while a state investigative panel questioned Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye about the lane closures.
Christie said he remembers nothing about the texts, Egea has said she only recalled a single text that discussed the "professionalism" of Port Authority officials who testified that day.
Gibson Dunn's filing from Tuesday says Egea deleted the texts "in the ordinary course of maintaining storage on her personal mobile device."
If they can't recover the texts, the defense wants the judge to tell the jurors to assume the information was favorable to the defendants.
The U.S. Attorney says that should not happen, since it never had possession of the cell phones or the messages, so its case shouldn't be affected.
4. The defense actually wants an extra three years of records from Christie's office.
According to Tuesday's Gibson Dunn brief, the governor's office complied with the grand jury's subpoena by providing records from January 2013 to January 2014, even though the subpoena itself is for records going back to January 2010.
Defense lawyers want to hold Gibson Dunn to the extended time period, the brief says. The law firm argues that the request is unreasonable and that the defense has offered no evidence that the massive extra production would yield anything useful for the trial.
5. The next date for court arguments about the cell phone is set.
U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton, who will preside over the Bridgegate trial, ordered lawyers for Gibson Dunn and defendants Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly to appear July 7 to argue over Gibson Dunn's bid to quash the defendants' subpoena for a host of electronic devices and communications, including the cell phone.
Tim Darragh may be reached at tdarragh@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @timdarragh. Find NJ.com on Facebook.DETROIT -- The Red Wings recalled forward Mattias Ritola from Grand Rapids (AHL). He likely will replace struggling Ville Leino in the lineup for Monday's game in Columbus, though coach Mike Babcock said after Sunday's practice that he hadn't decided.
"I don't have any idea what I'm going to do yet,'' Babcock said. "After the game last night we just went through our lineup and thought (Ritola) can help our team, so we called him up.''
Leino has just three goals and three assists in 35 games, but it is his lack of competitiveness that disappoints Babcock.
"Everything here is about competition level for every guy,'' Babcock said. "The way you make sure you play and get as much as you want is you compete every day in practice and compete every time you get a chance. If you do that with your skill set, normally everything looks after itself.''
Ritola practiced on a line with Valtteri Filppula and Drew Miller, while Leino was the odd-man out.
"Anytime someone comes in and moves into the spot you were in and now you don't have a line, I'd say that's a message,'' Babcock said. "But it's not about sending a message anymore. We got to be better. You get so much opportunity and if you don't take advantage of your opportunity, somebody else gets the opportunity.''
Ritola was sent back to the Griffins after playing last Wednesday against Chicago.
"It's a great opportunity for me to play with Fil,'' he said.
Howard starts again
Jimmy Howard will start on Monday, as Babcock will continue to ride the hot hand.
Chris Osgood has played in only six of the last 23 games, three of which he missed due to the flu.
"The way I look at it is real simple: I got a Stanley Cup because of Chris Osgood, so Ozzie's been very good,'' Babcock said. "I don't think anyone likes watching the other guy playing. It's about being the best you can be. He knows all this. He'll get his opportunity and run with it.''
Zetterberg eyes road trip
Zetterberg, who suffered a separated shoulder on Dec. 17, has been skating the last few days and hopes to be cleared to practice with the team this week. He expects to return during the four-game road trip that begins in Phoenix on Saturday.
"It's been getting a little better every day. I've been skating the last few days just to get the conditioning back,'' Zetterberg said. "As soon as I can make a decent pass and shoot the puck a little bit I will probably be skating with the guys.''Todd Morgan Beamer (November 24, 1968 – September 11, 2001) was an American passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked as part of the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was one of the passengers who attempted to regain control of the aircraft from the hijackers. During the struggle, the aircraft lost control and crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, saving the hijackers' intended target and additional victims.
Biography [ edit ]
Todd Beamer was born on November 24, 1968, in Flint, Michigan, to David Beamer, an IBM sales representative, and Peggy Jackson Beamer, a muralist,[1] the middle child of three and only son.[2] Beamer and his two sisters, Melissa and Michele, were raised "with a strong biblical value system and work ethic". The family relocated to Poughkeepsie, New York, and then to Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago, where David worked at Amdahl, a computer technology company.[1]
Beamer attended Wheaton Christian Grammar School, where he played soccer, basketball and baseball.[1] He attended Wheaton Academy, a Christian high school, from 1983 to 1985,[3] where he excelled in the same sports.[4] He was elected class vice president in his junior year. After David was promoted to vice president of Amdahl's California headquarters, the family moved, and Beamer spent his senior year at Los Gatos High School, just south of San Jose, California.[1]
Beamer attended Fresno State University, where he majored in physical therapy and played baseball, in the hopes of playing professionally, but injuries he suffered in an automobile accident ended these plans. He returned home to Illinois and transferred to Wheaton College, a Christian university. At Wheaton College he majored initially in medicine before switching to business. He continued to play baseball and as a senior became captain of the basketball team.[1] He graduated in 1991.[5]
While at Wheaton College, he met Lisa Brosious, his future wife, during a senior seminar class.[1][4] Their first date was November 2, 1991, the 10-year anniversary of which they had been planning to celebrate at the time of his death.[4]
Beamer subsequently worked for Wilson Sporting Goods while taking night classes at DePaul University, earning an M.B.A. in June 1993.[1][4]
Beamer married Brosious on May 14, 1994, in Peekskill, New York, and they moved to Plainsboro, New Jersey, where Beamer began working with Oracle Corporation, selling systems applications and database software as a field marketing representative.[1][4] Within months, Beamer was promoted to account manager.[1]
Beamer and Lisa taught Sunday school at Princeton Alliance Church for six years, and worked in youth ministry.[1][4] Beamer also played on the church softball team. He was a staunch fan of the Chicago Cubs, Chicago Bulls and Chicago Bears.[4] In 2000, the Beamers moved to Cranbury, New Jersey,[1][4][6] with their two sons.[6]
Flight 93 [ edit ]
An American flag now flies over Gate 17 of Terminal A at Newark Liberty International Airport, departure gate of United 93.
Beamer's work forced him to travel up to four times a month, sometimes for as long as a week. In 2001, he earned a five-day trip to Italy with his wife for being a top sales performer. They returned home on Monday, September 10, at 5 pm (EST). While Beamer could have left that night for a Tuesday business meeting in California, he opted instead to spend time with his family. His wife was due the following January with their third child. He left home at 6:15 am the next morning, to take an early flight from Newark to San Francisco to meet with representatives of the Sony Corporation at 1:00pm, planning to return on a red-eye flight that night.[1][4]
United Flight 93 was scheduled to depart at 8:00am, but the Boeing 757 did not depart until 42 minutes later due to runway traffic delays. Six minutes later, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower. 15 minutes later, at 9:03 am, as United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower, United 93 was climbing to cruising altitude, heading west over New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. At 9:25 am, Flight 93 was above eastern Ohio, and its pilot radioed Cleveland controllers to inquire about an alert that had been flashed on his cockpit computer screen to "beware of cockpit intrusion." Three minutes later, Cleveland controllers could hear screams over the cockpit's open microphone. Moments later, the hijackers, led by the Lebanese Ziad Samir Jarrah, took over the plane's controls, disengaged the autopilot, and told passengers, "Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board." Beamer and the other passengers were herded into the back of the plane. The curtain between first class and economy class had been drawn, at which point Beamer saw the pilot and co-pilot lying dead on the floor just outside the curtain, their throats having been cut, as a flight attendant informed him. Within six minutes, the plane changed course and was heading for Washington, D.C.. Several of the passengers made phone calls to loved ones, who informed them about the two planes that had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City and the third into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. Beamer tried to place a credit card call through a phone located on the back of a plane seat, but was routed to a customer-service representative, who passed him on to GTE airphone supervisor Lisa Jefferson. With FBI agents listening in on their call, Beamer informed Jefferson that hijackers had taken over United 93, that one passenger had been killed, and mentioned the dead pilots. He also stated that two of the hijackers had knives, and that one appeared to have a bomb strapped around his waist. When the hijackers veered the plane sharply south, Beamer exclaimed, "We're going down! We're going down!"[1][7][8]
Flight 93 crash site
Following this, the passengers and flight crew decided to act.[1] According to accounts of cell phone conversations, Beamer, along with Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett and Jeremy Glick, formed a plan to take the plane back from the hijackers.[9] They were joined by other passengers, including Lou Nacke, Rich Guadagno, Alan Beaven, Honor Elizabeth Wainio, Linda Gronlund, and William Cashman, along with flight attendants Sandra Bradshaw and Cee Cee Ross-Lyles, in discussing their options and voting on a course of action, ultimately deciding to storm the cockpit and take over the plane.[1] Beamer told Jefferson that the group was planning to "jump on" the hijackers and fly the plane into the ground before the hijackers' plan could be followed through.[6][7] Beamer recited the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm with Jefferson, prompting others to join in. Beamer requested of Jefferson, "If I don't make it, please call my family and let them know how much I love them." After this, Jefferson heard muffled voices and Beamer clearly answering, "Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll." These were Beamer's last words to Jefferson.[1][7][8]
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, after the plane's voice data recorder was recovered, it revealed pounding and crashing sounds against the cockpit door and shouts and screams in English. "Let's get them!" a passenger cries. A hijacker shouts, "Allahu akbar". Jarrah repeatedly pitched the plane to knock passengers off their feet, but the passengers continued their assault and at 10:02:17, a male passenger said, "Turn it up!" A second later, a hijacker said, "Pull it down! Pull it down!" At 10:02:33, Jarrah was heard to plead, "Hey! Hey! Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me." The plane crashed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 580 miles per hour, killing everyone on board. The plane was twenty minutes of flying time away from its suspected target, the White House or the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. According to Vice President Dick Cheney, President George W. Bush had given the order to shoot the plane down had it continued its path to Washington.[1]
Legacy [ edit ]
Beamer's name is located on Panel S-68 of the National September 11 Memorial's South Pool, along with those of other passengers of Flight 93.
Beamer was survived by his wife, Lisa, their sons, David and Andrew (known as "Drew"), who were three and one at the time of Beamer's death, and their daughter Morgan.[6][10][11][12] In an address to a joint session of Congress and the American people on September 20, 2001, which Lisa Beamer attended, President Bush praised the courage of United 93's passengers, naming Beamer in particular, whom he called "an exceptional man." In a November 8 address from the World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, Bush would invoke Beamer's last-heard words, saying, "Some of our greatest moments have been acts of courage for which no one could have been prepared. But we have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let's roll!"[1] He would use them again in the 2002 State of the Union address: "For too long our culture has said, 'If it feels good, do it.' Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: 'Let's roll.'"[13]
Beamer's posthumous daughter, Morgan Kay,[14] was born January 9, 2002, four months after Beamer's death. The President and First Lady Laura Bush were among those who sent letters to Morgan upon her birth.[15][16]
A nonprofit foundation was founded in October 2001 to counsel traumatized children of 9/11 victims and survivors.[1][17] Beamer's best friend, Doug Macmillan, quit his job to become the administrator of the Foundation.[8]
In 2002, Beamer's widow, Lisa, wrote a book with coauthor Ken Abraham, Let's Roll! Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage.
In 2002, the passengers of Flight 93, including Beamer, were posthumously awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.[18][19]
The Cranbury, New Jersey post office was dedicated to Beamer on May 4, 2002, as a result of an Act of Congress authored by Congressman Rush D. Holt, Jr.. The bill was signed into law by President George W. Bush.[17][20]
In 2003, Wheaton College honored Beamer, an alumnus, by opening the Todd M. Beamer Center, which encompasses Anderson Commons, Coray Alumni Gym and the Student Center located on the lower level.[5][17] That same year, Todd Beamer High School opened in Federal Way, Washington.[17][21]
In February 2010, the city of Fresno, California dedicated Todd Beamer Park.[22]
Beamer's name appears on the third panel at the Flight 93 National Memorial, seen here with the visitor center in the background.
The Flight 93 National Memorial located at the crash site in Stonycreek Township was completed and opened on September 10, 2015. The site includes a concrete and glass visitor center,[24] and a white marble Wall of Names—completed in 2011 —on which Beamer's name and those of his 32 fellow passengers and seven crewmembers are engraved on individual panels.[25]
At the National 9/11 Memorial, Beamer and the other passengers and crew of Flight 93 are memorialized at the South Pool, on Panel S-68.[26] An Oracle business card bearing Beamer's name and his two-tone Oyster Perpetual Datejust Rolex wristwatch, both of which were found damaged at the crash site, are on display inside the memorial museum.[27] The Flight 93 National Memorial was completed and opened to family members of the victims on September 10, 2015.
On September 10, 2013, Wheaton Academy honored Beamer by unveiling a plaque dedicated to him on the grounds of the Academy, next to a plaque of a former student who was killed in Afghanistan.[3]
Alpha Company of the 1-148 Infantry RGT, Ohio Army National Guard, adopted the motto "Let's Roll" to honor Beamer. The company deployed to northern Afghanistan in 2012 for 9 months.
In popular culture [ edit ]
Beamer was portrayed by David Alan Basche in the film United 93, and by Brennan Elliott in the TV movie Flight 93.The term “marijuana” enjoys a secure place in the American lexicon. The recent drive to legalize the drug for medicinal purposes has certainly helped loft the word into the mainstream. Marijuana-legalization movements for recreational use in Colorado and Washington state have played a role, too, as has the nascent legalization and decriminalization campaign sweeping through Latin America, most notably in Uruguay.
But throughout the 19th century, Americans used the word “cannabis” when referring to the plant. Pharmaceutical companies like Bristol-Myers Squib and Eli Lilly used cannabis in medicines — widely sold in U.S. pharmacies — to treat insomnia, migraines and rheumatism. From 1840 to 1900, U.S. scientific journals published hundreds of articles touting the therapeutic benefits of cannabis.
So why does the term “marijuana” dominate the discourse in the United Sates, while most people in Europe and large swaths of Latin America refer to the drug as cannabis, the botanical name for the plant?
The answer, in part, is found in the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. After the upheaval of the war, scores of Mexican peasants migrated to U.S. border states, taking with them their popular form of intoxication, what they termed “mariguana.”
Upon arrival, they encountered anti-immigrant fears throughout the Southwest — prejudices that intensified after the Great Depression. Analysts say this bigotry played a key role in instituting the first marijuana laws — aimed at placing social controls on the immigrant population.
In an effort to marginalize the new migrant population, the first anti-cannabis laws were targeted |
to feature a live version of the character, with an actress performing the role on screen. This meant there was actually a real Carmen Sandiego, but the show tried to downplay its decision and never revealed who played the role, leaving the credit a mystery.
The year 2016 has been a bleak one for humanity. I’ve had a hard time falling asleep many nights after long days of seeing horrible news followed by more horrible news. The world has always been filled with both good and evil, but this year certainly seems to have awoken an inflamed inspiration from those who conduct the latter.
As a lowly content creator on the internet, I am obviously powerless to make this stop in any meaningful way within the scope of my day job. But since this year marks the 20th anniversary for “Where in Time?” I decided I could at least go after the villain I grew up with in a quest to bring a very small smidgen of justice to the world.
I needed to finally find Carmen Sandiego once and for all.
Earlier this summer, I wrote a story about my quest to try and please Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook algorithm. That journey took over a year to report, but this one ended up taking even longer. I must admit that I’m certainly hoping this story will please the Facebook gods, as well.
Just as it was while growing up, the mission to find Carmen turned out to be harder and more circuitous than I could have expected. I even learned things.
And sans all the stealing, the real Carmen proved to be everything I could have hoped for.
HERE in the world is Carmen Sandiego...
The case began with the end credits for “Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?” Even though she was the namesake character, no actress was listed as playing Carmen Sandiego.
"Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?"/PBS Who in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Actress Lynne Thigpen played the Chief in multiple television and video game iterations of the “Carmen Sandiego” brand. As the legendary figure that’d help players find Carmen while also teaching them basic facts about the world, she certainly deserved top billing.
Then there’s the hero of this specific “Carmen” series. Squadron Leader and host Kevin Shinick would guide kid contestants in their quest to capture Carmen. The Squadron Leader was certainly an important part of the show.
But after listing just those two roles, the acting credits switch into the general “Cast.” As per usual, Carmen Sandiego can’t be found.
The show purposefully kept the actress’ identity a secret. While actors Thigpen and Shinick would make media appearances, Carmen was always mysteriously absent.
"Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?"/PBS Lynne Thigpen as The Chief and Kevin Shinick as the Squadron Leader. ACME's finest.
The stars of “Where in Time?” would travel the country in character to promote the show to children and their parents. Carmen didn’t join them.
The show probably assumed Carmen’s presence would confuse the kids. The real Carmen Sandiego hanging around a press area with Chief and the Squadron Leader wouldn’t have made much sense.
Perhaps that time Carmen Sandiego stole the Golden Gate Bridge was an inside job, the kids might’ve thought. Maybe the president paid Carmen to steal the Constitution to facilitate a military coup?
These are questions no grade-schooler should ask while just learning the basics of world history and geography.
Just like the video games, Carmen never showed her face on the television show, so you couldn’t get a decent look.
"Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?"/PBS Carmen Sandiego as the leader of V.I.L.E., i.e., "Villains' International League of Evil."
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single instance where Carmen Sandiego allowed her whole face to be shown in a video game or during a TV appearance. Her live-action appearances did not break this trend.
The real mystery, though, is how Carmen pulled off so many capers with such a small range of vision. In the above photo, how would she even know the difference between stealing the Grand Canyon versus a less impressive hole in the ground?
Since the show aired, gumshoes have speculated that general cast member Janine LaManna played Carmen.
In the “Where in Time?” acting credit list, “Janine LaManna” gets fifth billing, third in just the “Cast” section. Certainly a bizarre placement for the actress presumably behind the show’s lead character.
Since the show aired, fan forums and Wikipedia have listed LaManna as having the part. Old articles in The New York Times and Newsday about the actress’ other work note her time embodying Carmen as an aside.
Sources of confirmation remain scarce, but it seemed as if LaManna had the role. If true, she would be the first person to ever officially play the part. Including LaManna, only two women have ever portrayed Carmen, as another actress had the part in the second “Where in Time?” season.
Still, LaManna never did an interview about being Carmen Sandiego.
As LaManna seemed like the best place to start, I decided to try and reach out. But despite being a well-known Broadway actress, she had gone completely off the grid.
Sylvain Gaboury via Getty Images Janine LaManna and Christina Applegate at the Broadway opening of "Sweet Charity" in 2005.
Since supposedly playing the part of Carmen, LaManna went on to star in many Broadway plays, the last of which was “The Drowsy Chaperone” in 2007.
After that, the actress seemed to have disappeared from the public eye. The most recent image listed for her on professional photo service Getty Images is from 2005. She’s not on social media. She doesn’t have a publicity agent listed.
Just as I was chasing after the role she might have played 20 years ago, I had to go on a journey to find LaManna.
I searched for any associates and sent messages about my case. I also decided to email every address with a name even close to “Janine LaManna”... to no success.
Todd Van Luling This person was unfortunately not Carmen Sandiego.
If asked when I was 5 years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’m not sure I would have said “gumshoe.” But I definitely wanted to find Carmen Sandiego.
Not wanting to let the dream die, I risked bothering quite a few people who seemed remotely connected to Janine LaManna. I started with former co-workers before trying to find contact information for some of her theater acquaintances. Not being able to find a solid email for LaManna, I tried various variations of her name in the address line, asking these people if they were the LaManna I was looking for.
They were not.
Desperate for a lead, I thought back to how I would find Carmen in my youth. I realized I was in a major city and could possibly ask passersby questions about geography and history for clues.
"Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?"/Brøderbund Software Only one of the most important cities in the United States? Perhaps second to San Diego.
The main conceit of the Carmen Sandiego games I played while growing up was that you’d travel to different cities and ask the strangers there for clues. The strangers would then give you clues in cryptic trivia-esque ways, saying something like, “I heard that person went to the state of potatoes.” Given a barely helpful response such as that, you’d have to learn which state is most proud of their potatoes and travel there.
While living in New York City over the last three years, I’ve never encountered a stranger that talks like this. I have heard people yelling to themselves phrases like, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat!” But I don’t think that would have led me to LaManna.
Still, I wondered if I went full-out in dedication to the quest, strangers would know how to react.
I looked into a detective costume suitable for catching LaManna in Times Square. I found one that somewhat mirrored her getup.
Amazon The entire history of human commerce led up to this purchase.
I don’t typically spend money for stories, but these very authentic detective clothes were tempting.
When you’re on a big case ― just trying to blend in with the locals in seedy parts of town while hunting for clues ― nothing works better than wearing a bright yellow suit and hat.
I figured if I went to Times Square, passersby would respect me and spill the trivia-based clues they somehow had about LaManna’s whereabouts.
But in looking closer at the reviews, I learned the fedora color was unfortunately a “banana yellow.” Not wanting to be a fedora-wearing banana man, I got nervous and bailed.
Amazon Despite consuming two bananas a day, I refuse to become what I eat.
Bright yellow I can deal with. Back in high school, I used to wear highlighter-yellow clothes on my running team all the time.
But banana yellow just isn’t me.
Also, in a strange coincidence, while I was looking at this costume, my girlfriend messaged me, “how do bananas smell so strong lol, when apples and clementines and berries and stuff do NOT smell crazy.”
Even if it would lead to solving this case, I decided I couldn’t be a banana man.
Alas, right as I thought all was lost, LaManna emerged from my previous emails. And the supposed Carmen said, “Sorry you had a hard time locating me!”
Todd Van Luling Carmen, the whole point is that it's supposed to be hard to find you. No need to apologize.
In the video games, you don’t really get to talk to Carmen. She might say a more cool and clever version of, “Oh, no, you caught me,” but then the Chief’s special forces would whisk her away to be put behind bars.
Here was an email in my inbox, though, inviting me to have a longer conversation with the woman of mystery.
After almost a lifetime of fruitless chases, Carmen was allowing me to finally ask her a few questions.
We got on the phone and LaManna confirmed that she was Carmen Sandiego. The search is over, Chief.
LaManna remembered filming the episodes in the summer of 1996, just a few months before the show would air in the fall. The cast shot all their scenes at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York. It was “a fairly standard TV schedule” in LaManna’s memory, with a 6 a.m. makeup start.
This was LaManna’s first television show and a big break of sorts. Her whole family would watch the show, including her nieces (as long as they didn’t have soccer practice).
“I almost wish that I had been a mom at the time, because I loved working with the kids,” said LaManna. Speaking about the children on the show, LaManna explained that some were ready for television and “gung-ho,” but predictably many were pretty scared. I sometimes got scared just watching Carmen from the safety of my childhood home, so I understood.
As the show had tried to hide her true identity, this was LaManna’s first-ever interview about the role. She talked in length about what it had been like to be Carmen and shared photos from way back when.
Wendy Stuart LaManna as Carmen Sandiego. The face is still obscured.
Crafting the character of Carmen was a bit tricky for LaManna, since previous iterations of the role weren’t readily available to watch. Nobody had ever officially played the character in person and it would be hard to find her brief appearances in the children’s video games.
“It seemed to me that she was a bit of a diva,” LaManna said of trying to emulate Carmen from what she knew about her. “So, I kind of gave her a little bit of that.” The actress was nervous to get Carmen right. “Once you embody a character that hasn’t been embodied yet, that’s a big responsibility.”
But, as mentioned earlier, if she hadn’t gotten it fully right (which of course, she had), it wouldn’t have been a huge hit on her career since the role went uncredited. “When you look up Carmen Sandiego on the web now, they basically list Kevin and Lynne and then the crew, so Carmen isn’t really one of the first characters,” LaManna said. “You’d think Carmen would be the first.”
LaManna elaborated on how she didn’t do press for the role and why the show wanted to keep her identity a secret. “Because of the mysterious aspect of her, I don’t think they ever wanted an actor to be [associated with Carmen],” said LaManna. “They didn’t ever want to reveal my face probably. Then you would reveal Carmen. But don’t forget, the internet was not [as useful back then]. It wasn’t that easy to find stuff. Everything had to go through the press.”
Twenty years later, the reveal is finally happening.
Part of the reason they kept Carmen’s true identity a secret is because LaManna also played the “good” people that would help contestants thwart Carmen on the show.
Wendy Stuart LaManna as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Blue Girl" and Lady Byron.
LaManna’s most involved job on the show actually wasn’t being Carmen, but playing various historical figures and other helpers during the game-show aspect of the series. According to her memory, she shot all of the Carmen footage at the beginning of the production and then would just portray other characters day-to-day throughout the summer.
The costume designer for the show, Wendy Stuart, received an Emmy nomination for the first season and LaManna had nothing but praise for her work. “She and I had just clicked in such a way,” LaManna said.
Over the course of the 65 episodes in Season 1, LaManna played about a dozen historical characters, as she recalled. Characters included Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lady Byron (pictured above) as well as the more esoteric “Blue Girl,” who perhaps existed in some alternate timeline of history. Maybe with Carmen’s affinity for red, the show felt “Blue Girl” would be the perfect foil.
Further shaking my conception of good versus evil, LaManna suggested I also talk to the person who chased her all those years ago, Squadron Leader Kevin Shinick.
"Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?" The Squadron Leader had one job to do. And I did it for him.
After two decades, LaManna still had very fond memories of working with the cast, including Thigpen and Shinick, who played Carmen’s adversaries.
Thigpen died in 2003 after a cerebral hemorrhage, causing her hometown of Joliet, Illinois, to name an elementary school in her honor.
“Watching her work, whenever she was in the room, that was so exciting,” said LaManna. “If I’d cross paths with her in the makeup room, I was always so excited because she was such an icon, especially in TV.”
LaManna insisted I talk to Shinick, who still works as an actor. “Kevin was great to work with because he had to do a lot of ad-libbing... ” LaManna broke out into laughter remembering her co-star on set.
“Kevin just had that... Kevin was perfectly cast. I don’t know how else to say it. He was just so funny and he was so quick, but sweet. He had that perfect combination of being kind of goofy funny and he was accessible to the kids.”
These two were supposed to be enemies on the show, but that certainly didn’t seem to mirror real life. “We just laughed a lot because it was lot of fun,” added LaManna.
On the phone, Shinick expressed that he felt LaManna was the embodiment of Carmen.
Wendy Stuart It's possible Carmen has just one eye. She really likes to keep that other one private.
”Janine was the first one to breathe life into this character,” Shinick said during a phone interview. “And I have to tell you, when you meet Janine, she embodied everything that I thought would be great in Carmen Sandiego. She’s beautiful, she had that great hair. She just had that mystery to her, and I thought she did such a beautiful job of bringing this iconic character to life. It was pitch-perfect in my opinion.”
Shinick corroborated that the show’s masterminds wanted to keep her credit a mystery as it could have confused the children. “You know, Kevin Shinick was a Squadron Leader, but if they said, ‘Janine LaManna was Carmen and Betsy Ross,’ it may lose some of the mystique.”
Throughout the call, Shinick stressed that LaManna was the one true Carmen.
“I still remember seeing Janine coming out in that red coat and that fedora and thinking, ‘Wow, she nailed it. That is Carmen Sandiego,’” said Shinick. “Something about it when Janine came out, I thought, ‘Wow, that is it. That’s the one I’ve envisioned all my life.’”
The lady in red.
At the end of our conversation, Squadron Leader Shinick asked if he could get Carmen’s LaManna’s contact information.
"Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?" It's honorable that he's still searching for Carmen Sandiego after all these years.
Shinick now has a 5-year-old daughter who recently discovered an action figure that was made in his likeness for the show. The two have been watching the show together on YouTube and he’s been happy that it seems to hold up.
“Because it’s a history quiz show, it’s still incredibly relevant and the answers aren’t dated,” said Shinick. “Going back now with my daughter to see how well it replays and how relevant it still is, it’s just an honor to be a part of something I think stands the test of time like that.”
Growing up, I definitely thought Shinick was a hero. If I had known there was an action figure, I would have wanted it to go along with my Michael Jordan toy from “Space Jam,” which premiered the same year as “Where in Time?”
The end of my conversation with Shinick seemed to emulate the show, as he asked if I could tell him where Carmen was. To be fair, more specifically, “Do you have contact info for Janine?”
This was my time to finally win the game. But after the bonding moment I’d had with LaManna, I felt my idea of right and wrong had become more complicated. I couldn’t betray her whereabouts.
My gut reaction, built in from childhood, gave me pause to let him know how to find her. I told him I’d see if she was up for getting on a phone call.
After my awkward stalling and pausing, Shinick eventually gave me his phone number to pass along to LaManna in case she was up for reaching out.
“You know what, you can give her my number,” said Shinick. “I was just going to say hello to her.”
No mention about locking her up in a time-jail. It didn’t seem like a trap.
This wasn’t the end of the long and winding road for Carmen, right?
It turns out the two had mutually fond feelings for each other all along. They spoke and dealt the last blow to my concept of heroes and villains from childhood.
Wendy Stuart LaManna as a 1950s mom with the Squadron Leader. The show could have ended right here.
“The only thing that sticks out is not so much specific stuff with Janine, but we would laugh all the time,” Shinick told me. I shouldn’t have worried he would lock her up like he did on the show. In a way, it was secretly a story of friendship between two fated enemies all along.
“It’s so funny because she’s the villain and Chief and I were the heroes... she was supposed to be this mysterious evil woman, but she’s got such a great sense of humor and such a great personality that we just had a blast every time we were on the set together,” said Shinick.
I don’t know what the moral to this story is except that things that seem so clear-cut in childhood often take on shades of gray in adulthood.
“I think Carmen was really neat because she was a villain and yet she wasn’t villainous,” LaManna told me during our conversation.
So where exactly in the world is Carmen Sandiego now?
"Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?" A spotlight-worthy investigation.
After the first season of “Where in Time?” LaManna left to pursue theater. She assumed that the show would be on for many seasons and that she could eventually come back.
However, despite my dutiful watching, “Where in Time?” only lasted one more season with an alternate actress filling in as Carmen.
As previously mentioned, LaManna went on to successfully become a Broadway star over the next decade, but has admittedly gone off the grid more recently, as she put it.
“Since I was kind of away from New York for a couple years, I decided not to do Facebook and Twitter and all of that because I wasn’t necessarily doing anything that required a lot of publicity,” explained LaManna. “I said, ‘OK, I’m just going to kind of drop out for a little bit.’”
She added, “So, that’s why you cant find me anywhere.”
As she’s now married to an army officer, LaManna has been traveling all over the globe for years. She said her current whereabouts are off the record.
Carmen Sandiego Never stop running, Carmen.
LaManna has two children with her army officer partner. They’ve been on the move quite a bit since she took a break from acting to raise her young kids. “I can’t really say that I’m in one place or the other, because it could change in a week.” Once Carmen, always Carmen.
Though, she now plans to start acting again, as her children are growing up.
Her daughter is “just about the right age” to start watching “Where in Time?” which LaManna is excited to share.
Perhaps nobody could recognize Carmen Sandiego behind that red-brimmed fedora all those years ago, but even without help from her mom, I have a feeling LaManna’s daughter will be able to identify the real Carmen immediately.
I was barely half a decade old when I first tried to thwart Carmen Sandiego. After two decades I had finally found her... and she was actually really nice.
Courtesy of Todd Van Luling's parents Maybe I can finally experience the childhood I lost while chasing this case.
At the end of my conversation with LaManna, she had an apology for me of sorts. “Sorry it took you so long, but you’re pretty tenacious about it.”
She laughed and continued, “I thought, ‘My God, I owe it to him. He tried so hard to get me.’”
It may have taken 20 years, but I finally found Carmen Sandiego.
Let God, the Chief and Mark Zuckerberg know, I am now content.More recently, some programs competing in computer challenges have come close to fooling one-third of interrogators, as required in a restricted form of Turing Test, in which a program must be indistinguishable from a human in its ability to hold a text-based conversation. During the recent contest organised at the Royal Society in London, more than 30 per cent of judges were deceived by the Eugene Goostman chatbot. As discussed last week in Science, few scientists believe that Goostman displayed the sort of “intelligence” that British computer pioneer Alan Turing had in mind. In its original incarnation, Turing’s test was intended to be a way of determining whether a computer was displaying signs of a new breed of machine intelligence, known as artificial intelligence, or AI. (The computer HAL 9000, depicted in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, was one of the first fictional machines to pass the test.) One reason why AI has proved to be so controversial and elusive is that the concept of intelligence is hard to define. Even a working definition is difficult to construct. All the same, let’s say intelligence, in the broadest sense of the word, refers to the ability to perceive and to understand meaning. “Intelligence is about external performance,” says Australian National University philosopher David Chalmers. “In a sense, it’s about sophisticated behaviour.”
Based on this definition, might computers be anywhere near achieving an artificial version of such intelligence? “Probably not,” replies Sydney University computational linguist James Curran, who directs the National Computer Science School. The Turing Test, he reminds, was a thought experiment – performed just by thinking about it – which Turing proposed to avoid the question of what it means to be intelligent. “His idea was basically to say that, if enough people think you’re intelligent, you are intelligent,” Dr Curran notes. Another way to judge whether or not a chatbot is intelligent is to follow a conversation, such as one that took place between Goostman and Scott Aaronson from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. “Goostman avoided answering most of the questions – so he might make a good politician but not a human,” Dr Curran quips. Dr Curran is not alone: most experts doubt that a program will pass a so-called full Turing Test for some time yet. And if it did – would that mean the machine had demonstrated “intelligence” of some sort? Such questions have been the source of philosophical debate since the 1950s.
Many researchers now feel the test is of little value as a measure of intelligence. “That’s because human beings are too ready to attribute intelligence to things that don’t have it: dolls, puppets, constellations of stars, and so on,” reflects Murdoch University roboticist Graham Mann. “Human psychology is a sucker for things that appear to talk and this means that the test, as normally understood, is much too weak,” Dr Mann explains. Take over? The issue of artificial intelligence begs the question of whether silicon might someday supplant carbon-based life forms. At least one respected international journal, Cognitive Processing, has agonised over this. American philosopher Daniel Dennett sums up the feelings of some scientists when suggesting that humans are immensely complex and able computational machines. Brute force computing power, he reckons, might eventually mimic the human mind.
Other computer experts, however, dismiss the idea of AI as silicon pie in the sky. Intelligence, they argue, is special – and involves more than very fast, very extensive digital information processing. What else might it involve? Dr Mann, for one, believes that something missing from our current conception of intelligence – and which greatly disadvantages efforts to create intelligent behaviour in machines – is that we regard the brain as a box of processes that takes inputs in the form of sensors, or senses, and produces outputs in the form of actuators, or muscles. “This comes from the way we traditionally conceive of computers; you input information, do calculations on it and get some output,” Dr Mann points out. Natural intelligence, too, depends on sensory inputs and outputs, he adds. “But it has something else: another dimension of processing that manages the personal agenda of a living system.” This other system, he explains, ministers to physiological needs including hunger, thirst, self-protection and reproduction. “It is deeply connected with emotions, which are nature’s solution to controlling behaviour without complete information or rational processing that evolved much later in humans,” Dr Mann says.
At a rational level, the “other system” manages a person’s many, sometimes conflicting, goals. “A person’s needs and ambitions matter to them and are intimately mixed up with their cognition – in a way that’s almost never present in today’s AI designs,” he explains. “When we start to design intelligent systems to include motives and the emotional signalling that accompanies them – and to use these as a reference standard against which perceived events and objects can be sorted, evaluated and organised – we’ll have made a major step towards achieving true machine intelligence.” Evolution “Intelligence can be identified with specific cognitive functions,” says Monash University computer scientist Kevin Korb. “This is suggested by the fact that it’s a product of evolution – and evolution through natural selection selects for functional characteristics.” Another alternative, Associate Professor Korb explains, is that scientists use hugely improved nano-recordings of the brain and put them through some huge data mining and modelling processes to build a brain emulator.
“In that case, we’d have an artificial human brain – but it would have as much understanding of its brain as we do of ours, in other words, rather little. So, it would be in no special position to improve itself, and no Technological Singularity would be imminent, even though the machine would be intelligent.” Super-software When IBM supercomputer “Deep Blue” defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997, the then reigning world chess champion declared “quantity had become quality”. What he meant was that, even though differences between Deep Blue and earlier chess computers were related to the computer’s speed, a new kind of artificial intelligence had somehow emerged. “It is likely that part of what we recognise as natural intelligence in animals, including humans, is based on the speed of mental computing operations,” says Kristinn Thorisson, director of the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines at Reykjavik University.
As computers get faster and more powerful, Associate Professor Thorisson says, they will start resembling machines that “think”. New designs and computer architectures would require the development of super-software systems. In addition to neural networks, which take their inspiration from biology in trying to mimic the way the brain works, and genetic algorithms, which mimic the process of evolution in the natural world, the software might include as-yet-uninvented methods. Computer scientists at Reykjavik University, for instance, are refining programs and languages that share common ground with self-evolving biological systems. “Natural intelligence, as observed in humans and animals, is the result of multiple systems and subsystems, implementing a complex pattern of information flow and controlled interaction,” Professor Thorisson says. How can complex interactions produce a thinking mind? “This question is basically an architectural one: how the system operates as a whole,” he explains. “Without a deep understanding of architecture, we will never understand intuition, attention, insight, or understand understanding itself.”
Caution If and when it does arrive, a general form of artificial intelligence may be dangerous, either in itself or in the hands of certain people, warns Oxford University computer scientist Stuart Armstrong. “It may be able to work a thousand times faster than humans, and to copy itself millions of times and thus operate as a huge group, all within minutes,” Professor Armstrong explains. “It might even improve its own intelligence or develop new technologies that give it great wealth and power. In this situation, we have to ensure that the AI is safe – since great power and good motivations are very distinct things.” Prize Every year, the Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence is awarded to a lucky chatbot considered by a panel of four judges to be the most human-like. The contest involves administering a version of the Turing Test.
Is this year’s Loebner Prize, due to be announced in November, likely to go to Goostman’s creators, Russian-born Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian-born Eugene Demchenko? “The Loebner Prize has a different set of competition rules, and the interaction time between judges and the contestants – which could be a human or a chatbot – has varied each year over the past few years,” says RMIT computer scientist Xiaodong Li. In the 2010 competition, for instance, the interaction time was 25 minutes. “Such a lengthy conversation may affect Goostman’s performance,” Associate Professor Li points out. Professor Armstrong’s guess is that Goostman will not win the much-coveted prize. “This latest success has been well publicised, so the whole ‘persona’ trick – with the chatbot being a young kid with limited English language skills – may be useless,” he says. “Without that, Goostman has little chance.” Dr Mann, on the other hand, is more upbeat. Goostman may win the Loebner, he suggests: “But only if it competes according to the rules – which have a tendency to change from year to year. I met Hugh Loebner once, and he certainly won’t be giving away his big prize too easily!”
Topics Whether Goostman, or another chatbot, wins the prize depends on the topics the judges discuss, says Dr Curran. “There are a lot of pre-programmed – rather than learnt – areas of conversation and avoidance strategies in these chatbots. If the judges ask questions that suit this pre-programming, then any system could be more convincing.” By way of comparison, Dr Curran’s department at Sydney University has a system that sends out an automatic welcome email when a student enrols. “Some students reply, saying hello or thank you,” he explains. “In some sense, those people have been fooled into believing our system is human – but it is clearly not intelligent at all.” Apple’s intelligent iPhone assistant, Siri, has several amusing responses programmed by its developers. For instance, to the question “Siri, will you marry me?” it has said “You should know you’re not the only one who’s asked”. “Does this mean Siri itself is funny – or that its developers are funny?” Dr Curran asks. Links
Read Dr Mann’s research papers at: http://aai.murdoch.edu.au/publications/index.php?action=showcategory&by=author&pub=Graham%20A.%20Mann Try your hand at the $100,000 Loebner Prize at: www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html Read the conversation between Goostman and Scott Aaronson at: www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1858 VCAA link Science VCE study page: www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Pages/vce/studies/envscience/envscindex.aspx
Please send bright ideas for new topics to pspinks@fairfaxmedia.com.auPosted by Chris Scott Barr on May 15, 2012
If you’ve been trying to get onto Diablo III tonight, then as we’ve said before, Error 37 seems to be the biggest thing hindering most people. However, it is not the only error message showing up. There are four others that seem to be causing people some concern: Error 3004, 3006, 3007, and 300008.
According to Blizzard, these all all seem to boil down to connection errors, but not on their end. They have already posted a support article that outlines a variety of ways to fix this issue. Of course, it’s really all just a fancy way of saying “turn it off and on again.”
The only thing you might need to do outside of your normal connectivity troubleshooting is to open a few specific ports on your firewall. These would be 80, 1119, and 6881 – 6999. These will probably already be open, but depending on your security, some of them might not be. If you’ve encountered any of these errors and fixed them using a different method, feel free to share in the comments below.Ba Xi and Ying Xue have gone through two years’ intensive survival training under the watchful eyes of experts dressed in black and white panda costumes scented with the animals’ urine. The two year old bears have proven so adept at surviving in the wild they spent several days on the run avoiding rangers in their forested training sanctuary and had to be lured back with treats. Tomorrow (Thursday) both animals will be given a final veterinary check before being let loose in the Liziping nature reserve in China’s Sichuan province. Over recent months, Ba Xi and Ying Xue have been taught to forage and also how to avoid dangers posed by predators.
REUTERS Giant pandas Ba Xi and Ying Xue have gone through 2 years of survival training before being released
As many as 1,800 giant pandas survive in the wild and by merging their vanishing habitats will help them mingle and mate
One the techniques used by trainers working with pandas is confronting them with a stuffed leopard scented with big cat urine and recordings of their fearsome growls. If a baby panda sniffs instead of running away, it fails the test. Panda urine is also a requisite scent for the trainers dressed in their black and white overalls and head coverings as it stops the animals assimilating or becoming comfortable with humans. With male Ba Xi weighing 143lb and female Ying Xue at 130lb, and both in good health as they approach the age of 30 months, officials agreed earlier this month they were ready to be released.
GETTY The pandas have been taught to forage and how to avoid dangers from predators
This will be only the second time that a pair have been set loose together. There has been mixed fortunes for single releases. China’s first captive-bred panda to go wild in 2006 only survived for a year. He was killed fighting with other pandas over territory. China has cracked the problem of helping diffident giant pandas overcome their breeding sensibilities to produce generations of captive babies, with the population reaching 520 individuals, many of which are held in zoos around the world. Yet to keep genetic diversity buoyant, China’s conservationists want to release more pandas into the wild.
GETTY The pandas were given a series of final veterinary checks before being released
Plans are in process for creating a vast reserve across 10,000 square miles of remote, bamboo-forested mountains between the cities of Chengdu and Xian by linking 70 small reserves. As many as 1,800 giant pandas survive in the wild and by merging their vanishing habitats will help them mingle and mate. Introducing captive bred animals like Ba Xi and Ying Xue is an additional bonus to helping arguably the planet’s most famous endangered animal stave off extinction. The intensive efforts of the China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda in recent years have recently seen the species reclassified from endangered to vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, custodians of the so-called Red List.
REUTERS Workers dress in panda masks as they track pandas recently released into the wildThis article is about the fraternal order founded in 1819 in Baltimore, United States. For other uses, see Odd Fellows (disambiguation)
"IOOF" redirects here. For other uses, see IOOF (disambiguation)
The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) is a non-political and non-sectarian international secret society and fraternal order of Odd Fellowship. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Wildey in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Evolving from the Order of Odd Fellows founded in England during the 1700s, the IOOF was originally chartered by the Independent Order of Oddfellows Manchester Unity in England but has operated as an independent organization since 1842, although it maintains an inter-fraternal relationship with the English Order.[5] The order is also known as the Triple Link Fraternity, referring to the order's "Triple Links" symbol, alluding to its motto "Friendship, Love and Truth".[5]
While several unofficial Odd Fellows |
all I had was my wits, a compass, and (probably more than a little bit of) luck. And a browser open with the generic map, of course — without that, I wouldn’t have even known what direction to take in the first place. That helps, but not as much as you’d think — there’s a lot that just isn’t on the map, and because the scale and detail is what it is, locating suitable landmarks can be a challenge.
The fact that DayZ understands and treasures these challenges is a big part of what makes it so much fun.
See Also
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in trying out, the DayZ website should be your first stop, obviously.
As I mentioned, DayZ is an Arma II mod. Arma II is a a military simulation with a heavy emphasis on realism — it’s most decidedly not a run and gun game. You can get the Arma II Combined Operations pack (which includes the main game and the Operation Arrowhead expansion, both of which are required for the mod) on Steam.
There’s an interesting PC Gamer interview with the mod’s creator, Dean “Rocket” Hall.
And if you want to get a good idea of what the gameplay can be like, I strongly recommend CHKilroy’s “The Days Ahead” videos — they’re done on an older version of the mod, so some things have changed, but it’s pretty fascinating stuff:
Enjoy.
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Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, tweeted a news story about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s comments along with a photograph of former NBA star and apparent Kim Jong Un fan Dennis “The Worm” Rodman, captioned “Future Secretary of State?”
And a Clinton campaign press release used the tinsel-haired mogul’s words to argue that his foreign policy would be “unpredictable and dangerous.”
Trump touched off the debate over North Korea policy on Tuesday in an interview with Reuters, saying he was open to speaking to Kim and that he would “put a lot of pressure on China” to use its considerable leverage to rein in the Stalinist nation’s nuclear weapons program.
“I would speak to him. I would have no problem speaking to him,” Trump said of Kim.
While the Obama Administration has put pressure on China to help defuse increasingly worrisome tensions with North Korea, direct leader-to-leader talks with Kim would be a major shift from current U.S. policy.
“Our position has always been that we have to see that they [North Korea] are serious about denuclearization,” a senior Obama aide told Yahoo News. “They have not given that indication, so we’ve been focused on upping the pressure and ensuring we are pursuing appropriate steps like missile defense.”
Trump declined to offer details of his North Korea policy, according to Reuters. And his campaign did not immediately respond to an email request for more information. But by envisioning direct, leader-to-leader talks without apparent preconditions, he was following the model set by another high-profile presidential candidate: Obama.
At a July 2007 Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C., the future president was asked “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?”
Obama’s response? “I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.”
In the same forum, Clinton said she would not, stressing: “I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don’t want to make a situation even worse.”
Later, she toughened her stance, calling Obama’s position “irresponsible and frankly naïve.”
In February 2007, Clinton had seemingly signaled greater openness to this kind of diplomacy in the context of calling for an international conference to stabilize the Middle East.
“You don’t refuse to talk to bad people. I think life is filled with uncomfortable situations where you have to deal with people you might not like,” she said. “I’m sort of an expert on that. I have consistently urged the president to talk to Iran and talk to Syria. I think it’s a sign of strength, not weakness.”
Obama dropped the idea of direct leader-to-leader talks with North Korea in early 2009 after that country again tested missiles and nuclear weapons. His policy shifted to what Clinton, as his secretary of state, described as “strategic patience in close coordination” with China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. Top administration officials later held talks with North Korean counterparts, but the notion that Obama himself would communicate directly with Kim or his late father, Kim Jong Il, never again got serious contemplation in public. Instead, the United States led the charge for increasingly tough economic sanctions on North Korea.
As secretary of state, Clinton supported Obama’s historic diplomatic outreach to Iran, including direct communications between the president and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.Manchester United + FÖLJ
Flyger till England för att göra klart – efter landskampen
avFredrik Jönsson
FOTBOLL 10 juni 2017 20:00
Följetongen är slut.
Victor Nilsson Lindelöf, 22, åker till England för att skriva kontrakt med Manchester United i veckan.
Klubben har bekräftat övergången.
Foto: IBL
Manchester United har jagat Victor Nilsson Lindelöf under en lång tid. Redan förra sommaren kom klubben med första budet till Benfica. Sedan har det varit långa förhandlingar, massor med spekulationer och skriverier.
Vid klockan 20.00 i kväll skrev Sportbladet att Nilsson Lindelöf kommer att presenteras av Manchester United inom en dryg vecka.
Två timmar senare bekräftade United att klubben är överens med Benfica. Klubben skriver att det enda som återstår är läkarundersökning, personligt avtal och att han kommer presenteras officiellt senare.
Åker efter landskampen
Efter matchen mot Norge, tisdag 13 juni, kommer den 22-årige försvararen att åka till England.
Första budet från United var på drygt 250 miljoner kronor. Sedan har prislappen ökat och enligt uppgifter ser den ut att hamna runt 450 miljoner kronor med bonusar inräknat.
LÄS OCKSÅ ”VNL” kan debutera – mot klubben Zlatan ryktas till
Varit förstavalet för Mourinho
Nilsson Lindelöf har varit managern José Mourinhos förstaval under flera transferfönster. Enligt uppgifter till Sportbladet har han tryckt på extra hos United för att få klart 22-åringen så fort som möjligt.
Nilsson blir den dyraste svenske försvararen någonsin och den näst dyraste övergången totalt. Zlatan Ibrahimovic är dyrast, han kostade cirka 650 miljoner när han flyttade från Inter till Barcelona.
Så mycket får VSK
Nilsson Lindelöfs moderklubb Västerås SK gjorde en uppgörelse med Benfica som gav klubben rätt till tre miljoner euro, cirka 30 miljoner kronor, oavsett om försvararen stannar i Portugal eller flyttar till en ny klubb.
Om Benfica säljer 22-åringen får VSK ytterligare tio miljoner kronor. Den svenska klubben har även rätt till solidaritetsersättning och den summan uppges också hamna runt tio miljoner kronor.
I så fall hamnar intäkterna för Västerås SK på cirka 50 miljoner kronor för Nilsson Lindelöfs flytt från Sverige.
LÄS OCKSÅ Blågult hyllas av Europa efter skrällenHis suit itches.
The last person who called in to this radio show was sorely misinformed about the current debate over temporary immigration for skilled overseas workers.
He had an argument with his wife recently.
Or girlfriend.
Or husband! God, what does it say about me that I didn’t consider that right off the bat?
He just watched a Sofia Coppola film and feels that, while her skills with pacing and characterization are undeniable, she continually displays a subtle but mean-spirited condemnation of life styles she doesn’t directly subscribe to.
We’re in a Toyota Prius. Obviously not anyone’s first choice.
Someone just requested a trip and then cancelled. We’ve got places to be!
By the end of the century, scientists reasonably predict that the Atlantic Ocean will have risen six to ten feet above its current level, causing untold damage all along the Eastern Seaboard. Countless industries would be adversely affected, if not ruined. The economy may collapse, perhaps irrevocably. The city of Miami, home to nearly half a million Americans, could potentially be submerged under several feet of water. The city as we know it might become but a ghostly echo of its past self, a mere monument to nature’s cruel dominance over us all.
Maybe his favorite pastry place is in Miami.
I feel like I glossed over the suit before. Maybe it’s not only itchy, but also indicates that he’s on his way in to work. On a weekend! Ugh!
An animal he loved died.
An animal he hates remains alive and well.
That radio station from before is now playing the hottest club anthems of 2012.
The fact that we went twelve blocks out of our way to pick up a man and his pubescent son, who is now eating an orange.
The fact that Uber Pool is a terrible, terrible idea. No reduced fare is worth this Sisyphean nightmare. This endless carnival of wandering strangers. This ever-shifting, labyrinthine route to a Bed Bath & Beyond that was a seventeen-minute walk away, at most.
The fact that this car smells like oranges, which I hate, and it’s too cold to roll down the window.
Another pickup? Where are we going to put her?
The innate dissonance between human intentions and actions, which all too often leads us to hurt the people we care the most about. Love in all its forms cannot exist without tragedy.
Maybe he just has one of those faces. He might be totally fine. Happy, even. Who am I to judge? If I made that assumption the moment I saw him, just imagine the kinds of interactions that he must have every single day. Very sad to think about.
Kid’s still eating that goddamn orange.
The fact that I should probably be paying more attention to the road.To celebrate Thunderbirds Day, which celebrates 52 years of the iconic British TV series, we were joined by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays character John Tracey in the current series Thunderbirds, and David Graham, who has played Parker since the original show.
Thomas is most famous for his role in Love Actually - and more recently in Game Of Thrones, but says being a part of Thunderbirds is a huge honour. He said: "I was a massive fan of the series as was my father. I had all the toys and the costumes, I loved it!"
David added it was an extraordinary feat that the show is still going more than 50 years after it first aired. "We thought it was something special but we had no idea 50 years later it would be this iconic show," he quipped.
David also surprised viewers but revealing his identity as the voice of another very famous children's TV character. Find out who in the video above.
Thunderbirds Are Go 5 is on ITV and CITV tomorrow at 8.30am.Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., introduced the Qualcomm RF360 Front End Solution, a comprehensive, system-level solution that addresses cellular radio frequency band fragmentation and enables for the first time a single, global 4G LTE design for mobile devices. Band fragmentation is the biggest obstacle to designing today’s global LTE devices, with 40 cellular radio bands worldwide. The Qualcomm RF front end solution comprises a family of chips designed to mitigate this problem while improving RF performance and helping OEMs more easily develop multiband, multimode mobile devices supporting all seven cellular modes, including LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, WCDMA, EV-DO, CDMA 1x, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE. The RF front end solution includes the industry’s first envelope power tracker for 3G/4G LTE mobile devices, a dynamic antenna matching tuner, an integrated power amplifier-antenna switch, and an innovative 3D-RF packaging solution incorporating key front end components. The Qualcomm RF360 solution is designed to work seamlessly, reduce power consumption and improve radio performance while reducing the RF front end footprint inside of a smartphone by up to 50 percent compared to the current generation of devices. Additionally, the solution reduces design complexity and development costs, allowing OEM customers to develop new multiband, multimode LTE products faster and more efficiently. By combining the new RF front end chipsets with Qualcomm Snapdragon all-in-one mobile processors and Gobi™ LTE modems, Qualcomm Technologies can supply OEMs with a comprehensive, optimized, system-level LTE solution that is truly global.
As mobile broadband technologies evolve, OEMs need to support 2G, 3G, 4G LTE and LTE Advanced technologies in the same device in order to provide the best possible data and voice experience to consumers no matter where they are.
“The wide range of radio frequencies used to implement 2G, 3G and 4G LTE networks globally presents an ongoing challenge for mobile device designers. Where 2G and 3G technologies each have been implemented on four to five different RF bands globally, the inclusion of LTE brings the total number of cellular bands to approximately 40,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president of product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Our new RF devices are tightly integrated and will allow us the flexibility and scalability to supply OEMs of all types, from those requiring only a region-specific LTE solution, to those needing LTE global roaming support.”
The Qualcomm RF360 front end solution also represents a significant technological advancement in overall radio performance and design, and it comprises the following components:
Dynamic Antenna Matching Tuner (QFE15xx) – The world’s first modem-assisted and configurable antenna-matching technology extends antenna range to operate over 2G/3G/4G LTE frequency bands, from 700-2700 MHz. This, in conjunction with modem control and sensor input, dynamically improves the antenna’s performance and connection reliability in the presence of physical signal impediments, like the user’s hand.
The world’s first modem-assisted and configurable antenna-matching technology extends antenna range to operate over 2G/3G/4G LTE frequency bands, from 700-2700 MHz. This, in conjunction with modem control and sensor input, dynamically improves the antenna’s performance and connection reliability in the presence of physical signal impediments, like the user’s hand. Envelope Power Tracker (QFE11xx) – The industry’s first modem-assisted envelope tracking technology designed for 3G/4G LTE mobile devices, this chip is designed to reduce overall thermal footprint and RF power consumption by up to 30 percent, depending on the mode of operation. By reducing power and heat dissipation, it enables OEMs to design thinner smartphones with longer battery life.
– The industry’s first modem-assisted envelope tracking technology designed for 3G/4G LTE mobile devices, this chip is designed to reduce overall thermal footprint and RF power consumption by up to 30 percent, depending on the mode of operation. By reducing power and heat dissipation, it enables OEMs to design thinner smartphones with longer battery life. Integrated Power Amplifier / Antenna Switch (QFE23xx) – The industry’s first chip featuring an integrated CMOS power amplifier (PA) and antenna switch with multiband support across 2G, 3G and 4G LTE cellular modes. This innovative solution provides unprecedented functionality in a single component, with smaller PCB area, simplified routing and one of the smallest PA/antenna switch footprints in the industry.
– The industry’s first chip featuring an integrated CMOS power amplifier (PA) and antenna switch with multiband support across 2G, 3G and 4G LTE cellular modes. This innovative solution provides unprecedented functionality in a single component, with smaller PCB area, simplified routing and one of the smallest PA/antenna switch footprints in the industry. RF POP™ (QFE27xx) – The industry’s first 3D RF packaging solution, integrates the QFE23xx multimode, multiband power amplifier and antenna switch, with all the associated SAW filters and duplexers in a single package. Designed to be easily interchangeable, the QFE27xx allows OEMs to change the substrate configuration to support global and/or region-specific frequency band combinations. The QFE27xx RF POP enables a highly integrated multiband, multimode, single-package RF front end solution that is truly global.
OEM products featuring the complete Qualcomm RF360 Solution are anticipated to be launched in the second half of 2013.
Qualcomm also announced today a new RF transceiver chip, the WTR1625L. The chip is the first in the industry to support carrier aggregation with a significant expansion in the number of active RF bands. The WTR1625L can accommodate all cellular modes and 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE frequency bands and band combinations that are either deployed or in commercial planning globally. Additionally, it has an integrated, high-performance GPS core that also supports GLONASS and Beidou systems. The WTR1625L is tightly integrated in a wafer scale package and optimized for efficiency, offering 20 percent power savings compared to previous generations. The new transceiver, along with the Qualcomm RF360 front end chips, is integral to Qualcomm Technologies Inc.’s single-SKU World Mode LTE solution for mobile devices that are expected to launch in 2013.
About Qualcomm
Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) is the world leader in 3G, 4G and next-generation wireless technologies. Qualcomm Incorporated includes Qualcomm’s licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of its patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of Qualcomm’s engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of its products and services businesses, including its semiconductor business, QCT. For more than 25 years, Qualcomm ideas and inventions have driven the evolution of digital communications, linking people everywhere more closely to information, entertainment and each other. For more information, visit Qualcomm’s website, OnQ blog, Twitter and Facebook pages
Except for the historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including Qualcomm Technologies’ ability to successfully design and have manufactured significant quantities of Qualcomm RF360 Front End components on a timely and profitable basis, the extent and speed to which the Qualcomm RF360 Front End components are deployed, change in economic conditions of the various ecosystems that Qualcomm Technologies’ serves, as well as the other risks detailed from time to time in Qualcomm Incorporated’s SEC reports, including the report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 25, 2012, and most recent Form 10-Q. Qualcomm Incorporated and Qualcomm Technologies undertakes no obligation to update, or continue to provide information with respect to, any forward-looking statement or risk factor, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
###Story highlights World seeing sobering signs of climate change's accelerating impacts, say politicians
But they argue that national legislation to limit emissions is advancing
U.N. action on climate change will only be credible if backed up by national legislation, they say
"The fate of our planet depend on our actions," they write
The world is seeing sobering signs of climate change's accelerating impacts, from longer, more intense droughts to stronger storms and rising seas. Yet in contrast to the slow pace of international negotiations to combat climate change, national legislation is advancing at a startling rate, a surprise to those who ascribe to the conventional wisdom that progress has waned.
Remarkably, since 1997, almost 500 climate-related laws have been passed in 66 countries covering around 88% of global greenhouse gases released by human activities. This surprising legislative momentum is happening across all continents. Encouragingly, this progress is being led by the big emerging and developing countries, such as China and Mexico, that together will represent 8 billion of the projected 9 billion people on Earth in 2050.
These are the key findings of the 4th edition of the GLOBE Climate Legislation Study, released on Thursday 27 February, the only compendium of climate legislative action created by legislators from around the world, and the most comprehensive audit yet of the extent and breadth of the emerging legislative response to climate change.
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Our message is that we believe national legislation should be at the heart of a new international agreement to tackle climate change, and this study is proof it can be achieved in every country.
While optimistic, we must also be honest. These laws are not yet enough to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, the level scientists say we must not breach if we are to avoid the worst risks of climate change. Yet these actions are putting into place the legal frameworks necessary to measure, report, verify and manage greenhouse gas emissions -- the cause of man-made climate change.
Part of the reason for this spectacular wave of progress is changing attitudes. Previously, the debate on climate change was framed by a narrative about sharing a global burden -- with governments naturally trying to minimize their share. Now, however, countries are seeing mitigating climate change -- through clean energy and energy efficiency solutions -- and strengthening resilience to its impacts, as being firmly in the national interest.
For example, 61 of the 66 countries in the GLOBE study have passed laws to promote domestic, clean sources of energy and 54 have legislated to increase energy efficiency. The former reduces reliance on imported fossil fuels, thereby mitigating exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices, increasing energy security and reducing energy poverty. The latter reduces costs and increases competitiveness. That's why the first bill U.S. Senator Markey introduced was to do both.
And it's no surprise, too, that 52 out of the 66 countries covered by the study have developed legislation to improve their resilience to the impacts of climate change, some of which we are already experiencing.
As the formal U.N. negotiations move towards Paris in 2015, the scheduled conclusion of negotiations on a post-2020 framework, this legislation is creating a strong foundation on which a post-2020 global agreement can be built.
Moreover, it is increasingly clear that not only is the agreement in Paris dependent on national legislation in place in advance, implementation of the Paris agreement will only be effective through national laws, overseen by well-informed legislators from all sides of the political spectrum.
A national "commitment" or "contribution" put forward at the U.N. will only be credible -- and durable beyond the next election -- if it is backed up by national legislation, supported by cross-party legislators, that puts in place a credible set of policies and measures to ensure effective implementation.
That is why legislators must be at the center of international negotiations and policy processes, not just on climate change, but also on the full range of sustainable development issues. And it is why, on climate change, governments must immediately prioritize supporting the implementation of national legislation between now and 2015.
GLOBE members recognize this and have been at the forefront of developing the legislative response to climate change. In 2008 UK members shaped and strengthened the Climate Change Act. In 2009, South Korean members passed "Green Growth" legislation. In 2013, members in Micronesia were instrumental in the passage of climate-related legislation showing the power of island voices.
A comprehensive climate change law is expected to pass in Costa Rica this year, and members in China, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Peru, amongst others, are developing legislation now.
However, we need to do much more. And that is why, in collaboration with the World Bank and the United Nations, GLOBE is launching the "Partnership for Climate Legislation" to promote the advance of climate-related laws.
Of course, the role of legislators does not end when legislation is passed. It is one thing to pass legislation and another to implement it. That is why GLOBE is equipping legislators to be as effective as possible in holding their governments to account. This is crucial if the agreement made in Paris in 2015 is to deliver.
Legislators -- with their formal responsibilities on legislation and oversight - are a fundamental part of an effective strategy to tackle the world's environmental and sustainable development challenges. To maximize the chances of success, they must be at the center of all international processes and negotiations. Success in Paris to create a climate agreement, the follow-through to implement the accord, and the fate of our planet depend on our actions.Share:
Pokémon Crystal coming to Nintendo eShop on Nintendo 3DS on Jan. 26
When it launched in Japan 17 years ago, Pokémon Crystal introduced many new and exciting elements to the beloved Pokémon franchise. The game, an expanded version of the popular Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver games, was the first in the Pokémon franchise to allow players to choose between a boy or girl playable character, as well as being the first game to introduce animations during Pokémon battles.
Now this groundbreaking game is coming to Nintendo eShop on the Nintendo 3DS family of systems on Jan. 26 for only $9.99.*
On the day it launches, Pokémon Crystal will also be compatible with Pokémon Bank, a paid service that lets players bring select Pokémon from classic core games to the newest core games in the series. With the addition of Pokémon Crystal to this service, it is now possible for players to bring Pokémon from all 29 core games in the series to Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon.
In this version of Pokémon Crystal, players will also have the chance to encounter the mythical Pokémon Celebi in an event after completing the game. In the original Pokémon Crystal game, Celebi could only be obtained by using a special accessory.
As with the Nintendo eShop editions of Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver, Pokémon Crystal will take advantage of the wireless communication capabilities of the Nintendo 3DS family of systems, allowing players to enjoy Link Trades and Link Battles with each other. With the Time Capsule feature, players can even trade and battle Pokémon from Pokémon Red, Pokémon Blue and Pokémon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition, which are all also available in Nintendo eShop on Nintendo 3DS.
Fans also have the option to play Pokémon Crystal on a New Nintendo 2DS XL system that resembles an iconic Poké Ball. The Poké Ball Edition New Nintendo 2DS XL system can be purchased in stores at a suggested retail price of $159.99. (The Pokémon Crystal game and Poké Ball Edition New Nintendo 2DS XL system are sold separately.)
For more information about Pokémon Crystal, visit https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/pokemon-crystal-version-3ds.
*Pokémon Crystal for the Nintendo 3DS family of systems is only playable in 2D.
Game Rated:A A
AK-CHIN RESERVATION, Ariz. (KSNV News3LV) - The landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage does not apply to Native American reservations. One American Indian is taking her tribe to court to fight for the right to marry.
As sovereign nations, American Indian tribes have its own constitution independent of the United States. According to the non-profit organization Freedom to Marry, of the 566 tribes recognized by the federal government, 12 officially recognize same-sex marriage.
Cleo Pablo is taking her tribe to court, in what could be the first lawsuit of its kind in the country.
"If you don't practice Indian law, tribal courts, people are so shocked at how different things are. Things don't work the same."
Pablo was born and raised on the Ak-Chin reservation - about 30 minutes outside of Phoenix. Her family has called the reservation home for generations.
"They all knew me when I was little. They all basically raised me. So, I'm not really sure why, but here we are," she said.
Pablo has been in a relationship with her-now wife Tara Pablo for 10 years. In many ways the two are a modern family - both women have children of their own. Tara is Jewish; Pablo is Native American.
"I knew all of these kids since they were like 10 and younger. So we've been a family - a blended family - for almost 10 years."
The couple tied the knot once it became legal in the state of Arizona.
"I think after being married and having that finality, it was just like, we can relax," she said.
But Pablo's marriage hit a dead end. The legality of her marriage changes once the couple crosses the street onto reservation land. As a tribal government, Pablo and Tara's union is actually a crime.
According to Pablo's lawsuit, the Ak-Chin constitution states "marriage between persons of the same sex is prohibited and void." Pablo could face arrest or even lose her home on the reservation.
So she moved to Phoenix.
"Wow, I have to run off my reservation because I am married to a woman."
Pablo's choice to marry a woman comes with another problem. Pablo is employed by Ak-Chin as a probation officer, technically breaking the law every time she goes to work.
"I feel like every day I go to work it's going to be my last day."
Which also means spousal benefits are off the table.
"Tribal communities hire a lot of non-native people and this affects them because they can't get benefits either," says Tara Pablo.
So where does Southern Nevada's tribe stand on the issue of same-sex marriage?
The Moapa Band of Paiutes is about an hour outside of Las Vegas. Chairman Darren Daboda says the tribe doesn't plan on amending its constitution to include same-sex marriage, but adds that tolerance has existed well-before the U.S. and Nevada Supreme Court ruling.
"For us, same-sex marriage doesn't impact our tribe," says Daboda. "As a community, we don't see it as an issue. We love all out tribal members."
Daboda says same-sex couples have lived on the reservation before, and couples could get married on the tribe's land if they so choose.
"We are probably a little more progressive," Daboda said. "But at the same time, we try to respect everybody."
But Pablo is among a chorus fighting for the tradition "'til death do us part."
"This is my community. This is who I am," Cleo said. "They hide behind sovereignty. They hide behind the idea that you can't tell us what to do. We are raised to keep our mouth shut, sit in the corner, and just take it. And I've refused to do it anymore."
The Ak-Chin reservation released the following statement to News 3 in response to the pending lawsuit:
"Because this matter is now in litigation, it would not be prudent to comment on the particulars of the claim at this time. Nevertheless, we offer the following general comments:
"On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry that is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The Court further held that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution requires all states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in other jurisdictions.
"However, because the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution does not apply to federally-recognized Indian tribes, the decision of the Court does not apply to the Ak-Chin Indian Community. The Supreme Court has long held that tribes, as sovereign nations, have the inherent right to regulate internal matters, including the regulation of domestic relations. Further, Congress has enacted many laws that are designed to protect and preserve tribal culture. Because Indian tribes are subject to different laws and have different inherent authorities, any analysis of the question for Indian tribes will be different than the analysis applicable to the states.
"The overarching issue presently facing the Community is really the issue concerning a tribe's right of sovereignty, its right of self-governance, and the inherent right of tribes to regulate domestic relations within their reserved lands. We believe that this is a matter for the Community to decide, not the Supreme Court.
"Whether our current law stays the same or needs to change, it must still be addressed in a manner that best promotes and protects the Community's sovereignty and right of self-governance, and best reflects the culture, tradition, and morals of the Community and all of its Members within the confines of our laws."President Barack Obama has bestowed prized ambassadorships on big donors, such as Charles H. Rivkin and Louis B. Susman. | AP photo composite by POLITICO Obama rewards donors with plum jobs
He may have promised to change Washington, but President Barack Obama is continuing one of its most renowned patronage traditions: bestowing prized ambassadorships on big donors.
Of the nearly 80 ambassadorship nominations or confirmations since Obama’s Inauguration, 56 percent were given to political appointees and 44 percent have gone to career diplomats, according to records kept by the American Foreign Service Association.
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The latest nomination came this week, when Beatrice Wilkinson Welters was nominated to serve as ambassador to the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.
Welters, a longtime advocate for underprivileged children, and her husband, Anthony, an executive with UnitedHealth Group, generated between $200,000 and $500,000 in donations to Obama’s presidential campaign and an additional $100,000 for his Inauguration, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political giving.
The Welters can be counted among the nearly two dozen Obama bundlers — fundraisers who together organized and solicited more than $10 million in donations during the 2008 campaign — who now are being dispatched to some of the world’s greatest cities.
Charles H. Rivkin, a Los Angeles-based children’s television executive and an $800,000 bundler, is in Paris; Alan Solomont, a Boston-based investor and $500,000 bundler, is in Madrid; Louis B. Susman, a Chicago investor and $500,000 bundler, is in London; and former Virginia lieutenant governor Don Beyer, a $745,000 bundler, is in Bern, Switzerland.
Nicole Avant, a member of a Motown family dynasty who is credited with bundling up to $800,000 for Obama, was granted the coveted and cushy ambassadorship in Nassau, Bahamas.
Beyond the bundlers, Obama’s ambassador ranks are also teeming with good, old-fashioned, loyal Democrats who have given generously to the party but weren’t ranked among his top fundraisers.
Counted on those rolls are newly installed Ambassador to Germany Philip Murphy, former finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee who since 1989 has personally donated nearly $1.5 million to the party; and Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Costa Rica, Anne Slaughter Andrew, an environmental attorney whose husband, Joe, is a former DNC chairman who provided a well-timed endorsement of Obama during the extended 2008 primary against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.
For career diplomats, the selection of amateurs is always galling. “It is time to stop this spoils system and these de facto, three-year-term rentals of ambassadorships,” said Susan Johnson, president of the American Foreign Service Association.
“We believe the appointment of noncareer individuals, however accomplished they may be in their own field, to lead American diplomatic missions should be exceptional and circumscribed and not the routine practice it has become over the last three or four decades,” she added.
The politicization of the diplomatic corps, which began in the 1960s, is of increasing concern to some foreign policy experts, given the rise of terrorism and the need for greater coordination between the U.S. and foreign governments on national security issues.
Diplomatic posts that may once have largely involved ceremonial appearances now can be focused on issues such as human and drug trafficking, kidnappings, war and intelligence sharing. With that worldview, “We believe America is best served by having career foreign service officers, just as we have career military officers,” Johnson said.
Obama never promised an end to the practice of ambassadorial patronage. In an appearance before his Inauguration, he said, “it would be disingenuous for me to suggest that there are not going to be some” political appointments.The Urban Manor Housing Society is getting money it needs to fix a leaky roof, part of a $1.7-million fund announced Wednesday by the provincial government to address maintenance and repair issues at shelters across Alberta.
Urban Manor, a downtown homeless shelter for men with addictions, is receiving $52,266, while the Hope Mission and Operation Friendship Seniors Society are receiving $342,447 and $52,266, respectively. The money is to pay for remediating fire, health and safety risks.
Community and Social Services Minister Irfan Sabir, who made the announcement, said ending homelessness will “take more than budgets.”
“It is not easy work and there is no easy solution.”
In total, Edmonton is receiving $457,000. How the rest of the money will divided throughout the province was not announced.
The province also announced a $250,000 grant for the city to identify service gaps in treating the homeless with complex needs and a second $250,000 grant for Boyle Street Community Services to pay for the |
by, for his part, says his biggest fear is to see St. Andrew’s become a “liberal” church, populated with people who see their faith as a mandate to vote Democratic, rather than to challenge systems like capitalism.
“The prophetic message is radical, not liberal,” he says. “To me, that left/right continuum is a complete fabrication. The true axis is up and down—it’s about who has power.”
Rick Scarborough doesn’t like the term “Religious Right,” either. Scarborough is a Baptist pastor and founder of Lufkin-based Vision America, which mobilizes Christians to “be proactive in restoring Judeo-Christian values” and “reverse America’s moral decline.” The group is starting a network called the Tea Party Unity Project. If there’s a Religious Right, it includes Scarborough.
“I prefer to be called a lover of God and a follower of Jesus,” he says. “I don’t think anyone I know relishes the idea of being called the Religious Right, unless it means we’d like to think we’re right about it.”
“Left” and “Right” may be inappropriate applications of political language to essentially spiritual endeavors. But for those unfamiliar with the nuances of Christianity, the shorthand can be helpful. If the Christian Left disclaims the name, how will anyone recognize it?
In the sanctuary at Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope, sunlight filters though stained-glass windows inscribed with the word “hope” on a rainbow background. As many as 1,200 people worship here each week. In the narthex, plates bearing symbols of different religions are enmbedded in the walls, representing the church’s commitment to interreligious dialogue. Next to the main church building an interfaith peace chapel designed by Philip Johnson hosts musical events and displays the traveling AIDS Memorial Quilt.
The Cathedral calls itself the world’s largest gay church. Its website says “Jesus was the ultimate liberal.”
“When I’m talking to people about LGBTQ issues, and [to] people who are coming out, I’m often surprised they’ve never heard the other side of the faith story,” says senior pastor Jo Hudson. “All they’ve heard is the really conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist message. I’m taken aback that people have no knowledge there’s a different strain of Christianity, one that is just as scholarly, just as passionate, just as committed to faith, yet sees that questions of faith are as important as answers.”
The Cathedral of Hope, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, is for many members a second chance at religion. Two-thirds come from Roman Catholic or Southern Baptist backgrounds, which many found inhospitable to their sexual orientation. At the Cathedral, they find an inclusive theology and a community active in anti-bullying programs and advocacy for a living wage. The church broadcasts its services online in hopes of reaching people who may feel isolated in less-welcoming communities.
“In rural places in Texas, Missouri, Iowa, and around the world,” Hudson says, “people need to know there’s a church where they are welcome, and that they can be Christian and gay, and that they are children of God just as legitimately as anybody else.”
Lubbock is one such place. When members of St. John’s United Methodist Church stand along busy University Avenue protesting the death penalty, they’re alternately rewarded with thumbs-up or middle fingers.
Fourteen years ago, St. John’s became a Reconciling congregation—a United Methodist church that’s deliberately and publicly inclusive of all sexual orientations. It’s the only Reconciling church in all of West Texas, and it was one of a handful of churches to host a booth at Lubbock’s second-ever Pride Festival last fall. Some participants reacted to senior pastor Kevin Young’s presence there with surprise.
“I had a lot of conversations with people who said, ‘I can’t believe you’re a preacher and you’re out here,’” he says. “It was just astonishing to them, because their experience of the church has been very negative for the most part.”
How can the Cathedral of Hope and St. John’s arrive at conclusions so different from, say, Rick Scarborough?
Part of it comes down to fundamentally different relationships with the Bible.
“Conservatives start with the presupposition that the Bible is true,” Scarborough says. “It doesn’t just contain the word of God, it is the word of God. The Left, theologically, has left the infallible word of God and said, ‘Hey, the Bible is a good guideline, but it’s not the only one.’”
According to the Pew Forum, 42 percent of Texans agree with Scarborough that scripture should be interpreted literally. Less-conservative Christians tend to acknowledge the Bible’s historical and literary contexts, as well as its translations, as impediments to literal interpretation.
“Particularly in the South, the Bible is viewed as making authoritative statements about science—specifically biology and creation—and so science that seems to be saying something different than the Bible is suspect,” Lubbock’s Young says. “A more progressive perspective would say that the scripture and our belief are in conversation with science, the social sciences, literary scholarship and archaeology. Information that comes from the wider fields of knowledge helps to inform and strengthen us, not threaten us.”
Progressives, like conservatives, have their favorite Bible verses, but progressives tend to emphasize scripture’s overall message. “How many times did Jesus talk about homosexuality?” Rigby asks. “Abortion? A flat tax? Zero. How many times did he talk about sharing everything and not judging? The great themes are about liberation and about love.”
Christian churches of all stripes respond to Jesus’ call to serve the poor, with food pantries and shelters for the homeless. Christian leaders on the left, though, draw distinctions between charity and justice.
Young quotes Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, on the difference between the two: “‘The church has been really good about jumping in the river and pulling drowning people out. What we have not been so good at is going up the river and finding out who’s throwing all those people in it in the first place.’ Charity is helping in the immediate need, and justice is trying to change unjust structures that continuously result in people’s harm.”
Working for justice outside of partisan contexts can be complicated. Take, for instance, the work of Texas Impact. Bee Moorhead co-chairs a task force on partnerships with nonprofits that’s part of the Faith- and Community-Based Initiatives project of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. State agencies participating in the initiatives—the Public Utility Commission, for example—have a mandate to assist low-income Texans, but their expertise doesn’t typically lie in local outreach. To get the assistance where it needs to go, Moorhead and members of the task force help agencies collaborate with community organizations that, particularly in small towns, are often religious.
“At some point the local faith people may conclude, ‘Hey, there’s just not enough money—maybe I should talk to my legislator,’” she says. “Okay, now they’re involved in the political process in a way that’s not holding a sign saying, ‘down with your thing, up with mine.’ In my opinion that’s a legislative success.”
If it wants to become a significant force in Texas politics, the Christian Left must contend with several challenges. Churches may have internal conflicts that prevent them from taking a public stand on issues. For instance, the Reconciling Ministries Network, to which St. John’s in Lubbock belongs, is a deliberately inclusive expression of Methodism. But while the United Methodist Church is officially anti-homophobia and anti-heterosexism, it doesn’t allow the ordination of “practicing homosexuals” or same-sex blessings. Rocking the boat can have consequences for pastors’ careers.
Rigby realized that to identify with the oppressed, as he says Jesus did, he would have to take a public stand with gays and lesbians at a time when his church’s governing body, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), would not ordain them or bless same-sex unions. (The PCUSA approved ordination of non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy in 2011.) When Rigby and the majority of St. Andrew’s decided to welcome all, the church lost members.
Still, it was important to take the risk, he says. “When you talk to a lot of the liberal clergy, privately they’re very much in favor of justice for all people. But if you’re not seen publicly saying that—if you’re not staking yourself on it—people use the word ‘Christian’ to mean the Christian Right.”
In fact, progressive Christianity’s ambivalence toward public proclamations of faith may limit its political influence. The word “evangelical” is often used interchangeably—and incorrectly so—with “fundamentalist”; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for instance, is a relatively progressive denomination. But, in general, liberal Christians don’t have much evangelical impulse—the desire to convert others. Most people interviewed for this story explicitly stated their respect for pluralism and for separation of church and state. Their distaste for imposing their own views on others leaves them hesitant to “evangelize” for liberal Christianity.
The Religious Right sees things differently. Conservative Christian groups are “very keen to win over converts to their theology or way of thinking,” Valentine says.
Finally, progressive Christianity is not particularly media-friendly. Texas Impact’s work with the state’s Faith- and Community-Based Initiatives office doesn’t translate easily to headlines. The movement is smaller and less unified than its conservative counterpart. And spokespeople are harder to find.
“Covering it as a journalist is a much more difficult proposition,” Valentine says. “You can find Religious Right poobahs who can tell you exactly what the Religious Right thinks, but the Left isn’t structured that way. It’s a lot of different groups and leaders with overlapping goals.”
During early voting in the November 2012 election, a Williamson County woman named Kay Hill wore a T-shirt that read “Vote the Bible” to a polling station. She was asked to cover the shirt because election workers considered it too political. County Elections Supervisor Rick Barron was later quoted in the Austin American-Statesman saying, “Nowadays, I think it’s politically naïve to say ‘vote the Bible’ doesn’t mean to vote Republican.”
The anecdote illustrates the daunting task before Texas’ Christian Left: to reclaim scripture, in which Jesus mingled with outcasts, blessed peacemakers, and admonished the rich; and to reclaim its legacy of activism on behalf of the disadvantaged.
A phrase often used by Christians to describe a countercultural stance is “a voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” The words first appeared in the book of Isaiah and are applied to John the Baptist in the New Testament. In contemporary contexts they refer to a minority opinion or unheeded warning.
In the conservative wilderness of Texas, the Christian Left’s voice is barely audible. Combined with the voices of secular activists, it might become impossible to ignore.
“I think it would be a good thing if we, and political organizations that are working on issues we also care about, were more aware of each other,” Kevin Young says. “There are more progressive people around Lubbock, Texas, than just those in my church, and we’ve got to figure out a way to make those connections.”Japan got its first underground metro in the 1920s. Nearly a century later Mumbai is scheduled to receive its first metro by 2020. Young Mumbaikars, who have lived and travelled abroad and experienced commuting by metro, were most thrilled at the news of having their own. After all it was high time, right?
That's what I thought until a few days ago when the distant noise of chainsaws caught my attention along with other people in my neighbourhood of Churchgate. A crew of men were slicing away at the bark of a 200-year-old banyan tree—it was painful to watch. I never realised we could be so connected to our trees until that day; I felt violated.
[T]he government has decided that it is going to build the metro even if it means bypassing laws and endangering citizens.
In Mumbai, we don't have the luxury of private gardens or public parks filled with trees, the song of birds, fluttering butterflies, et al. We live in apartments and can barely afford the minimum nature required for survival. The godlike trees that line the sidewalks equip us with cooler summers and are a relief for the eyes and the soul.
It all began in December 2016 with a newspaper mention that some trees would be cut for the metro. Some curious citizens enquired with the authorities and were told 5000 trees could go.
During the Congress government's tenure, a monorail project had been initiated to boost the connectivity of the existing monorail, and harbour lines were extended, but the projects have been abandoned by the BJP government for unknown reasons.
Subsequently, a metro project proposed in the 1960s, was taken up as the next big thing. (In the 1980s, a plan was introduced to build the metro under the already existing railway system in order to save space and lessen inconvenience to citizens but that didn't take off). That wouldn't be a bad idea to implement today now, would it?
Bad design
Zoru, a resident of Khar, who has filed a petition in the Mumbai High Court, explains that the plan of the Mumbai Metro is badly designed—recreational spaces such as parks and open grounds that have the most number of trees, have been marked as future metro stations. "No thought has gone into planning and considering least damage scenarios where trees and the environment are concerned," he says.
Robin Jaisinghani, a resident of Cuffe Parade, says the alignment of stations and tracks looks haphazard and mindless. And Cuffe Parade has now lost its garden of 400 trees.
"There was no need to cut down all those trees, if they had done it the right way they could've saved at least 350," he says.
The MMRC is using outdated equipment and methods for construction instead of the commonly used NATM (New Austrian Tunnelling Method)... that would not require all the trees to be cut along the path.
The MMRC is also using outdated equipment and methods for construction instead of the commonly used NATM (New Austrian Tunnelling Method), which has been used for building underground metros since the 60s. The NATM only requires a hole to be dug at either end of the road and one can burrow through it to create a tunnel that would not require all the trees to be cut along the path. Instead, MMRC is using the primitive cut-open method.
According to Jaisinghani, the Executive Director of Planning at MMRC, R. Ramana, said during a visit that the authority didn't have the resources to save the trees.
Another technicality shows that the area required to build the stations is 60 metres by 25 metres and stations of this size are being built at locations like DN Road. So why are trees being cut on both sides of the 150-metre-wide Churchgate Road when it can clearly be avoided?
There are other rules that are being flouted. One is a Supreme Court ruling that mandates that no construction should be carried out in residential areas from 10pm until 6am, but the loud noise of the ancient equipment in deployment—which easily exceeds 90db— can be heard into the wee hours of the night (any noise above 80db is said to be harmful to humans).
The authorities don't seem to have environmental permissions either, at least according to a letter sent by the State Environment Impact Authority to the MMRCL dated 21st April 2017. In addition, the construction site falls under the Coastal Regulation Zone, which needs special permissions as it involves mining of rock and substrata material.
Dangerous waste
It's also important to note that the construction will likely generate 10.5 million cubic metres of debris, requiring land that is equivalent to more than 50 football fields, and over 5 metres high, for disposal. However, the MMRCL hasn't shared plans of its disposal. One can assume it might just land up in the sea like everything else does, and be washed up by the lashing rains come monsoon season.
[T]he construction will likely generate 10.5 million cubic metres of debris, requiring land that is equivalent to more than 50 football fields, and over 5 metres high, for disposal.
The underground water table may also be severely affected with trees gone, and contamination by seawater cannot be ruled out. In a city that already suffers from potable water shortage this could be dangerous.
While transplantation was promised by the MMRC, an investigation by environmentalists revealed one of the locations was a saltwater-logged plot on which trees would not have survived. It's safe to assume, then, the intention to transplant was just a formality on a piece of paper.
No compensation has been declared for residents or shop owners living and working near the barricaded construction sites, and whose lives and businesses will be disrupted until 2020.
The mammoth ₹23,000 crore project, which is 750 crores per km to put it into perspective, is partially being funded by the Japanese who regard trees to be sacred (irony right there) and is also being funded by the state that has huge debts.
How can Mumbai, which is already notorious for its monsoon flooding, see an "underground" metro survive the floods?
Quite simply, the government has decided that it is going to build the metro even if it means bypassing laws and endangering citizens. All this while the PM tweets about climate change from Paris.MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Federal investigators are looking into the finances behind a real estate deal for a now-defunct college put together by the wife of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, and she has hired a lawyer to look after her interests, a family spokesman confirmed on Monday.
The investigation, first reported by the news website VTDigger.org, is looking into allegations that Jane O’Meara Sanders made fraudulent claims and promises while seeking $10 million in financing for the real estate deal.
The complaint against Jane Sanders was filed in early 2016 by attorney Brady Toensing, who served as the Vermont campaign chairman for Donald Trump during his run for president as a Republican. In a separate complaint, Toensing alleged that Bernie Sanders’ senatorial office pressured a bank to approve the loan.
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Sanders, an independent, ran for president as a Democrat last year but was ousted in the primary by Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in the general election.
Asked about the allegations Monday at a Washington press conference on expanding community health centers, Sanders sought to keep the questions on health care.
‘‘No, that’s not what I’m talking about today,’’ Sanders said when an Associated Press reporter attempted to ask him about the FBI’s investigation.
Sanders then chided a Fox News reporter also seeking to question him on the issue, saying, ‘‘I’m glad that you’re interested in the fact that the Republican leadership is proposing legislation which would throw millions of people off of health insurance and give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top 1 percent.’’
The Sanderses’ spokesman, Jeff Weaver, who was the senator’s 2016 presidential campaign manager, said the allegations that prompted the investigation were politically motivated attacks.
Toensing noted that the investigation began during President Barack Obama’s administration under a Democratic attorney general and U.S. attorney for Vermont. He said he’s only looking for a ‘‘fair, impartial and thorough investigation.’’
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The background
In 2010, Jane Sanders was president of the tiny Burlington College when she brokered a $10 million deal for the college to buy the last undeveloped parcel of land in Burlington on the Lake Champlain waterfront — 32 acres overlooking the lake and the 77,000-square-foot former orphanage and administrative offices of Vermont’s Roman Catholic Church, which needed the money to settle a series of priest sex abuse cases.
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At the time Jane Sanders, a longtime political adviser to her husband, promised the deal would be paid for with increases in enrollment from about 180 to 500 students and $2.7 million in donations. She left the college in 2011.
In a previously unreleased letter from Jane Sanders to the Burlington College board provided by Weaver, she wrote that during her seven years at the college she had improved its financial outlook, the accreditation had improved and the college had gone from not offering any financial aid to offering $400,000 in student aid.
‘‘Together, I think it is safe to say we turned the corner,’’ she wrote in an Oct. 12, 2011, memo to the board. ‘‘We’ve got many opportunities before us, but we need to realize them to continue our momentum.’’
But the increase in the size of the student body and the promised donations didn’t materialize.
By 2014, the college had about $11 million in debt, and the only significant asset it had was the land. The college ended up selling much of the land, which is now being developed. The college closed for good in 2016.
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The accusation
In January 2016, Toensing filed a complaint with the Vermont office of the U.S. attorney and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. He alleged a loan used by the college to buy the land ‘‘involved the overstatement and misrepresentation of nearly $2 million … in what were purported to be confirmed contributions and grants to the college.’’
In a follow-up letter in May 2016, Toensing, who in the past has filed complaints against Democrats and members of Vermont’s Progressive Party, said that as a result of his original complaint he was ‘‘approached and informed that Senator Bernard Sanders’s office improperly pressured’’ the bank to approve the loan.
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As is typical in most cases, federal law enforcement won’t confirm nor deny an investigation.
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The Sanderses’ response
Weaver said Jane Sanders was working honestly to improve the outlook for Burlington College.
‘‘She was working to take the college to the next level with the land purchase,’’ Weaver said. ‘‘People can Monday morning quarterback it if they want, that’s for sure. But what her intent was was to turn Burlington College into a world-class liberal arts college in Burlington for the benefit of the community.’’
Weaver confirmed the existence of the federal investigation but predicted nothing would come of it. He said it only made sense that the Sanderses had hired an attorney, but they had not been contacted by investigators.
‘‘Are you supposed to wait for (U.S. Attorney General) Jeff Sessions to knock on your front door before you talk to a lawyer?’’ he said in a statement.
Last week, Bernie Sanders told a Burlington television station the allegations were nonsense.
‘‘But now that there is a process going on, which was initiated by Trump’s campaign manager, somebody who does this all of the time, has gone after a number of Democrats and progressives in this state,’’ he said. ‘‘It would be improper at this point for me to add any more to that.’’
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What could this mean for Bernie?
Bernie Sanders remains one of Vermont’s most popular politicians. He took that popularity nationwide in the 2016 presidential primary campaign, and he remains a leader of the progressive political movement in the United States.
Sanders is up for re-election to the Senate next year. He has served in the Senate since 2007.
A retired Middlebury College political science professor, Eric Davis, said he didn’t think the state GOP could field a serious candidate to challenge Sanders nor would the national party help fund a campaign against him. Davis said he didn’t think the Burlington College issue would end up hurting Sanders’ re-election prospects.
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AP Congressional Reporter Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report.
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Corrects the short headline to say feds are looking into Sanders’ wife, not Sanders. Corrects text to say the Sanderses have not been contacted by investigators. Corrects that the news website is VTDigger.org, not Vtdigger.com.“To me, driving off and leaving a bicyclist or pedestrian laying on the side of the road is one of the most cold-hearted things a driver can do. We’ll go after them every chance we get.”
— Sgt. Todd Davis, Portland Police Bureau
The Portland Police Bureau takes hit-and-runs seriously — especially when they involve someone walking or biking. I know their response to incidents doesn’t satisfy everyone all of the time; but in my experience, when they have enough evidence to work with, they go after suspects until they find them.
So far this year, I’ve learned of two arrests that have been made. In both cases, the person driving the car hit someone riding a bike and then fled the scene. In both cases, the PPB opened an investigation and made an arrest.
On December 31st, 28-year old Nicholas Smith was riding his bike on NE Sumner. When he got to NE 28th, he was hit by William Prosser, an 18-year old who was driving a car. The impact threw Smith from his bike and he sustained minor injuries. Prosser fled the scene but fortunately, Smith was able to get his license plate number.
PPB Officer Chris Johnson (whom Sgt. Todd Davis tells me handles the majority of bicycle cases), was assigned the investigation. Officer Johnson traced the license plate to Prosser and Sgt. Davis says Prosser turned himself in yesterday. He was arrested on one count of hit-and-run.
On January 11th, 27 year old Brian Reiter was riding his bike at the intersection of NE Multnomah and Wheeler in the Rose Quarter following a Trail Blazer game when he was struck by 25 year old Kealli Kai Torres. The impact left Reiter with a broken foot and facial “contusions.” He was transported to the hospital via ambulance. Torres, who was driving a car, fled the scene.
According to police, a Broadway Cab driver named Aaron Duff saw the incident and followed Torres several blocks. Duff then confronted the woman and told her she needed to return to the scene or he’d continue to follow her. Torres listened, returned to the scene, and was subsequently arrested for felony hit and run.
The cab driver, Aaron Duff, deserves recognition for stepping up and taking action in this case.
Sgt. Davis, who processes all the hit-and-runs that come into the PPB, told me yesterday that,
“We follow-up up on every one of these cases that we can. To me, driving off and leaving a bicyclist or pedestrian laying on the side of the road is one of the most cold-hearted things a driver can do. We’ll go after them every chance we get.”
Front Page, News
hit and run, PoliceSimEarth is a life simulation video game, the second designed by Will Wright, in which the player controls the development of a planet. The game was published in 1990 by Maxis. Versions were made for the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, IBM PC, SNES, Sega Mega-CD and TurboGrafx-16. It was also subsequently re-released on the Wii Virtual Console.[1]
Overview [ edit ]
In SimEarth, the player can vary a planet's atmosphere, temperature, landmasses, etc., then place various forms of life on the planet and watch them evolve. In the “Random Planet” game setting, the game is a software toy, without any required goals. The big (and difficult) challenge is to evolve sentient life and an advanced civilization. The development stages of the planet can be restored and repeated, until the planet "dies" ten billion years after its creation, the estimated time when the Sun will become a red giant and kill off all of the planet's life.
There are also 8 scenarios that do have goals, the first 3 (Aquarium, Cambrian Earth, and Modern-day Earth) involving managing the evolution and development of Earth in different stages, then 4 (Mars, Venus, Ice Planet, and Dune) involving terraforming other planets to support life, then the final one (Earth 2XXX) involving rescuing life and civilization on a future Earth from self-replicating robots and nuclear warfare and giving you the option of causing a great flood to help achieve this goal. In addition, there is another game mode besides Random Planet and Scenario mode, called Daisy World, where the only biome on the planet is daisies, which change their color relative to the temperature.
The game models the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock (who assisted with the design and wrote an introduction to the manual), and one of the options available to the player is the simplified "Daisyworld" model.[2]
The player's control of the planet in the game is quite comprehensive; display panels allow the player to regulate everything from atmospheric gases, with percentages to three decimal places, to the rate of continental drift, to the rate of reproduction and mutation of lifeforms. In addition, the player is given options to place equipment or items that interfere with the planet's development, such as Oxygen Generators, which increase the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and the monolith, a take on the one found in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which aids in increasing intelligence of a lifeform through extraterrestrial contact.
The list of disasters ranges from natural occurrences, such as hurricanes and wild fires, to population-dependent disasters, such as plagues and pollution. Effects on the planet may be minor or major depending on the current conditions. Increased volcanic eruptions, for example, increase the amount of dust in the atmosphere, lowering global temperature; earthquakes in a body of water may produce tsunamis; and the shortage of nuclear fuel for a nuclear power-dependent civilization may potentially trigger nuclear war and nuclear winter.
Global warming can cause the planet's ice caps to melt and sea levels to rise, but if a planet gets very hot, the oceans boil away until there are no oceans left, only land. A planet without any water can have oceans brought back if hit by an "ice meteor" (a.k.a. a comet). Many things have to be kept within a certain balanced range for a planet to be able to support multicellular animal life; outside this range, only single-celled lifeforms, plants, robots, and lifeforms that have been civilized can survive. This excludes most lifeforms in this game since most are multicellular animals that are not civilized.
All player-triggered actions have a cost specified in "energy units" or "omega (Ω) units"; for example, 50 energy units are required to lay down a single terrain square, while 500 units are required to lay down a terraforming device. The energy budget is determined by the level of development of the planet, and the chosen difficulty level; on the lowest difficulty level, the energy budget is unlimited.
Gameplay itself can be somewhat mystifying; species may thrive or die out for no apparent reason. Mass extinctions, however, are often followed by periods of renewed evolutionary diversification, allowing the player to experiment with new sets of species and ecosystems.
Taxa [ edit ]
A feature of the game is that all taxa of multicellular animals are on an equal footing, and thus it is possible to evolve, for example, sapient molluscs.[3] The two single-celled lifeform taxa, Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes (or Bacteria and Amoebas, in-game respectively) are treated specially. Some examples of animal taxa include Radiates and Cetaceans as well as more well known taxa such as fish and birds. As an "Easter egg", there is also machine life, which can appear if a city of the highest technology level (Nanotech Age) is destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Machine life can thrive in any biome or environmental conditions, generally out-competing any other lifeforms present, and can itself eventually evolve intelligence and build cities. Additionally, there are Carniferns, which are mutated, carnivorous plants, which can occur only naturally. Having an abundance of insects allows for these life-forms to develop. Carniferns are able to develop intelligence just as animals can. In addition to the familiar types, the long-extinct "trichordates" are included. The game states that "We [the game's developers] felt sorry for them, and are giving them a chance for survival in SimEarth." Dinosaurs are also an included taxa.
Reception [ edit ]
Computer Gaming World called SimEarth "absolutely fascinating". The reviewer wished that the game had more SimCity-like visual feedback, but stated that it was superior to the predecessor because of larger scope and greater replayability.[4] It won the 1991 Software Publishers Association Excellence in Software Awards for Best Secondary Education Program and Best Simulation Program.[5]
Entertainment Weekly gave the game an A- and wrote that "While it's never too early to teach kids to respect the biosphere, the same may not be true of introducing them to complicated simulations such as Simearth: The Living Planet (FCI, for Super NES), which has more variables (temperature, precipitation, etc.) than a polynomial equation. There's something to be said for this, though: A task as simple as 'growing a daisy'—one option offered here—requires knowing far more than which button to push to cream the bad guy."[6]
See also [ edit ]People protesting against the building of a coal-fired power plant in a southern Chinese town threw bricks at police who fired volleys of teargas and detained dozens in the country's latest environmental dispute, residents say.
At least 1,000 people in Yinggehai, on China's Hainan island, began several days of protests last week after construction resumed on the plant, which had been halted by earlier demonstrations.
Dozens had been injured and many were detained by police, who have put the town under strict surveillance, residents said on Monday. Police and local officials declined to comment.
"They fired teargas to disperse the crowds in the past few days," said a resident who gave only his surname, Xian, because he did not want to be identified by authorities. "We don't want a power plant here that will cause serious pollution," he said.
Three decades of rapid economic expansion in China have come at an environmental price, and residents have become increasingly outspoken about pollution in their backyards. In July, a southern town in Sichuan province scrapped plans for a copper plant after thousands clashed with police, and another community in eastern Jiangsu province dropped plans for a waste water plant after similar demonstrations.
The protests are especially sensitive because they come ahead of next month's change in China's leadership, who will have to balance a push for economic growth with maintaining public stability. Meanwhile, local leaders must balance their desire to attract industry with residents who do not want it in their neighbourhoods.
In Yinggehai, a round of protests took place in April when the plant project was first announced. Authorities then moved the project to another Hainan town, but it drew strong opposition there and officials returned to their original plan, Xian said.
Schools in Yinggehai, a town of 18,000 people, have been closed since Thursday, said another resident who lives in Shenzhen but is in regular contact with friends and family in his home town.
Clashes between brick-wielding residents and police armed with batons broke out after officers detained some of the protesters and fired teargas canisters, said the 26-year-old man, who gave only his surname, Lin.
He said authorities had taken some of the injured away from hospitals, making people afraid to go to them. Security officers had entered schools and homes, and were guarding local government offices and main roads, Lin said.
The heavy security presence meant fewer people were protesting by the weekend, and then only under the cover of darkness.
"We usually take to the street during the night so as to avoid being identified by police who are using video cameras to film the crowd," Xian said.
A Hong Kong-based rights group, the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, said 50 people had been arrested and almost 100 injured in the protests over the 3.9bn renminbi (£387m) plant.
A man from the town's police station refused to comment, while a woman from Yinggehai town government said she had no information to share. Officials at Ledong county government referred the call to the county party committee propaganda department and the provincial foreign affairs office. Calls to both offices rang unanswered, as did calls to the propaganda office of Sanya city, which oversees Ledong.For the first time in over a decade, the Vancouver Canucks will host a game on Super Bowl Sunday when they welcome the Minnesota Wild to Rogers Arena. Puck drop is set for 12 pm PT.
The last time the Canucks hosted a game on Super Bowl Sunday was back in 2003. The last time they won back-to-back games on home ice wasn't quite that long ago but it still seems like forever. Vancouver has a chance to do just that this afternoon with a win after they snapped a three-game home losing streak on Friday with a convincing 5-2 victory over the Sabres. The last time the Canucks earned consecutive home wins was January 3 and 6 when they knocked off the Red Wings and Islanders just prior to their three-game swoon.
Defenceman Adam Clendening, acquired in a trade on Thursday, will make his Canucks debut today. He'll see some time on the second-unit power play in addition to skating on a pairing with Luca Sbisa. Derek Dorsett, who missed Friday's game with an upper-body injury, will be a game-time decision. Brad Richardson remains out with a foot injury. Vancouver did not indicate yesterday which netminder is expected to get the call to play.
Puck drop at 12 pm PT – Live on Sportsnet Pacific, TSN 1040, or online at tsn1040.ca.
Regular Season Record 27-17-3 22-20-6 2014.15 Season Series 0-0-0 0-0-0 All-time Series 39-24-13 32-30-14 Last 10 games 5-5-0 4-5-1 Last 10 head-to-head 5-3-2 5-5-0
Scouting Report
The Wild have had a disappointing season by their expectations after making it to the post-season a year ago as they come into today's contest sitting in third-last position in the Western Conference although they are still within striking distance of a post-season position. They've slowly been playing some better hockey of the last couple of weeks as they come into today's tilt with points in five of their last six outings (4-1-1) and were 1-0 winners over the Flames in their last outing on Thursday.
A big part of their recent turnaround has to do with the acquisition of goaltender Devan Dubnyk from Arizona. Dubnyk has a 4-1-0 record since joining the Wild which includes pitching a pair of shutouts. Dubnyk's strong play has allowed the Wild to recapture their identity as being a stingy defensive team. They've allowed just nine goals in six games played since acquiring Dubnyk for an average of 1.5 goals against per game. Prior to that, they had averaged over three goals against per game. Minnesota beat Vancouver in two of three meetings last season albeit both of their victories came |
in 2010.) The worst thing anyone can say about him is that he never has broken 2:09, which by today’s standards is relatively pedestrian. He certainly has been in sub-2:09 shape but courses, conditions and race tactics worked against posting a faster time.
“He’s a 2:09 guy, but he runs 2:09 when it’s important to run 2:09,” says Greg Meyer, the last American man to win Boston, in 1983 (where his time was 2:09:00). “That’s a key thing.”
Keflezighi and Frank Shorter are the only living American males to win an Olympic medal in the marathon. When Keflezighi won New York, he was the first American to do so in 27 years.
“He’s got some really good items on his resume that will stand the test of time,” says Don Kardong, fourth in the 1976 Olympic marathon.
To veterans such as Meyer and Kardong, placing trumps time, though time is important.
“When we were running – Bill Rodgers and others – it was about place,” says Meyer, who trained with Rodgers in Boston in the 1970s under coach Bill Squires when Rodgers was winning four New Yorks and four Bostons. “I don’t remember Squires ever talking about running for time. It was all about surges and moves you would have to cover in order to be there to win.
“Meb has proved to be a great racer. Meb would be more of a throwback to Billy and I, not so much about time but racing well at big races. He has those victories, those high places to show for it.”
Keflezighi also has longevity. He has been finishing high in major marathons since 2002.
“Meb’s excellence and longevity may surpass anyone’s,” says Runner’s World editor at large and 1968 Boston Marathon winner Amby Burfoot. “He is an absolute testimony that all of us believe about this sport: Consistency is important. Everyone is going to hit a pothole and he’s certainly had his.
“But if you have patience and do the right things, you can get back on your feet, back to where you were and back to contending for Olympic medals and personal records. He’s such a shining light for everybody because of the personal path he has followed.”
Keflezighi’s career has lasted because of his fanatical devotion to training and rehabbing. He thought his career might have been over in 2008 because of problems resulting from a pelvic stress fracture. He resurrected himself when almost anyone else would have retired.
“His long-time dedication, unrelenting desire and motivation are unparalleled,” says Bob Larsen, who has coached Keflezighi since the runner arrived at UCLA in the summer of 1994. “That’s carried him through so many difficult injury situations. A lot of people don’t know the extent of some of those.”
That same commitment and fanatical cross training, doing much work on an ElliptiGo, has gotten Keflezighi to the starting line Sunday. “There’s no way he should be ready, but he’s done so much cross training when he couldn’t run at all that he’s going to give it a shot,” Larsen says. “Nobody else could have done this or won the Olympic Trials in 2012. That drive is unrelenting.”
Hall is facing his own moment of crisis. He has times that Keflezighi or any other American would envy. Hall’s 2:04:58, while finishing fourth at Boston in 2011 under favorable conditions of a big tailwind on a point-to-point, downhill course, is the fastest marathon ever by an American, either native-born or naturalized.
If you discount Hall’s sub-2:05 because it came on a course not eligible for records, his 2:06:17 for fifth in London in 2008 is the third-best time in U.S. history. The only American to run faster is Morocco native Khalid Khannouchi with a world record 2:05:38 and a 2:05:56, recorded in 2002 at London and Chicago, respectively. Hall has six marathons in 2:09:02 or faster.
He has a third and two fourths at Boston, a fourth in New York and a fifth in Chicago. He was 10th at the 2008 Olympics.
“My gosh, he’s run some spectacular times but because he hasn’t won a New York or Boston, his performances are getting overshadowed,” says Kardong.
Even Hall’s sole marathon win, an overpowering 2:09:02 at the Olympic Trials in 2007 in New York’s hilly Central Park, where his dominance, easy stride and blond hair evoked images of Rodgers, was overshadowed. Ryan Shay, his friend and one-time training partner, died during the race.
The only American ever to run consistently faster than Hall has been Khannouchi, who twice set world records in the marathon. Hall’s problem has been running while the men’s marathon has experienced incredible improvement in depth and times. His sub-2:05 doesn’t put him in the top 30 in history.
“This is what I think is special about Ryan,” Burfoot says. “He’s achieved more in the marathon than anyone could have possibly hoped for him to achieve. We always knew he was a talent though he wasn’t a Dathan Ritzenhein [at shorter distances]. Yet in several of his marathons he has run out-of-his-head, out-of-his-body incredible performances. I do think that has something to do with his mind and spiritual beliefs.
“It’s not enough to make you run great every day. Where some people are doing their absolute best is about 99% of what they’re capable of, Ryan on his best days has been over 100% of what he would seem to be capable of. That’s a really interesting phenomenon and a testimony to his make-up.”
Larsen, who has seen Hall train often with Keflezighi over the years, has no doubt Hall can return to running times from his past.
“Ryan is that type of runner who can’t always touch the magic,” Larsen says, “but when he does touch the magic, we all applaud it and we all enjoy it. That magic is still there. At 31, it hasn’t gone away.
“Two years between finishing marathons at his age is not too long. We have to give that really good person Ryan Hall some slack and allow him to be Ryan Hall and flourish in the future, because he will. That’s the kind of confidence I have in him.”
But Hall has got to halt the cycle of injuries. “The tough thing for him is that he’s looking for that little extra that’s going to give him a couple extra minutes,” Kardong says. “About the only way you feel you can do that is by training harder. Sometimes that’s not the answer.”
Since 2010, Hall has been self-coached, and briefly coached by Italian Renato Canova, after five years with Terrence Mahon. That’s a contrast to Keflezighi and most other top Americans, who have had long associations with their coaches.
“I think Ryan would have benefitted by finding one coach and having faith in that coach to manage his running,” Meyer says. “It’s not just Ryan. I’ve seen this with other athletes who keep moving and thinking there’s a better way. There’s not. It’s about realizing that and letting somebody guide you, having faith in that person. For me it was [Ron] Warhurst, or Squires, or [Bob] Sevene at different points. It’s having that faith and trusting somebody. It takes that doubt out of it.”
Hall and Keflezighi are still at it. Keflezighi has the places with aspirations for faster times. Hall has the times with hopes for higher places. They’re among the top U.S. marathoners ever. They share a strong Christian faith and have created charitable foundations. They’re great guys. What’s not to like?
Enjoy them. Don’t knock them.Image copyright Getty Images
Volkswagen car drivers in the US affected by its emissions scandal are due to get up to $10,000 (£7,500) after the firm agreed a deal with regulators.
The German car giant will offer to repair or buy back the affected diesel vehicles and pay owners between $5,000 and $10,000 in compensation.
Last year, US regulators discovered that some VW cars were fitted with software that distorted emission tests.
The German giant subsequently said 11 million cars worldwide were affected.
The total deal will cost Volkswagen $14.7bn. It is expected to spend up to $10bn on buybacks and compensation, and will put a further $2.7bn into an environmental fund operated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as invest $2bn over the next decade into zero emission technology.
Separately, the car firm has agreed to pay $603m to 44 US states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to resolve existing and potential state consumer protection claims.
However, it is still facing billions of dollars more in potential fines with lawyers currently working on settlements for 80,000 three-litre diesel engines.
'Flagrant violation'
Nonetheless, Volkswagen chief executive Matthias Müller described the settlement as "a significant step forward".
"We know that we still have a great deal of work to do to earn back the trust of the American people. We are focused on resolving the outstanding issues and building a better company," he added.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption VW customers who choose to sell back their car to the car firm, or terminate their lease, will still receive compensation
VW also said the settlement was within the €16.2bn (£12.6bn) it had already set aside for for the crisis.
The huge settlement will affect 475,00 owners of the 2009 to 2015 Volkswagen diesel models of Jettas, Passats, Golfs and Beetles as well as the TDI Audi A3.
Customers can choose to sell back their vehicle to Volkswagen, for its price last September before the scandal was revealed, or terminate their lease without incurring any penalty charges.
They can also choose to have their vehicle modified free of charge and keep it.
Customers who select any of the options will still receive compensation of between $5,100 and $10,000. They would also still be able to decline the VW offer and sue the firm on their own.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Some 475,000 cars are affected by the deal
Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said the VW scandal was one of the "most flagrant violations of our consumer's environmental laws in our country's history".
"By duping the regulators, Volkswagen turned nearly half a million American drivers into unwitting accomplices in an unprecedented assault on our environment.
"This partial settlement marks a significant first step towards holding Volkswagen accountable for what was a breach of its legal duties and a breach of the public's trust," she said.
Arthur Wheaton, an automotive industry specialist at Cornell University's ILR School, said the settlement went a long way to addressing the uncertainty surrounding the carmaker since the scandal emerged.
"It's expensive, but because Volkswagen has put a decent offer on the table it will avert many of the individual law suits."
Mr Wheaton also said the firm's $2bn investment into zero emission technology could "dramatically change VW's image".
"The US is a forgiving market. It [the scandal] hasn't done any permanent damage and now it's likely to focus more on electric and battery cars in the US," he said.
Last September, the EPA found that many VW cars being sold in America had a "defeat device" - or software - in diesel engines that could detect when they were being tested, changing the performance accordingly to improve results.
The German car giant has since admitted cheating emissions tests in the US.
Some models could have been pumping out up to 40 times the legal limit of the pollutant, nitrogen oxide, regulators disclosed.
The provision VW made for the scandal pushed the car maker into its biggest ever annual pre-tax loss of €1.3bn for 2015, compared with a profit of €14.7bn the previous year.Six bills labeled the “Justice Reinvestment Package” passed the House, despite warnings from the state’s attorney general.
The content of the bills came out of Gov. Gina Raimondo's “Justice Reinvestment Working Group” began study on the state’s criminal justice system in 2015. The group, created by executive order, promised to “identify new ways to relieve pressures on the correctional system and increase public safety.”
Among other things, lawmakers voted to:
— Reduce the maximum penalty for assault with a dangerous weapon from 20 years to six years if serious bodily injury did not occur.
— Allow a defendant to complete his or her sentence without fully paying to a victim.
— Remove the probation condition of “keep the peace and be of good behavior” when a court determines whether a defendant is a probation violator.
In a statement Monday, Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin called the package “feel good legislation” that accomplishes nothing and puts victims at risk.
The six senate bills, sponsored by Majority Leader Michael McCaffrey, were introduced in January, but only moved through committees in late June and during the special fall session.
The House passed their matching bills in concurrence with McCaffrey’s bills. The bills have been placed on the Senate's consent calendar and are awaiting vote.
— jtempera@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7121
On Twitter: @jacktemp
A Twitter List by mariacapHarrison Ford in the original 1982 "Blade Runner."
Not only has Ridley Scott confirmed that a sequel to “Blade Runner” is in the works, the filmmaker also says the film will feature a woman in the lead role.
While promoting his upcoming movie “Prometheus,“ Scott told The Daily Beast, “I started my first meetings on the “Blade Runner” sequel last week. We have a very good take on it. And we’ll definitely be featuring a female protagonist.”
Development on the project comes 30 years after the 1982 original, which starred Harrison Ford and is set in what then seemed the far-off future of 2019.
The sequel is expected to be released in 2014, and according to Ace Showbiz, original screenwriter Hampton Fancher may reunite with Scott on the film.
Scott told The Daily Beast having a female protagonist feels normal to him.
“I’m used to very strong women because my mother was particularly strong, and my father was away all the time,” he said. “I think there are a lot of men who feel they’re being emasculated by having the woman be in charge; I’ve never had that problem.”
Scott says acceptance of women in starring roles has changed a great deal since he directed 1991's "Thelma & Louise," which stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon.
"The budget (for 'Thelma & Louise') was very slender — about $15 million — because nobody wanted to make it," Scott said. "One director who turned me down said, 'I’ve got a problem with the women,' and I said, 'Well you’re meant to, you dope!' So I thought that I should direct it myself.”
"Blade Runner" fans, will you see the sequel? Tell us on Facebook.
Related content:WASHINGTON ― For Donald Trump, the past week has marked a fresh low in a campaign that has already sunk modern American politics to new levels.
But unlike the GOP presidential nominee’s previous nadirs ― such as his call for a blanket travel ban on Muslims, or his false claim that the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ― this week has actually hurt Trump’s campaign. A lot. Polls taken late this week show Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton leading Trump by double digits nationwide. The businessman is even behind in deep red states like Georgia. So what happened?
The short answer is that Trump waged war against everyone from the family of a fallen soldier, to his party’s top officials, to a baby who cried at one of his rallies. He’s given voters, GOP lawmakers and potential donors a laundry list of reasons to steer clear of his campaign. Here’s how Trump’s terrible week went down.
Saturday, July 30: Trump attacked Khizr and Ghazala Khan, a Gold Star military family whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004. The couple appeared on stage together at the Democratic National Convention, where Khzir Khan criticized Trump, saying the GOP nominee “smears the character of Muslims.”
Trump responded by insulting the Khans and ignoring their sacrifice. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there, she had nothing to say, she probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me,” Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Saturday. “Mr. Khan, who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, and say many other inaccurate things.”
In the same ABC interview, Trump complained about the presidential debate schedule. “It’s against two NFL games. I got a letter from the NFL saying ‘This is ridiculous,’” he whined. Within hours, a spokesman for the NFL said the former reality TV personality was lying.
@mikesisak @alexweprin While we'd obviously wish the Debate Commission could find another night, we did not send a letter to Mr Trump. — Brian McCarthy (@NFLprguy) July 30, 2016
Asked about changes to the GOP party platform that seemed to benefit Russia, Trump told ABC that Russian President Vladimir Putin was not sending forces into Ukraine. “Just so you understand, he’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right,” he said.
Informed that Russia had annexed part of Ukraine in 2014, Trump flubbed, “OK, well, he’s there in a certain way, but I’m not there yet.”
Early Monday, August 1: Trump renewed his attacks on the Khans.
Mr. Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over T.V. doing the same - Nice! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2016
Monday afternoon: Trump attacked the fire marshal overseeing a rally in Columbus, Ohio, saying the first responder “ought to be ashamed of himself,” because “they turned away thousands of people.” It was the second time in a week he’d attacked firefighters. Trump had speculated in Colorado Springs on July 29 that the fire marshal in charge was probably a Democrat, and he called the enforcement of fire code occupancy limits “a disgraceful situation.”
Monday 7:25 p.m.: Trump praised Paul Nehlen, the Wisconsin primary challenger vying to unseat Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Thanks to @pnehlen for your kind words, very much appreciated. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2016
Monday 8:35 p.m.: USA Today contributor Kristen Powers reported how the GOP nominee said that if his daughter Ivanka Trump were ever sexually harassed at work, he’d expect her to quit her job. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said.
Early Tuesday: Trump’s son, Eric Trump, doubled down on the idea that women who are victims of sexual harassment have done something to deserve it. “Ivanka is a strong, powerful woman” Eric Trump told CBS This Morning. His sister “wouldn’t allow herself” to be subjected to sexual harassment.
Tuesday, late morning: Donald Trump told a supporter at a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, to remove her crying baby. He’d said moments before to the same woman, “Don’t worry about that baby, I love babies. I hear that baby crying, I like it.”
“Actually, I was only kidding,” Trump said seconds later. “You can get the baby out of here.” When it seemed like the woman had left, an incredulous sounding Trump told the crowd, “I think she really believed me! That I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking!”
At the same rally, Trump told the crowd he received a Purple Heart from a veteran earlier that day.
“I always wanted to get the Purple Heart,” Trump said. “This was much easier.”
Trump made the statement less than a day after The New York Times published a story detailing the five draft deferments Trump received during the Vietnam War, including a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels.
Tuesday around lunchtime: In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Trump went out of his way to say he could not endorse three leading Republicans: Ryan, Arizona Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte. (R-N.H.)
The three snubs all appeared to be vindictive attempts by Trump to exact revenge on fellow Republicans he felt had been critical of him. Both Ryan and McCain have formally endorsed Trump already, but they also denounced his attacks on a federal judge and on the Khan family, respectively.
Tuesday evening: For the second time in two days, Trump peddled the notion that the November elections would be “rigged” against him. He said on Fox News that court rulings striking down voter identity laws were discriminatory and would likely lead to fraud on Election Day. “People are going to walk in there, they’re going to vote 10 times, maybe. Who knows? They’re going to vote 10 times,” Trump said.
Wednesday midday: During a rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, Trump vividly described watching a video of currency being unloaded from an airplane that he said was shot in Iran. “I’ll never forget the scene this morning,” Trump said. “Iran ― I don’t think you’ve heard this anywhere but here ― Iran provided all of that footage, the tape, of taking that money off that airplane.”
The only problem was that what he actually saw was a publicly available video that was months old ― and shot in Geneva, Switzerland. It did not show the exchange of cash, it was not “top secret,” as Trump claimed, it was not “a military tape” and it was not “provided by Iran.”
Early Thursday: Trump’s campaign admitted that all the candidate had ever seen was the old footage from Switzerland, not military video from Iran. But that didn’t keep Trump from repeating the lie again.
Thursday afternoon: The real estate businessman insisted to a crowd in Portland, Maine, he’d seen a secretive Iranian video. “It was interesting because a tape was made,” he said. “Right? You saw that? With the airplane coming in? Nice plane. And the airplane coming and the money coming off, I guess, right? That was given to us, has to be, by the Iranians.”
Thursday evening: The damage Trump had been doing to his campaign all week finally began to show up in polls, where the Republican nominee trailed Clinton by 9 to 15 points nationally. Even more worrying for Republicans, however, were the double digit leads that Clinton was achieving in battleground states.
Friday morning: Trump acknowledged in a Twitter post that he had not, in fact, seen any video from Iran.
The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2016
As if to underscore how irresponsible Trump’s comments on Iran had been, former CIA acting director Mike Morell penned a scathing condemnation of Trump, published in The New York Times on Friday morning.
He suggested in the article that the GOP nominee was being manipulated by Putin, himself a former Russian intelligence officer. “In the intelligence business, we’d say that Mr. Trump was an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” Morell wrote.
Friday afternoon: As Trump’s party, and his potential donors panicked all week, the presidential candidate repeatedly said how united the GOP was behind him, a point he reiterated at two rallies on Friday with his vice presidential running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Friday evening: The only sign that Trump had any intention of shifting the momentum of his disastrous campaign came late on Friday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he read formal endorsements of Ryan, McCain and Ayotte from a sheet of paper.
While this may have been enough to satisfy Republican party leaders desperate to find some redeeming quality in Trump’s campaign, a few minutes of politeness isn’t likely to repair the damage from his hellish week.
Only 12 more weeks to go...The Last Witch Hunter (2015)
The last witch hunter is all that stands between humanity and the combined forces of the most horrifying witches in history. (IMDB)
This episode, we dive into what’s good and what’s bad about this movie, which tanked at the box office in 2015. We find some things to admire about what was created here, and talk about how it could have been better and what we’d like out of a franchise like this. I think you’ll be surprised at what we discovered.
Listen and enjoy!
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PrintA cataclysmic war is taking shape in Yemen, one that pits nearly all of Washington’s key allies in the Middle East against Iran and its proxies in a fight that could quickly spin out of control.
A Saudi-led bombing campaign already has begun and troops from Egypt and some other countries may soon intervene on the ground.
All of this was done, according to a Saudi source who is part of the inner circle in Riyadh, without significant American involvement. “We have done this on our own,” this source told The Daily Beast. While the U.S. has a handful of people in a Saudi operations center, the source noted that this coalition was pulled together and went into action without the U.S. leadership that characterized, for instance, the Desert Shield/Desert Storm operations of 1990 and 1991. The Saudis have dubbed this operation “Decisive Storm.”
Ten Arab countries are involved, including not only those of the Gulf, but Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and even Sudan. Turkey—which has the second-biggest military in NATO, after the United States—may be the next to join. “The Iranian influence has to be challenged,” said this Saudi source.
But the question now, at the start of what could be the start of the next great Middle Eastern war, is: How far will Washington really go back its old allies? And will it risk alienating its new negotiating partner in Tehran?
The Obama administration finds itself in a position that is full of contradictions and almost completely untenable. It is offering some behind-the-scenes intelligence support to the Saudi-led anti-Iranian offensive in Yemen, but at the same time it is using American airpower to reinforce an offensive by Iranian-backed forces fighting the so-called Islamic State in Iraq. Most significantly, the Obama administration is trying to negotiate a controversial deal to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
“You couldn’t make this stuff up,” one veteran U.S. diplomat said with bitter irony.
The Arab states now arrayed against Iran in Yemen have warned repeatedly—as, indeed, has Israel—that if Iran is able to obtain nuclear weapons its ambition to dominate the region will be virtually impossible to contain. And recent events, in the view of the Saudis and their allies, prove that Iran is on the move even without the backup the Bomb would give it.
In Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen the gains of Iranian-backed militias have been such that the architect of this expansionist policy, Quds Force Commander Qasem Suleimani, is being touted as a contender for the Iranian presidency in 2017. Washington, reacting to events rather than shaping them, has been wrong-footed again and again.
Ironically, only last year President Barack Obama cited Yemen as a model for the kinds of policies he thought the United States should pursue in its war against al Qaeda affiliates. But the U.S. drones, American Special Operations Forces, and local commandos trained by the United States were so heavily focused on their fight against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that they failed to perceive the rising power of Iran and the Shiite Houthi rebels that it supported.
Over the last few days, U.S. forces in Yemen have been evacuated in haste, reportedly leaving behind troves of sensitive documents.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, underscored the chaotic development of events on the ground in Yemen. “We’re totally out,” he told our correspondent Tim Mak. “Yemen is going to be, in the president’s own words, a ‘model,’ [but] not of success, [instead] of absolute failure of our foreign policy.”
Since late last year, Tehran’s backing for the Houthi rebels has been increasingly obvious. They took control in the capital Sanaa in January, ousting President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi from his palace there, and they have been closing in on his displaced government in the southern Yemen city of Aden. Hadi is now reportedly in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Photos: Rubble and Grief—On the Ground in Yemen
Scott Atran, a Mideast analyst with Artis Research who has worked closely with U.S. government agencies as a consultant, tells The Daily Beast, “There was no preparation for this and no understanding that I can see within senior U.S. policy circles that the wider Sunni-Shia conflict is what it is all about. The Saudis feel they are fighting for their very existence.”
Indeed. From the Saudi point of view, Iran is gaining strength in Syria, where it is the embattled Assad regime’s most important ally, in Iraq, where it is propping up the mainly Shiite central government, and now in Yemen. All of these countries are on Saudi Arabia’s borders, and, what is more, to the extent that pro-Iranian Shiite forces appear to be gaining momentum, that threatens to disrupt the fragile equilibrium in the oil-producing Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, which has a majority Shiite population. Partly because of fears the crucially important production from Saudi Arabia may be disrupted, oil prices rose dramatically on Thursday.
“The Saudis are scared right now. They’re worried about Iran,” a U.S. official in contact with governments in the region told The Daily Beast. Riyadh may have notified the United States about their airstrikes, but they made it clear that they weren’t waiting for the American military to come to their aid, the official said.
The Americans should “join the team” fighting Iran in Yemen, a former senior official in the U.S. intelligence community told The Daily Beast. “We should have helped Hadi long ago against his most significant threat [the Houthis], and not just against AQAP. Had we done so, we would not be where we are now.”
The Saudis are making a strong public showing both of the military operations and their support for the Hadi government. Prince Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi defense minister and King’s son, visited the border region with Yemen this week. Just 34 years old, he is the youngest defense minister in the world and is “a rising star” within the Saudi government, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast. The prince also reportedly received ousted Yemeni president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in Riyadh on Thursday, after Hadi fled Yemen on Wednesday in the face of the Houthi onslaught.
As Riyadh portrays the offensive, the purpose is to let not only Iran but the leaders of al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State know that Riyadh and its allies mean business. “Extremists must know we are ready to fight,” he said. “This is a nucleus of the Arab force to stand against Islamic extremism,” he claimed optimistically.
Riyadh’s hope, according to this source, is that the Houthis and their Iranian backers will be forced to engage in serious negotiations about Yemen’s future.
“As a starting point, we are doing something to stop the Houthis from going to Aden,” the source said. “But once you go into this sort of potential quagmire you have to consult all the options. The Houthis were really surprised by the [Saudi-led] assault and the ferocity of it.”
But the Saudis and their partners may not be able to maintain a military operation against the Houthis for long. “The Saudis don’t have a sizable military force that can launch expeditions in Yemen, which limits their military capability,” the official said. If the Saudi coalition cannot keep up the attack on the Houthis, the Americans may have little choice but to join the fight, the official said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told an Iranian-owned television channel that the Saudi-led bombing would only lead to further loss of life. "Military action from outside of Yemen against its territorial integrity and its people will have no other result than more bloodshed and more deaths,” said Zarif, who is considered to be a moderating force in the Iranian government and is central to the ongoing nuclear negotiations. He called for an "urgent dialogue” among the Yemeni factions "without external interference.”
It seems, in fact, far too late for that.
— with additional reporting by Shane HarrisThe scene of the crash, via Bradd Jaffy
The cab driver who jumped the curb in Midtown yesterday causing a crash that severely injured a pedestrian, has not been charged with any crime. Mohammed Himon was issued an administrative summons for unauthorized operation of his vehicle, which carries a possible fine [PDF] of $100 to $350.
Kenneth Olivo, a bike messenger who was also struck by Himon but not seriously injured, told the Post that Himon began driving aggressively after the two jockeyed for position. “The hood of his car was so close to me, I could touch it. I told him to stop, he gets angry, he honks his horn, and he accelerates, and that’s itI’m on the hood of the car, and the woman is under his car,’’ Olivo said.
Sian Green (Instagram)
Green's left leg was severed below the shin. Green's father told the Leicester Mercury that doctors "have had to amputate what's left of her foot." Green's right leg was also badly mangled in the crash, but her blood loss was stemmed in part by a plumber, Dave Justino, who (along with Dr. Mehmet Oz) used a belt and a dog leash as tourniquets.
"She was in pain, beyond pain. She stayed awake the whole time," Justino told DNAinfo. "She screamed at the top of her lungs bloody murder that it hurts."
An NYPD spokesman confirmed that the Crash Investigation Squad conducted the investigation at the scene. In addition to Himon's single summons, the owner of the cab received an identical summons, and another citation for "incorrect info on rate card."
Allan Fromberg, a spokesman for the TLC, said that Himon was licensed to drive a cab, just not the one he happened to be operating yesterday when he plowed into the cyclist and the tourist. Fromberg added that he wasn't aware of what the summons for the "incorrect rate card" meant.
The Post reports that Himon was involved in a crash in 2010 in which one person was injured, and three moving violations in 2011, including running a red light, driving 65 mph in a 45 mph zone, and an improper turn. Those fines totaled nine points on his license and $415 in fines. Himon later took a defensive driving course. The amount of Himon's fine for this incident will be determined at a TLC hearing.
“I feel really, really bad... It was a very bad accident,’’ Himon told the tabloid. “Actually, I can’t even remember it. It happened really quick. I was very upset. I am praying to Allah for her that she is getting better. Please pray for her and me.’’Reported ‘hate crime’ on the University of Maryland campus demonstrates the laughable state that our culture has reached…
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I seriously feel like I’m reading parody websites with some of the news that has made headlines lately. In the latest battle against all of this oppression in the United States, two people were compelled to contact the University of Maryland Police Department when they spotted a discarded piece of trash lying on the ground. No, they weren’t trying to save the earth from litter. They were convinced that the piece of plastic wrap resembled a noose and they had stumbled upon a possible hate crime.
It was literally a piece of plastic wrap that can be found securing any number of items or packaging. It even looked like someone either pulled it from an item or was sitting in a boring class fidgeting with it. I’ve been known to play with random objects in class a time or two.
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Of course, it’s being taken seriously—as all allegations of hate crime should be—but things are getting a little out of hand. I’m pretty sure that if a person intended to commit discriminatory acts against people, it would be a little more obvious that placing a saran wrap noose on the ground hoping someone would find it and be shocked. Come on.
The campus police have said they will review video in the area just to cover all bases. I mean, even if some random college kid were seen throwing trash on the ground, how does that equal a hate crime? That’s just bad manners and littering.
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Naturally, I went on over to see what social media had to say on the topic. Most people are of a mind that the folks who reported the vicious act of saran wrap are reaching. I haven’t seen many in defense of being offended by a piece of trash. However, it should be noted that University of Maryland was the site of an actual incident earlier this year when a noose was found inside a fraternity house. There is no comparison between the two, either in terms of seriousness or intent. Pick up the offensive trash is the advice I would give. It doesn’t make headlines or draw negative attention to spin a narrative that hate crimes are out of control.
Things have gotten to the point in the United States where seemingly benign occurrences have ridiculous new labels. Micro-aggression. White privilege. Cultural appropriation. It all confuses me, and I am a member of a minority community! I have asked questions and engaged social justice warriors in dialogue, but was swiftly called a troll for questioning certain aspects of why everyone is mad. Straight-up aggression if you ask me, no need for the “micro.”
In any case, let’s stop looking for racism in the trash. If it’s there in the trash, dismiss it and move on. Don’t let garbage be a trigger. If people want to commit hate crimes or hate bias, |
ait House and Country Store is an institution. So Collin Dewberry and his partner Kelley decided to have breakfast there. He says everything seemed to be going fine until they paid their check and were approached by their waitress on the way out. “After I paid, her countenance seemed to change drastically,” said Dewberry. Big Earl Cheney, the owner, explains what happened next. “She told them the rules are on the door and it says ‘Welcome to Big Earl’s where men act like men, women act like ladies, no saggy pants and we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.'” “And so I laughed and I asked what do you mean?” says Dewberry. “And that’s when she said to us… ‘to put it plainly, we don’t serve fags here.'” The waitress happens to be Cheney’s daughter, and the owner says her choice of words were her own.
But it’s what happened next that makes the story interesting. When Dewberry and Williams’s story made headlines, hundreds of people took to Yelp to exact revenge by describing Big Earl’s Bait House as the “#1 Gay Hangout In Texas” and exploring the menu with a wide variety of double (perhaps even triple) entendres. They also collectively worked to lower the place’s rating.
Yelp user Lori G. writes:
I wish I could give this establishment 0 stars. I was sorely disappointed because I had heard Big Earl’s was overrun with gays so I went there to try to meet some women. But there were NO LESBIANS anywhere in the restaurant. Just a lot of gay guys. TONS OF GAY GUYS EVERYWHERE. Don’t get me wrong, I love gay men, I was just hoping to meet a nice woman. They don’t even have fish tacos on the menu. So I’m giving Big Earl’s 1 star because it’s not a great place for gay women. But I think gay men would love this place because there are so many hot gay guys there.
That’s a clever setup, and—in a follow-up story from CBS-DFW—we learn that it may be followed by a large trip from members of the Dallas LGBT community.
“I think it’s a fantastic idea and I’ll be there,” says Gary Burns. “There’s no reason not to just go and embrace those people and to love them and hug them and say ‘hey, we’re human beings too.'” And Big Earl’s restaurant says they’re ready for them. “If there’s any problems, they will be taken care of appropriately,” says Christina Cheney, who is Big Earl’s daughter and the waitress who made the homophobic remark. “We are aware that they are attempting to come out here. We’re ready for them; we have informed the Sheriff’s department and the state.”
It’d be nice to imagine that an influx of friendly gay customers could broaden the perspective of an institution—but it appears that the Big Earl family, with calls into the Sheriff’s department and the state (presumably the Texas Rangers?), isn’t really interested in seeing things another way. Whether the childish-but-satisfying Yelp prank actually turns into a road trip remains to be seen. Here’s hoping this story ends with broadened horizons and bacon and eggs for everybody.
(image via Facebook)The U.S. government is pursuing an effort to promote the sale of Westinghouse 1150 MW AP1000 nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. government is pursuing an effort to promote the sale of Westinghouse 1150 MW AP1000 nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia. Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act requires a bilateral agreement with any country that wants U.S. nuclear technology exports. The U.S. has insisted that countries signing such agreements set aside any plans for enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. (See summary below)
A total of 48 countries have signed such agreements but Saudi Arabia is not one of them. Saudi Arabia has for years resisted accepting a 123 agreement with these conditions.
The Trump Administration is now considering accepting Saudi Arabia’s objections in order to support a Westinghouse bid for at least two and as many as 16 nuclear reactors. At $5,000/Kw, the projects would be worth about $12 billion for the first two units.
The Bloomberg wire service reports that U.S. President Donald Trump considering easing nuclear rules for the Saudi project.
The wire service reports that Westinghouse is looking for new markets after it emerges from bankruptcy. Past deals have barred uranium enrichment for international projects which is an issue which has prevented Saudi Arabia from signing a 1-2-3 Agreement with the U.S. Without it U.S. nuclear firms cannot do business with that country.
The change that is on the table is that the Trump administration wants Saudi Arabia to consider bids by Westinghouse Electric Co. and other U.S. companies such as Curtis Wright, which makes reactor pumps, to build nuclear reactors in that country. To get to that point it may make a policy change and allow enrichment of uranium as part of that deal.
The action by the Trump Administration follows an unsuccessful effort by Michael Flynn, the former National Security Adviser, working with several consulting firms, to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia and Jordan in return for lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Paradoxically, while Flynn claimed he was promoting U.S. reactor firms, had he been successful, Russian and/or Chinese firms would have won the business. Flynn has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. about lifting the sanctions.
Alarm bells go off among weapons control experts
This proposal has alarmed nonproliferation experts at the Lawfare Center / Brookings Mieke Eoyang and Laura S. H. Holgate, both experts in these matters, point out that Flynn’s plan was dangerous because it could set off an arms race in the Middle East. They write that “Flynn’s actions could have further destabilized an already volatile region.” The experts say Saudi Arabia wants the enrichment capability so that it could eventually develop a nuclear weapons program to counter Iran
Bloomberg quotes Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, who said weakening the prohibition against enrichment and reprocessing, often referred to as “the gold standard,” is disturbing given what he said was Saudi Arabia’s “sub-par nuclear nonproliferation record.”
“We shouldn’t compromise our longstanding efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons in order to play favorites with certain companies or countries,” he said in an email, calling the idea “disturbing and counterproductive.”
At the Nuclear Policy Education Center executive director Henry Sokolski and nonproliferation expert Victor Gilinsky published an essay in November critical of efforts by DOE Energy Secretary Rick Perry to promote Westinghouse reactors for export to the Middle East.
Perry, told Congress in October 12 testimony, that “we have to support this industry,” because, among other things, it is important to the success of our nonproliferation policy. Sokolski and Gilinski argue that Perry’s position actually would, if implemented, do the opposite.
For its part Westinghouse told Bloomberg “Westinghouse is pleased that Saudi Arabia has decided to pursue nuclear energy,” Sarah Cassella, a spokeswoman, said.
“We are fully participating in their request for information and are pleased to provide the AP1000 plant, the industry’s most advanced technology.”
Is Saudi Arabia ready to buy nuclear reactors from Westinghouse?
There are a a few reasons why the Saudi Arabian government isn’t 100% ready to to want to do business with Westinghouse even if the U.S. loosens the requirements of the Atomic Energy Act.
What the firm has in terms of a reputation is that it ran the V C Summer project into South Carolina into the ditch with bad project managers and is bankrupt for it. That project is now cancelled by the utilities that got started with it with little prospect that another firm will want complete it.
The surprise about the failure at V C Summer is that there are no surprises. All of the faults that caused the project in South Carolina to come to an early halt are with failures to follow project management schedule and cost control standard practices that have been known since Admiral Rickover supervised the construction of the first nuclear submarines in the 1950s.
This is not a sterling recommendation. Note that the UAE decided not to accept a bid from Areva for four nuclear reactors after learning of costly schedule delays at a project in Finland. The Saudi energy ministry would undoubtedly do similar reviews of the track record of any bidder for its program.
South Korea seems to be in a better position to win the Saudi contracts
In September 2017 the Saudi energy ministry released an RFP that cites the power rating (1400 MW of the nuclear reactors being built by South Korea in the UAE. It follows that the Saudi government, if they do anything, will be to try to get the South Korean units.
Most importantly, the Saudi procurement team can kick the tires of the UAE units, so to speak, prior to signing on the bottom line. The first of four UAE units comes online in 2018 and South Korea has a similar reactor in revenue service at home which is where the UAE plant operators are learning how to run it.
Another reason is that the experienced skilled trades that are building the four units in the UAE would be available. This experience is invaluable and could shave costs of construction since the workers would have already built these types of units. The UAE units will be operating in revenue service and available to train the Saudi plant operators in Arabic.
Add to that the experience of the South Korean project managers, and the supply chain for long lead time large components like steam generators and reactor pressure vessels that is in place in South Korea, and the choice becomes more attractive
The UAE model of eventually returning the spent nuclear fuel to its suppliers (Areva and Tenex) is an obvious model for any commercial deal with Saudi Arabia. It would be the one reason Congress might accept a Westinghouse deal, but it would thwart the Saudi desire for enrichment and reprocessing capabilities.
South Korea’s 123 agreement, updated in 2016, with the U.S. still prohibits reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel so it would not be able to take back fuel from Saudi Arabia for this purpose. The agreement between South Korea and the U.S. opens the door for enrichment of uranium by South Korea, but only after further consultations. In diplomatic speak, that means the door is open without a specific timetable.
In signing the updated agreement South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized the fact that it is exporting nuclear reactors to the UAE and hopes to do the same to other countries, including the USA. South Korea has recently entered into negotiations to supply its reactors to the UK’s NuGen Moorside project following its abandonment for financial reasons by Toshiba, the parent firm of Westinghouse.
It occurs to me, and other observers, that Westinghouse has asked the White House for help to promote the Saudi deal in an effort to get the price up for sale of the troubled and bankrupt business unit to a buyer. By touting the potential for a Saudi deal, a buyer might be more interested. Hopefully, any buyer will have good help with their due diligence.
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty Picked for DOE Nuclear Security Undersecretary Post
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, president of national security consulting firms Tier Tech International and LEG Inc., will be nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as undersecretary for nuclear security at the Energy Department.
Gordon-Hagerty previously worked at DOE as director of the department’s emergency response office and acting director of its nuclear weapons surety office.
She also served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and spent more than five years as director for combating terrorism at the National Security Council, where she helped coordinate U.S. governmental efforts to prevent, deter and respond to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and conventional threats.
Her professional career also includes time as executive vice president and chief operating officer of enriched uranium fuel supplier USEC Inc. (now Centrus) and a health physicist at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The Under Secretary for Nuclear Security, in the United States Department of Energy, is the Administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). At DOE nonproliferation of nuclear weapons is one of its key missions.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s responsibilities include designing, producing, and maintaining safe, secure and reliable nuclear weapons for the U.S. military, providing safe, militarily effective naval nuclear propulsion plants, and promoting international nuclear safety and nonproliferation.
REFERENCE
Summary of a 123 Agreement
Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act requires the conclusion of a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement for significant transfers of nuclear material, equipment, or components from the United States to another nation.
Moreover, such agreements, commonly referred to as “123 Agreements,” facilitate cooperation in other areas, such as technical exchanges, scientific research, and safeguards discussions.
In conjunction with other nonproliferation tools, particularly the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT),123 Agreements help to advance U.S. nonproliferation principles. They establish the legal framework for significant nuclear cooperation with other countries.
In order for a country to enter into a 123 Agreement with the United States, that country must commit to U.S.-mandated nuclear nonproliferation norms.
The U.S. State Department is responsible for negotiating 123 Agreements, with the technical assistance and concurrence of DOE/NNSA and consultation with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As of January 20, 2017, the United States has entered into 23 such agreements that govern peaceful nuclear cooperation with 48 countries, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the governing authorities on Taiwan.
# # #We've finally snagged our first Desert Diamond Cup win, and not a moment too soon. Seattle's defeat of New York Red Bulls last night means we're off to the final, which will be nationally broadcast on NBC Sports.
At any rate, there's plenty to take away from last night's 3-2 win over New England Revolution, so let's talk about those.
What we've learned
Sebastian Velasquez at the top of the diamond gives the player a chance to influence the match in a way he can't always from wider positions. His shot to create the opportunity for Devon Sandoval's tap-in was a great example of that. The wide positions in the diamond undoubtedly will be where Velasquez sees most of his 2013 time, but long-term, he's an attacking midfielder who will benefit from being played centrally. The indications from last night are overwhelmingly positive.
David Viana as a striker means a midfielder in a roaming role. It wasn't exactly his finest display, but it surely wasn't a bad one. Tactically, he misses a little when being played up front. Perhaps that will come in time, but I'd say he's better-suited for a midfield role. That's not to say he couldn't grow into a tactical piece as a second striker, but he's not quite there yet.
Carlos Salcedo is going to be very, very good — and it might not be long until he is. The young center back has improved every preseason match, looking more and more effective as a defensive leader. If he continues to develop at this rate, we'll be lucky to have a player of his quality.
Ned Grabavoy has the potential to really make an improved impact for Real Salt Lake this season. It's not like he didn't make a mark before, but his preseason performances have been fantastic. He assisted for both goals last night and took up great positions throughout. Additionally, it was perhaps again proof that he's better in the outside of the diamond than the top.
Khari Stephenson has started to look an effective player for Real Salt Lake. The first Desert Diamond Cup match saw him looking a bit off, but as the team's improved, so has he. He's not the youngest option for a midfield signing, but he brings a veteran head and a knack for long shots. They're game-changers, those.
I am increasingly confident in our midfield depth. Sure, we lost Will Johnson and Jonny Steele, who both played significant minutes (the former being vital, the latter being considerably less so), but we've added some good pieces. Cole Grossman and Khari Stephenson can both be expected to play substantial minutes in 2013, and John Stertzer could win minutes, too. Enzo Martinez, Sebastian Velasquez and Yordany Alvarez all look improved on 2012's showings, as well.
Our problem of not scoring seems to have faded, too. Magnificent.Guinea's government raised the death toll in the Ebola epidemic raging through its southern forests and capital to 95.
The health ministry added nine deaths to the toll of 86 given before the weekend, saying that 52 cases had been confirmed in laboratories to be the killer tropical virus.
"Up to now, the Guinean authorities have registered 151 suspect cases and 95 deaths," the ministry's chief disease prevention officer Sakoba Keita told AFP, without specifying the locations of the new deaths.
A number of patients have been discharged from Ebola treatment centres after beating the virus, medical charity Doctors Without Borders, which goes by its French initials MSF, said in a statement.
"When the first patient came out from the treatment centre, I was so happy and the whole team was cheering," Marie-Claire Lamah, a Guinean doctor working in MSF's treatment centre in Conakry, was quoted as saying by MSF.
Various studies, including a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, have demonstrated some immunity in survivors from the particular strain to which they were exposed, but life-long immunity has not been demonstrated.
MSF said it was working with local communities to ensure that discharged patients who have beaten the virus can return home safely, and that everyone understands they are no longer contagious.
"We explain to the families and neighbours that the patient is now negative and doesn't present any risks to anyone - they can be kissed, touched and hugged without any risk of contagion," says MSF health promoter Ella Watson-Stryker.
MSF has about 60 international staff working in Guinea, and has flown in more than 40 tonnes of supplies to tackle the epidemic.
Ebola leads to haemorrhagic fever, which causes muscle pain, weakness, vomiting, diarrhoea and, in severe cases, organ failure and unstoppable bleeding.
The tropical virus can be transmitted to humans from wild animals, and between humans through direct contact with another's blood, faeces or sweat.
Sexual contact, or the unprotected handling of contaminated corpses, can also lead to infection.
Mali has become the latest of Guinea's neighbours to announce suspected cases of Ebola.
On Thursday it said that three victims had been placed in isolation while test samples were sent to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With Liberia and Sierra Leone also reporting suspected cases, MSF has described the outbreak as an "unprecedented epidemic" and warned the unusual geographical spread of cases complicates the task of containing it "enormously".Photo
Bill Gates, the founder and former chairman of Microsoft, has made education-related philanthropy a major focus since stepping down from his day-to-day role in the company in 2008.
His new area of interest: helping solve schools’ money problems. In a speech on Friday, Mr. Gates — who is gaining considerable clout in education circles — plans to urge the 50 state superintendents of education to take difficult steps to restructure the nation’s public education budgets, which have come under severe pressure in the economic downturn.
He suggests they end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers’ ability to raise student achievement. He also urges an end to efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead, he suggests rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools.
“Of course, restructuring pay systems is like kicking a beehive” — but restructure them anyway, Mr. Gates plans to tell the superintendents in his talk to the Council of Chief State School Officers, which opens a convention in Louisville on Friday.
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“Rebuild the budget based on excellence,” Mr. Gates says.
Teachers’ unions defend giving raises to teachers as they gain experience and higher education.QINGDAO, China - Everything was in place for a perfect ending to a brilliant debut.
Tracy McGrady, the former NBA and Rockets superstar playing in the Chinese Basketball Association, had rallied his new team, the Qingdao Eagles, from a 16-point deficit against Fujian QB. Now, with the game tied and 18.5 seconds remaining, McGrady, who had 34 points and nine assists, took the inbounds pass and slowly dribbled, eyeing the clock as the seconds slipped away.
Unfortunately, McGrady - known as Mai Di in China - was not watching the man who had been given the seemingly unenviable task of checking the CBA's highest-profile newcomer. Fujian's Zhou Qixin, timing McGrady's high dribble, reached in, flicked the ball away and came up with the steal. Seconds later, Sundiata Gaines banked in a 3-pointer at the buzzer for a 95-92 victory.
That 18.5-second slice of action is a perfect microcosm of all the frustrations, gaffes and growing pains of McGrady's upside-down maiden season in the CBA.
The script-flipping, opening-day shocker triggered a staggering run of 12 consecutive losses, and in a league that has only 32 regular-season games, that left no wiggle room for a playoff run as the Eagles sank to the bottom of the standings.
So, is McGrady disappointed?
"Not necessarily," he said with a shrug. "We've improved as a team and as individuals, so I can't say that I'm disappointed. It is what it is."
Great expectations
When McGrady, who played with China's basketball icon Yao Ming for five seasons with the Rockets, arrived in this sprawling city on China's east coast, it was supposed to represent a seismic shift in the Eagles' fortunes. In anticipation of a monster season, the Eagles moved from their cozy 4,000-seat home court at Qingdao University to the much larger Guoxin Stadium, which has three times the seating capacity.
After all, this was the great Mai Di, whose 16-year NBA career included seven All-Star Game appearances, two scoring titles and - the highlight clip that got the heaviest rotation in China after McGrady arrived - the 13 points in the final 35 seconds that sank the San Antonio Spurs in 2004.
But that sublimely athletic 6-8 McGrady exists only in highlights and memories, something Qingdao management apparently didn't understand when assembling this year's roster.
Qingdao finished a franchise-best 16-16 last season, but management didn't keep the nucleus intact, instead going with nine new players. The biggest loss was stocky, slam-dunking forward Li Gen, the MVP of last year's CBA All-Star Game, who bolted to Beijing as a free agent.
It was assumed by many such personnel losses would be mitigated by McGrady's dominance. There was talk he would average 50 points, speculation McGrady laughed off.
"It's hard to score 50 points in a game," he said, "much less average 50."
McGrady, 33, is averaging 25 points and 4.9 assists, but it chafes some that his numbers are not close to what other "imports" have been putting up, such as Zhejiang's Quincy Douby, a fringe NBA player who is averaging 32.5 points and set a CBA record with a 75-point game against Shanxi.
"That wasn't my intention when I came here," McGrady said. "I told my teammates, 'I'm not coming here to lead this league in scoring. Don't count on me to go out there and get 30 or 40 points every night. I'm going to put some pressure on you as well.' They didn't understand that in the beginning because they were still sitting back and deferring to me a lot. But I think they've caught on now because they're a lot more aggressive."
Reinforcements
Given time to jell after a 2-17 start, the Eagles have started to put it together, going 6-3 and beating upper-echelon teams such as Liaoning and Stephon Marbury's Beijing Ducks, the defending CBA champions.
One big reason for the turnaround has been the addition of 6-11 Chris Daniels, a Texas A&M-Corpus Christi product who is among the league leaders in scoring (29.6 points) and rebounds (12 per game), but the Eagles are getting consistent contributions from Chinese players Li Tao, a smooth-shooting wing, center Yang Genglin and forward Zhao Yonggang.
Another reason for the Eagles' recent surge is because McGrady has embraced the original concept behind having Americans compete in the CBA. The theory was American players, rather than simply act as ringers, would use their superior experience, skills, fundamentals, athleticism and strength to help to accelerate the development of Chinese players.
In that regard, McGrady has been a huge success, spending chunks of practice time teaching "how the game needs to be played and what my vision is out on the basketball court."
"He's doing things that are more important than scoring," coach Zhang Shizhang said. "He helps us on both sides of the floor, defense and offense. Also, he motivates the players in practice, teaching them. The role he plays for us has so many intangibles, which is good for us."
Controversy with refs
Not that it has all been good for McGrady.
In the last of a three-game exhibition series against a team of Americans, McGrady started but played just 98 seconds before retiring to the bench for the night. Fans at the sold-out arena were outraged, and late in the fourth quarter a riot almost erupted when they began throwing debris on the floor. He also publicly blasted the requirement that players take a written exam on the rules, calling it "nonsense."
In a Dec. 9 game at Beijing, McGrady made more headlines when he delivered a retaliatory elbow to the chest of Ducks forward Ji Zhe, who had taunted him with a wagging finger after making a 3-pointer. And in the wake of a controversial loss at Bayi, when officials didn't call a late 24-second violation on the home team Rockets, McGrady vented on his Sina Weibo (Chinese twitter) account:
"CBA has to do a better job with these officials. My team plays hard every night and the 3 blind mice take it away from us!
"This bad officiating has to change. No way I'm coming back if the officiating continues to be this errant."
McGrady was hit with a one-game suspension and a fine of approximately $1,600 for causing "adverse social impact."
McGrady said he's fine with the travel, accommodations and practices, but the officiating - which some say is merely incompetent; other rumors persist that many of the referees accept bribes to influence games (called "black whistles" in China) - has been the one thing with which he has struggled.
"It's just bad," McGrady said. "It's bad … (if) this league is going to go anywhere that has to be cleaned up. I'm going to leave it at that."
The Eagles' struggles have had little impact on McGrady's overwhelming popularity. He is an icon in the truest sense - grown men, in near-religious fervor, have broken down and wept after finding themselves in McGrady's presence.
McGrady has appreciated the rock-star treatment he has received, but he admitted it can be too much.
"Considering that I've been coming over here for 10 or 11 years, I've seen it before," McGrady said. "I'm used to it. What I wasn't used to is dealing with it every day and every moment. There's nowhere I can go (without being mobbed)."
High price of fame
So McGrady spends much of his time in his hotel room, pondering his future. He has business ideas, like opening basketball camps in China, which he hopes will help young Chinese players catch up with the rest of the world.
Does his future include another season in the CBA?
McGrady just shrugs.
"I don't know," he said. "I haven't even thought about it."
Perhaps this long, strange trip is nearing its end. If so, McGrady said he will leave with no regrets.
"I wanted to come here and give back to my Chinese fans who have supported me over my NBA career," he said. "Before I stopped playing basketball I wanted to give them the opportunity to see me play in person. I think it's been fantastic this season. This journey has been everything and more than what I had expectations of it being.
"Coming over here for so many years I realized how passionate and loving these fans are. When the opportunity presented itself there was no hesitation - I wanted to do it. Who knows what the future holds, but I will have something going on here in China."
Michael Murphy is a freelance writer based in China.Keima Katsuragi (桂木 桂馬, Katsuragi Keima) is the main protagonist of The World God Only Knows series, written and illustrated by Tamiki Wakaki. He's known in the gaming world as the God of Conquest (落とし神, Otoshigami) for being extremely skilled at conquering every girl in dating sims. He's known in his normal life as Otamegane (オタメガネ), a portmanteau of "Otaku" (オタク, Nerd) and "Megane" (メガネ, Glasses). "Otamegane" can roughly be translated to "gloomy geek with glasses", referring to his silent and extremely cold behavior. Keima is obsessed with games, to the point of closing himself up in his own room and playing for three days straight, just to make it for his "deadline" on the Internet. His main catchphrase is "I can see the ending!"
Contents show]
Appearance
Keima has brown hair and eyes, wears glasses, has a bed hair sticking out and usually has a PFP in his hands. His uniform varies according to season. When he's not wearing it, he wears a long-sleeved shirt with a white collar and pants. He's also forced to wear a black (purple in anime) guillotine collar on his neck, proving he made a contract with Hell. Keima is also shown to be quite handsome, especially without his spectacles. This is apparent, as when Keima ever approached a capture target, most of them tend to be flustered. And Ikumi Yoshino from the light novels even said that he looked like a "a rich kid hikkikomori! Or something like that." When he cross-dressed, he was able to enlarge his pupils, thus making himself look like a girl and even at that, he is able to attract boys into flirting with him (much to his annoyance). He also seems to be able to transform his face to a less attractive one when he doesn't want to be identified.
Keima also owns a light-blue and dark-blue striped Yukata along with a blue slash along with wooden slippers.
Personality
At the start of the series, Keima is completely detached from reality, showing absolutely no interest in any real girl, even pointing out that they are flawed and claims he is in no way sexually attracted to "3D girls" and sees such thoughts as below him.[1] He hates virtually everything from reality, even himself. As a result, he takes refuge in his 2D world.
Keima is an avid gamer and is extremely devoted to finishing his games. When challenged with a bug in a game, Keima tried every single option in the game throughout seven hours straight, tiring even Elsie.[2] He becomes very attached to the heriones[3] and firmly begins that there is no such thing as a bad herione, only bad games.[4]
When talking to people normally without altering his personality, he is generally cold and distant. If he is paying attention to his PFP or any other kind of game, he will even take no notice of other people around him unless called vigorously, physically abused or appealed to.
He seems to take the concept of making mistakes extremely difficult, as shown when he got a 99% on his English test instead of a 100% simply because he was distracted when he was tutoring Ayumi, Chihiro and Kanon. Also, this is extremely obvious during the point in time when Kanon had been stabbed. He seemed to take the incident very seriously as compared to most other things, and even blamed himself for her being targeted.
Keima would also change and alter his true personality to match and make his conquest targets appeal hence, making the capture easier. The instances when he did not alter his personality at all is his capture of Chihiro and Tenri.
As the series progresses, Keima slowly changes his view of the real world and Keima has also gotten more into devoting time and energy to his conquests. In the beginning, he was often very reluctant to capture girls and would also be quite flustered whenever they showed affection to him. But as time goes on, he's more precise whenever a runaway spirit shows up, devoting time and energy into it while holding his composure even during the kissing.
Recently, when Kanon was assaulted, Keima entirely stopped playing his PFP and is very devoted to searching for the goddesses. Furthermore, Keima has also began to show a much softer side shown that when he rejected Chihiro, Keima gave genuine faces of sadness and grieved. As of chapter 189, Keima's perspective of the real girls has changed, shown most evidently when he shed tears and even apologized to what he had done to Chihiro.
Keima also seems to be accepting reality more saying "There is no difference between the real and the virtual. I'll aim for the best ending". However, he still seems to believe 2D girls to be superior.
Keima remains faithful to his "2D girls", and in particular, to Yokkyun and immediately after assembling all of the goddesses, Keima shut himself in his house for five days straight to play his games.
Abilities
Intelligence
Despite the fact he plays video games in class, Keima is a top scorer in every subject. When he was scolded by his English teacher Ichirō Kodama because of his gaming habits, he reasoned that everything would be fine as long as he aced all his exams, and then proceeded to do so, demonstrating a great academic ability.[5] It is shown that he applies the same analytical skills he utilities to "capture" girls when studying. This method was proven effective when he flawlessly predicted the questions on the upcoming English test, basing himself on the teacher's personality and the examination extent.
Keima can multi-task with unflinching accuracy. He has been shown to be able to operate several different video and computer games at the same time with extreme ease and regularity. He can even place his full attention to each screen, becoming "emotional" whenever a screen has an emotional scene. His room is set up to allow him to play up to eight different video games at once. He also has an extensive collection of video games and systems, even those that goes as far back as the early cassette based computer games of the 70's and 80's. Keima has made a point that anything less than several games at once leaves him unchallenged and unsatisfied. The diversity of the games he owned and conquered also contributes to him excelling at many other non-galge games like shōgi.
Keima is also a fast learner, being able to beat Haqua in her New Hell-only game multiple times despite the latter claiming to have never lost for the past 100 years.
In an omake, it is said that Keima has modified his PFP, granting them never before seen abilities that normal PFPs don't possess. This may hint that Keima is also good with technology.
Capturing Skills
During captures, he is shown to be able to use his vast knowledge of galge to help him. Although some of his techniques backfired, Keima has always managed to get to the roots of the girls' emotional problems, showing great adaptability. His skill in conquering girls may be inherited from his father, as his father was able to "conquer" Mari who used to be in a biker gang. Keima is also very organized during capture operations, sometimes withstanding days and weeks of tedious menial labor just for the sake of setting up the needed scenario.
Keima is also a gifted actor, being able to adjust his real personality between every capture, usually altering the personality presented to something he knows will appeal to the girl in question. For example, he acts really concerned, supportive and interested in Kanon's problems while for Sumire he acts like the ideal, polite employee. This does not apply as much with Chihiro and Nanaka, neither of whom he was actually intending to get to love him. Very few people, notably only people who are very close in relation with Keima, can ever tell if Keima is lying or forcing himself to act, one such person being Tenri.
Keima however, does have weaknesses that has made his capture in-real-life harder and more difficult:
Ordinary girls like Chihiro or Asami with no clearly defined traits. Without a defined trait, Keima would have a hard time altering his personality that best suits for the conquest.
Daydreamer-type girls like Tooru Amami, since they operate outside logic due to conflicting personalities and all of his technique is based on said logic.
Aggressive girls like post-capture Yui. He plays games where he is the player chasing after girls. If a girl chases after him, being inexperienced in such a situation, he tends to be extremely flustered.
Uncooperative-type of heroines who do not do what Keima said or predicted. Examples include how Chihiro who does not follow suite with Keima's plans during the Sports Fest, and Akari, who was very persistent in using Keima for her 'kissing project'. Yui also briefly displayed this behavior during her conquest before Keima cross-dressed as a girl.
Physical Prowess
In terms of physical abilities, he has been shown to be from average to horribly unfit. This is due to his obsessive gaming habits, leading him to ignore the outside world and game in his room for extended periods.
Keima is also capable of doing sport activities such as baseball batting if it has anything to do with capturing 2D girls, such as a girl character on a monitor who reacts if the batter manages to hit a target with the baseball. This is due to the above example classifying (barely) as a galge.
Keima has demonstrated to be able to withstand being electrocuted (by Kanon), kicked (by Ayumi), punched ( |
, but don't idolize them. Over the years there have been many people that I looked up to and watched for new tech. I learned a lot by simply trusting they were right and digging into things they worked on. These people tend to be very productive, brilliant, and inspiring. Find them and let them inspire and teach you. However, make sure not to idolize them. It's easy to seem intimidating from a twitter feed, but if you look at how they work in real life, you'll see that they aren't that different. Hacks everywhere, etc. We're all just experimenting. Lastly, don't blindly trust them; if you disagree, engage them and learn from it. Some of my most productive conversations happened this way. My Emacs config is a mess. I don't know why my OCaml autocompletion is broken (it's been broken for over a month). I don't automate stuff and have to dig around in my shell history to find commands I need sometimes. I write the ugliest code at first. I stick things on the global object until I know what I'm doing. The most experienced programmer uses hacks all the time; the important part is that you're getting stuff done.
Don't devalue your work. Newer programmers tend to feel like their work isn't worth much because they are new. Or maybe you are an experienced programmer, but working in a new area that makes you uncomfortable. In my opinion, some of the best ideas come from newer programmers who see improvements to existing tech that those who have already-formed opinions don't see. Your work is worthwhile, no matter what. In the worst case, if your idea doesn't work out, the community will have learned better why that approach doesn't make sense. (A note to the community: it's up to us to execute on this and be welcoming to newcomers.)
Don't feel pressured to work all the time. With new tech coming out every day, it can feel like the world will move on without you if you take a night off. That's not true. In fact, you will do better work if you disengage a lot. Your perspective will be fresh, and I find myself subconsciously coming up with new ideas when I'm not working. The majority of the stuff being released every day is just a rehash of the same ideas. Truly revolutionary stuff only happens every few years. A good talk to watch on this subject is Hammock Driven Development.
Ignore fluff. One of the biggest ways you can objectively get better faster is by ignoring "fluff" that won't actually improve your skills very much. Another way to say this is "use your time wisely". You only have so many hours in the day and if you spend it on deeper things you will see a big difference over time. So what is "fluff"? It's up to you, but I can give you some examples of what I consider fluff: language syntax, library APIs, and configuring build tooling. Learning a new ES7 JS syntax won't make you a better programmer nearly as much as learning how compilers work, for example. Adopting a new library that implements the same idea but with a new API isn't that interesting. All of those things are important, of course, but I recommend spending more time learning deeper concepts that will reward you for years. Here's a question I like to ask: do you spend most of your time making your code look "nice"? If so, I recommend not focusing on it so much. Your code is going to change a lot over time anyway. It's better to focus hard on the core problems you're trying to solve and think hard about your layers of abstractions. After you've nailed all of that you can spend a little time polishing your code. (This also applies to the DRY principle. Don't worry about it so much. Feel free to duplicate.)
Dig into past research. If you're excited about an idea, it's super tempting to sit down an immediately get going. But you shouldn't do that until you've done some cursory research about how people have solved it before. Spending a few days researching the topic always completely changes how I am going to solve it. It's valuable to learn how to read academic papers. I don't know anything about denotational/operational/etc semantics so there are a lot of papers I can't read. But there are many that use code instead of math and aren't too hard to read. There is a huge amount of knowledge sitting in papers from the last 30 years. If you get good at extracting this, you'll be a thought-leader in no time. Prettier is a perfect example of this. I knew what I wanted but I had no idea how to implement it. After a little research I found this paper and after a few days I knew exactly what I needed to do. I had something basic working in a week. If I ignored previous research it would have taken a lot longer. If you're looking for papers, the Papers We Love GitHub repo is a great place to start.Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino the former and possibly current boss of the Philadelphia Mafia returned to Philly recently for a probation revocation hearing leaving many wondering what is Joey’s current status when comes to La Cosa Nostra in Philly. Since his release from prison Joey has been seemingly living the good life down in Boca Raton, Florida and when asked has maintained that he has given up on the mob and is out. But many people from law enforcement to mob buffs find it hard to believe that Joey no longer has a hand in things.
“Joey Merlino”
From this recent hearing we know the feds have been keeping a close eye on Merlino since his release and claim he met with fellow Philly mobsters and other criminals in a violation of his probation down in Florida. Many believe this is yet another sign that Joey is still the current boss of the Philly mafia running things through his close associate and current acting boss Steve Mazzone. He took over as acting boss following the indictments of former boss Joseph Ligambi and most of his administration many of which were convicted.
“Steven Mazzone”
But the John Gotti of Passyunk Avenue says after doing 14 years behind bars and now on other side of 50 says he has no desire to go back. He and his lawyer say he has a fresh start down in Florida and although he misses his family has no plans to return to Philly. It seems like he is on the verge of opening up a restaurant down in Boca with some investors if he beats the parole revocation case back in Philly.
“Upcoming Merlino Restaurant in Boca”
A secretly taped conversation the feds have from back in 2010 between Joseph Ligambi, Philly mob capo Joseph “Scoops” Licata, and others in which Joey is possibly mentioned as still being the actual boss of the mafia in Philadelphia is another smoking gun for many. Many believe including some in law enforcement that Ligambi was simply handing day to day operations acting as boss for Merlino while he was away. So what do you think is Joey Merlino still the boss of the Philly mob?
Is Joey Merlino still the boss of the Philly Mafia? Yes (41%, 67 Votes)
Probably (33%, 54 Votes)
No (15%, 25 Votes)
Probably Not (11%, 18 Votes) Total Voters: 164
Loading... Loading...The Israeli military shelled a United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA) school today, killing and injuring some of the Palestinians who had gathered there after fleeing their homes following Israeli messages to do so. CNN‘s Ben Wedeman, who is reporting from Gaza, said that medical sources told him 30 people were killed. Other reports put the death toll lower; the Associated Press reports that at least seven were killed, while Agence France Press reports nine dead.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness has confirmed that there are “multiple dead and injured at designated UNRWA shelter in Beit Hanoun.” He said on Twitter that the Israeli military had been given “precise co-ordinates of the UNRWA shelter in Beit Hanoun.”
The first reports came in on Twitter from Palestinians in Gaza, and were then confirmed by CNN’s Ben Wedeman, who is reporting from the coastal strip.
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As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified last week, they dropped leaflets in Palestinian neighborhoods urging them to flee ahead of heavy bombardment. Tens of thousands of people heeded the call, with UNRWA sheltering 140,000 people in 83 different schools.
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UNRWA has been pulled into the conflict by both sides. On Tuesday, the agency for Palestinian refugees announced that they “discovered rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip” for the second time. The agency condemned “the group or groups responsible for this flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law.” Israel has also hit other UNRWA schools multiple times. The agency’s spokesman, Chris Gunness, reported that “UNRWA’s had 3 direct hits from Israeli fire on 2 schools in 3 days,” injuring five Palestinians in one of the incidents.
During Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza, the military bombed UNRWA facilities multiple times, a war crime under international law.
Editor's note: Since this article was published, the death toll has written to at least 15.Brooke L. Lajiness, 38, will go on trial next month on 13 charges of criminal sexual misconduct
A Michigan mother is set to go to trial next month on 13 charges of criminal sexual conduct.
Brooke L. Lajiness, 38, was arraigned earlier this month for accosting a minor for immoral purposes and furnishing obscenity to a child.
Her pretrial has been scheduled for May 8 before a judge in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Her attorney, David I. Goldstein, told a judge Thursday that Lajiness was renouncing her probable cause hearing and her right to a preliminary examination.
Lajiness' husband has stayed married to her and has been accompanying her in court.
In a Facebook post last month, Lajiness proclaimed her love for her husband David, saying: 'In life, nothing is guaranteed,'
'So finding someone who knows all of your flaws, weaknesses and mistakes and still thinks you're amazing is something to hold onto and never take for granted!'
Her affair with the young boy allegedly began last summer, as he was graduating from middle school on to high school.
Michigan State Police Trooper Donald Pasternak testified that most of the sexual encounters happened in the back of Lajiness' car in a Lima Township driveway.
At her arraignment on March 3, Pasternak testified that he started investigating Lajiness a few weeks before, when the victim's mother walked into a police station and complained that Lajiness was having sex with her son.
Lajiness reportedly confessed later on to having sex with the teen and exchanging the nude pictures.
Police found that she started exchanging photos with the teen while he was still in middle school.
She is also facing an additional charge in relation to the photos.
Langinesswas accompanied by her husband David in court on Thursday after being accused of engaging in a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy
Brooke posted this photo of the two in June of 2016, around the time that the affair reportedly began
Assistant Washtenaw County Prosecutor John Vella said last week that they are looking into whether they may be more victims.
'This case involves a defendant seeking out minors for sex,' Vella said, according to M Live.
Lajiness' attorney, David I. Goldstein, said prosecutors need to focus on the case at hand.
'He keeps talking about'minors,' but there's one,' Goldstein said.
Police say she admitted to having sex with the teen and sending nude photos to the boy
Lajiness is currently free after posting $50,000 bail.
As part of her bond conditions, Lajiness is not allowed near school property or around minors except for her own children. She is also not allowed to use computers, social media websites or to drink alcohol or take drugs.
Attorneys argued in court over whether she should be allowed to travel to Toledo to visit her family while she's free on bail. The judge ruled that she should be free to travel there, so long as she lets the court know in advance.happy halloween everyone!
This is just a little thing i sketched on since halloween was approaching and i was thinking of making something for the holiday.
In here i draw cly as a vampire, inspired by carmilla (the vampire from the book, not A's other personality).
Fennel as a kind of poke-frankenstein doctor with her creepy smile.
Aoi in her werewolf form.
and finally A-chan as jason from friday the 13th since i see her as a slasher film serial killer (i had a previous sketch of her in the michael myers mask but it ended up looking weird or not really good)
Placed false prophet since i was thinking of the closest thing to a demon in tpp lore and helix since he is the most lovecraftian thing we have in our history.
Anyways happy halloween and stay safe this night.Disgraced former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber isn’t the only big name caught up in the emerging green energy scandal in the Pacific Northwest: SolarCity, the brainchild of billionaire corporate welfare queen Elon Musk, was also heavily involved in some of Kitzhaber’s shady schemes. According to an extensive investigation by The Oregonian, a local paper, this particular scheme had it all: political corruption, broken deal terms, and $0.93/hour prison labor.
According to The Oregonian’s investigation, it all started with a $27 million solar array project for the Oregon Institute of Technology and Oregon State University. The project brought with it $12 million in tax credits. After the first vendor brought in by the state filed for bankruptcy, Oregon turned to two companies for help — SolarWorld and its bitter rival, Elon Musk’s SolarCity. SolarCity would oversee the project and do the local engineering and installation work. The two firms were expected to buy and hire locally in order to goose the regional economy and create high-paying area jobs.
But that’s not what happened.
SolarWorld, which made a name for itself by manufacturing its products in the U.S. instead of using cheap, overseas labor like SolarCity did, was unable to handle the scope of work (UPDATE: a SolarWorld rep e-mailed The Federalist after this article was initially published and took issue with this characterization, claiming that rather than SolarWorld being unable to handle the project, SolarCity canceled the contract in retaliation for SolarWorld winning a high-profile trade case against SolarCity). In order to save the project, and its $12 million in tax credits, Elon Musk’s SolarCity stepped in to complete the project by itself. And how did SolarCity go about its work? By hiring prison labor at the rate of $0.93 per hour, roughly one-tenth of the state’s current minimum wage in 2013 of $8.95 per hour:
Firing SolarWorld was just business, said Will Craven, SolarCity spokesman.
But if workers in Hillsboro weren’t going to make the state’s panels, who would?
Shain assured state officials that SolarCity had found “alternative modules of U.S. manufacture, and very possible Oregon manufacture.”
SolarCity’s alternative: Prison labor.
SolarCity told government officials it would use local labor, but it never informed them that it would be using incarcerated local labor instead of trained technicians who generally earn upwards of $11 per hour:
According to The Oregonian:
Under a subcontractor, Norcross, Georgia-based Suniva, the panel work went behind the walls at the Federal Correctional Institute in Sheridan. Inmates paid 93 cents an hour assembled the panels. That was in contrast to SolarWorld factory pay — $11 an hour to start.
Craven acknowledged that using inmate labor “may not have been in the spirit” of the tax credit program. He said state officials knew prisoners were involved.
State officials said they were unaware of the inmate component until questioned recently by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
“They used inmates?” Simonton asked. “That’s unfortunate.”
While it may be unfortunate, it is not even remotely surprising given the involvement of an Elon Musk company. Yes, he is remarkably successful. He’s built a huge car company, a huge space company, and a huge solar energy company. What he hasn’t done is build any of those companies without massive taxpayer subsidies.
Tesla depends on federal electric car subsidies, to the tune of $7,500 per vehicle, as well as government-enabled zero emission vehicle credits. SpaceX depends on large government procurement contracts. And SolarCity depends on renewable energy mandates that force states to go in search of “alternative” energy sources that are expensive and economically unsustainable. But that’s not enough, apparently. Elon Musk’s SolarCity also felt compelled to use $0.93/hour government jail jobs for its labor needs.
And even with all that — the subsidies, the mandates, the contracts, and the cut-rate prison labor — Elon Musk’s companies still can’t consistently make money. Tesla has never turned an annual profit, but it had racked up an accumulated $1.4 billion in losses by the end of 2014. The same goes for SolarCity, which had generated more than a quarter billion dollars in accumulated losses through the end of last year. While SpaceX is rumored to be profitable, it’s hard to believe it got there without tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in the form of Pentagon and NASA procurement contracts (because SpaceX is a private company and is not required to publicly release its financials, its profitability claim cannot be independently verified).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with using prison labor, but there’s something super sketchy about a billionaire corporate welfare queen using incarcerated contractors in order to skirt the local hiring requirements of a lucrative taxpayer-funded project. Elon Musk may be a huge fan of hiring taxpayer subsidies, but it turns that at least one of his companies is not so keen on hiring actual taxpayers.People Who Feel They Have A Purpose In Life Live Longer
Enlarge this image Maria Fabrizio for NPR Maria Fabrizio for NPR
We know that happiness and social connection can have positive benefits on health. Now research suggests that having a sense of purpose or direction in life may also be beneficial.
To find out if having a sense of purpose has an effect on aging and adult development, Patrick Hill, an assistant professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, looked at data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, which is funded by the National Institute on Aging.
Hill and his colleague Nicholas Turiano of the University of Rochester Medical Center looked to see how more than 6,000 people answered questions like "Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them," and other questions that gauged positive and negative emotions.
They found that 14 years after those questions were asked, people who had reported a greater sense of purpose and direction in life were more likely to outlive their peers.
In fact, people with a sense of purpose had a 15 percent lower risk of death,compared with those who said they were more or less aimless. And it didn't seem to matter when people found their direction. It could be in their 20s, 50s or 70s.
Hill's analysis controlled for other factors known to affect longevity, things like age, gender and emotional well-being. A sense of purpose trumped all that.
Hill defines it as providing something like a "compass or lighthouse that provides an overarching aim and direction in day-to-day lives."
Of course, purpose means different things to different people. Hill says it could be as simple as making sure one's family is happy. It could be bigger, like contributing to social change. It could be more self-focused, like doing well on the job. Or it could be about creativity.
"Often this is individuals who want to produce something that is appreciated by others in written or artistic form, whether it's music, dance or visual arts," Hill says.
It's not exactly clear how purpose might benefit health. Purposeful individuals may simply lead healthier lives, says Hill, but it also could be that a sense of purpose protects against the harmful effects of stress.
An experiment in Chicago tested this theory. Anthony Burrow, a developmental psychologist at Cornell University, had college student volunteers of different races and ethnicities ride rapid transit through the diverse neighborhoods of Chicago, recording their emotions as individuals of different racial and ethnic groups boarded.
Earlier research has shown that when people are surrounded by people of different ethnic or racial groups than their own, their level of stress increases. Burrow wanted to know if thinking about their sense of purpose might reduce that stress.
He had about half the students write for about 10 minutes about their life's direction. The other half wrote about the last movie they saw. They were all then given packets that listed the name of every stop. When they got to a stop, they were asked to assess how they felt and how much they felt that way by placing an "X" in a box next to negative emotions such as feeling scared, fearful, alone or distressed.
It turned out that the students who wrote about the last movie they saw experienced the expected levels of stress as the percentage of people of different ethnicity increased. But the students who wrote about their sense of purpose reported no feelings of increased stress at all.
More research is needed, but Burrow says his findings suggest that having "a sense of purpose may protect people against stress," with all of its harmful effects, including greater risk of heart disease. And that may explain why people with a sense of purpose live longer.JapanesePod101.com is a language course, podcast and accompanying website that offers lessons in Japanese.
It’s a “fremium” site meaning you can sign up to the site for free and access lost of resources on there, including the podcast. For the more advanced features they have a subscription service starting at just $4 a month, with a little bit of searching you can regularly find promotions and discounts too.
As far as features go, there is lots on there. The site is arranged by level from Beginner through to Advanced with each level containing 50 or so lessons. Each lesson has a podcast, a review track, dialog and downloadable PDFs with lesson notes and transcriptions.
If you sign up to Premium (I’ve only ever used basic so far) then there are lots of other features too including flash cards, slideshows, word banks and dictionaries.
You can listen to the podcasts through the site itself or download them to listen to them later. To make it even easier, if you download the “Innovative Language” app (iOS and Andriod), you can download whole sections at a time to your phone or tablet and then listen to them at your leisure.When The Magazine ceases publication this December, owner Glenn Fleishman will be closing shop on an ambitious two-year experiment in digital publishing.
It’s not a total surprise — subscriptions were already on a downward trend when Fleishman transitioned from editor to owner of The Magazine after purchasing the publication from Marco Arment last year — and it’s not a total bummer, either.
In fact, Fleishman says he’s feeling pretty good about stopping here: he’s met his obligation to provide Kickstarter backers with their one-year subscriptions, and he’s ending this fascinating experiment while it’s still profitable.
“I’m even able to pay myself an ever-declining hourly rate for my time,” said Fleishman, who spoke with Cult of Mac about what went right, what went wrong, and his feelings about pulling the plug on a project that was his full-time job for the last year and a half.
For Fleishman, this is a thoughtfully planned ending rather than a forced, last-minute exit. He counts this period of his career as one long learning process, for himself as well as for the folks behind the publishing platform he used, TypeEngine. (He even learned quite a bit about book publishing when putting together the crowd-funded print archive The Magazine, Year One.)
Nevertheless, The Magazine is shuttering, and there’s no single reason for the publication’s failure. The following are nine hard lessons he learned that contributed to the tough decision.
Topical drift can hurt: When it first came out, The Magazine was a unique thing. “It was a really great, unique idea — it was independent, it was paying people,” he said, “and it was the only one on Newsstand that was compact and lightweight. People subscribed out of interest.”
The Magazine pulled in almost 35,000 subscribers on launch (the title currently only has 7,000 to 8,000). To contrast that, Rupert Murdoch’s experiment in digital publishing, The Daily, attracted 80,000 subscribers, a sixth of what the media giant said he needed to break even.
The Magazine started out publishing a lot of personal essays that were about technology, by app developers and other folks in technology, who were also the target audience. Fleishman and Arment quickly realized that kind of content couldn’t sustain the publication.
“We started doing reported features and we started stretching,” Fleishman said. Many of the original readers weren’t interested in these new stories, even though Fleishman thinks everyone would have gotten bored by too many tech-focused personal stories.
“It would have become too blog-like over time,” he said, “with stuff like you could read elsewhere.”
Newsstand changed for the worse: “iOS 6 Newsstand was good for the publication,” said Fleishman, “but iOS 7 Newsstand was bad.” Apple, he said, lost interest in its iOS publishing hub.
“They hid it, they made it sort of ugly, and they suppressed the screen previews in the interest of flatness,” he said. Loyal subscribers canceled subscriptions, he said, because they forgot that new issues existed, even with Notifications and email reminders. It wasn’t in their face enough, something Fleishman attributes to the lack of publication-supportive design in Newsstand, which lost the little dot and any active cover previews of new issues.
“Apple’s disinterest in the Newsstand didn’t doom The Magazine,” he said, “but it certainly meant that people who were already subscribers forgot it existed, and contributed to the drop in subscriptions.”
Notifications aren’t always helpful: Apple sent out emails to subscribers reminding them that their subscriptions were about to renew. Fleishman notes that this counter-intuitively made people unsubscribe: If folks weren’t reading The Magazine because they forgot it had new issues, a reminder that they were “wasting” money each week didn’t help.
Targets can be too broad: Another thing Fleishman thinks contributed to The Magazine’s loss of subscribers was that the complement of content was just too broad. The original tagline, “For curious people with a technical bent,” was hard to pitch to both advertisers and potential readers, the latter of which consisted of tech-savvy people unhappy with the quirky stuff The Magazine was publishing as well as less-savvy folks.
The garden was walled: The publication’s website wasn’t really built out until June of last year. “We failed to capture readers early that way,” said Fleishman, “and many people still don’t realize they can read it online with a login.” Subscribers can download.epub and.mobi versions of the issues, but most didn’t take advantage.
Making a Newsstand app is labor- and cost-intensive. Fleishman isn’t sure he’d decide to go the same route today if he was commissioning a publication like The Magazine. “I would have avoided the expense of a native app,” he said, “and focused entirely on a backend with super-responsive design and eventually restyle as an app, or adopt a platform like TypeEngine.”
Not enough flash: Fleishman put in thousands of dollars and an equal number of hours designing parts of the app, but never was able to do the serious work of making the app interesting enough for people who like the flash and bang of modern media apps. People lost interest in the app itself at the same time that Newsstand was side-lining publications, making The Magazine lose subscribers faster than it was picking them up.
Not everyone can be an Internet personality: “If I were Guy Kawasaki,” said Fleishman, “I’d have 100,000 subscribers right now, but, sadly, I’m not.” Attention, he said, is an extremely scarce commodity — he was unable to attract enough interest in the writing quality alone to really bring and maintain attention to The Magazine.
Original content is tough: Building an all-commissioned digital magazine is time- and labor-intensive. The Magazine started as a publication and then became a website. Fleishman suggests it would have been better using Web content to populate a digital magazine (and points out that some sites, like Cult of Mac and The Loop, are already doing this). That way, he said, readers get all their content in one well-designed space without a publisher having to split their already beleaguered staff into yet another content stream. People love to get content in a different reading experience, he said.
Ultimately, notes Fleishman, all these factors combined to lead to the shuttering of The Magazine. Anyone starting up an independent digital magazine like it these days would be best served using a platform like TypeEngine, he said, and effectively keeping startup costs low.
The Magazine has been profitable. Nobody lost any money in the venture, which has paid out a half-million dollars to its writers. Because of that, Fleishman is not unhappy at all about having to end this part of his career, though he would do it differently if he started today.
“I would rather bring [a digital magazine] into being and make it flower,” he said, “as opposed to starting at a super-high point but with an extremely expensive and time-consuming infrastructure.”
Fleishman is currently finishing a The Magazine: The Book (October 2012 to October 2013).Zaatari’s occupants say they would still jump at any chance to leave. Complaints are rife about electricity, which since June has been available only at night; rationed water; and, especially, the dismal quality of the schools. Last year, classes in the camp were crammed with up to 90 children; of those who took Jordan’s 12th-grade exam, 3 percent passed.
The camp population has dropped to 79,000 from 83,000 in April (and 156,000 in March 2013).
While the rate of Syrians leaving Jordan has doubled to 120 per day in September from 60 in July, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that Zaatari residents are less likely to exit than those outside. Still, Hovig Etyemezian, the camp director, sees “an alarming trend” of young men selling land in Syria to finance precarious journeys to Europe.
“This is the way forward,” said a 26-year-old who left on Sunday hoping to join a cousin in Stuttgart, Germany, or former Zaatari neighbors in the Netherlands and Sweden. “I have a degree, and for five years I have not worked with my degree,” said the man, who was trained as a lab technician but has been selling stationery in Zaatari. “I want a career.”
Bassem Zuhri, 42, would love to follow him — “I wish today I could leave” — but he cannot afford $400 passports for his two wives and five children. Profits at Mr. Zuhri’s bridal shop, where poofy dresses studded with rhinestones rent for $25 a day, were slashed this summer by the $155 monthly cost of a generator.Toyota had publicly defended its global communications chief and acknowledged it must do a better job of helping foreign executives integrate into Japan.
Julie Hamp, an American, was arrested two weeks ago after authorities allegedly discovered 57 oxycodone pills in a package she shipped to herself. (Photo11: Tsutomu Agechi, AP)
TOKYO — Two weeks after her arrest on suspicion of illegally importing prescription drugs into Japan, Toyota's global communications chief is still in jail — and out of a job.
American Julie Hamp, the highest-ranking female executive at the Japanese automaker, relinquished her role after authorities allegedly discovered oxycodone pills in a package she shipped to herself.
Toyota said in a statement that it "accepted her resignation after considering the concerns and inconvenience that recent events have caused our stakeholders."
The move comes amid speculation that Hamp may face prison time in Japan, where stiff drug laws prohibit foreigners from importing prescription drugs without significant documentation.
Her resignation may have been inevitable, said Robert Dujarric, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, at Temple University's Japan Campus.
"In most (Japanese) companies, executives who are arrested will resign, or at least go on leave until the case is resolved," Dujarric said.
Hamp remains in custody in Japan, where prosecutors have a high rate of successful prosecution and can retain suspects for up to 23 days without bail or formal charges. Depending on the charges, Hamp could face up to 10 years in prison.
Toyota had publicly defended Hamp, with President Akio Toyoda holding a televised press conference in June to declare her "a close friend" and an "invaluable" part of the company. He apologized for "the confusion surrounding recent events" but said he believed that she had not knowingly broken Japanese law.
The company acknowledged that it did not do enough to help foreigners integrate into Japan.
"Because the investigation of Ms. Hamp is ongoing, there is little Toyota can say at this time," the company said. "However, we intend to learn from this incident to help ensure a secure working environment for everyone at Toyota around the world as we continue to take the steps necessary to become a truly global company."
Police raided Toyota offices in Japan after they allegedly discovered 57 pills of the powerful painkiller tucked away in a package Hamp sent to herself while moving from the U.S. to Japan.
The incident embroiled Toyota in controversy just months after the 55-year-old Hamp was appointed to the role as the automaker's global communications chief, the first woman to fill that role. Her elevation was viewed as a significant step in Toyota's halting bid to diversify its leadership ranks.
On Thursday, Toyota said it remains committed to that goal. "We remain firmly committed to putting the right people in the right places, regardless of nationality, gender, age and other factors," the company said.
Hamp told police that she had mailed a package containing the painkillers from the U.S. to her hotel in Japan, but had not intended to break Japanese law, according to Japanese media reports. Police said the tablets were not listed on the package's Customs declaration form and were placed in several parcels, including an accessory case and paper bag.
Oxycodone is a widely prescribed painkiller in the United States. But possession is illegal in Japan without a prescription and special permission is required to bring it into the country.
Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.
Bomey reported from McLean, Va.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1LUhxjmA DANGEROUS killer was still on the run last night after escaping from the custody of prison officers.
A DANGEROUS killer was still on the run last night after escaping from the custody of prison officers.
Manhunt under way for dangerous killer on the run
Gardai issued a nationwide alert after Christopher Doyle (39) disappeared during a visit to his seriously ill father in St James's Hospital in Dublin last Wednesday.
Doyle has a number of convictions for violent attacks on elderly people, including beating a Co Meath farmer to death in 2000.
He is serving prison sentences for dangerous driving causing bodily harm and a number of robberies.
Doyle, who is described as being extremely dangerous, gave prison warders the slip when he went to the toilet during the hospital visit and escaped through a window.
It was still unclear last night if he had planned the escape and whether he had an accomplice. Gardai have been talking to Doyle's family and friends in a bid to track him down.
Officers have also been studying CCTV to trace his movements when he left the hospital grounds.
It is understood that he had been granted compassionate temporary release to visit his father in the company of at least one prison officer.
Apart from the garda investigation, the Prison Service has also launched an internal inquiry to ascertain how Doyle made his escape. They will try to establish why he was not handcuffed at the time.
The violent thug, who has a reputation for attacking and robbing elderly people in their homes, was jailed in 2002 along with his brother for the manslaughter of pensioner Paddy Logan.
Christopher and John Doyle demanded money and beat Mr Logan and his brother Peter, when they broke into the home of the two elderly bachelor farmers in June 2000.
Paddy Logan died as a result of his injuries and Peter was also badly injured. The Doyles made off with just €50 and their brutal attack shocked the nation. Christopher got 12 years and his brother 15 years.
Locals in Castlejordan, Co Meath, where the brothers lived at the time of the attack, said that the house was sold shortly afterwards.
Irish Independent(Reuters) - Target Corp announced an overhaul of its information security practices and the resignation of its chief information officer as the retailer tries to reassure customers and investors after a massive data breach late last year.
A Target employee returns carts to the store in Falls Church, Virginia May 14, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
CIO Beth Jacob is the first high-level executive to leave the company following the breach, which led to the theft of about 40 million credit and debit card records and 70 million other records of customer details.
Jacob, who comes from a sales background and has been CIO since 2008, will be replaced by an external hire, Target said in an email to Reuters on Wednesday.
“It’s a decision that should have been made by the CEO on January 1, not through the resignation of an employee that overlooked critical weakness in the operating model,” Belus Capital Advisors CEO Brian Sozzi said.
The breach at Target was the second largest at a U.S. retailer, after the theft of more than 90 million credit cards over about 18 months was uncovered in 2007 at TJX Cos Inc, operator of the T.J. Maxx and Marshalls chains.
Hacking has become a major concern for retailers in the United States. In the latest reported breach, beauty |
want.TechCrunch reports on this subpoena issued to Twitter, seeking the identity of two twitterers that had apparently been critical of Corbett.
The striking thing is that this is a subpoena to provide evidence in a criminal investigation. If it had been a subpoena related to a civil libel lawsuit, then either Twitter or the anonymous poster could try to quash the subpoena, and then the court would have to decide whether the plaintiff had, at least, a legally sufficient libel case (i.e., the statements were factual allegations and not opinions, and there was some reason to think the factual allegations were false). If the plaintiff did have such a case, then the plaintiff would indeed be able to discover the identity of the defendant, so he could know whom to sue, and so he could get further factual information relevant to the case (such as what the defendant knew about whether the statements were true or false). That’s the emerging rule in many states (though there are important variations in detail). There are no Pennsylvania appellate cases on the subject, but I expect that Pennsylvania courts will follow this rule, as several Pennsylvania trial courts in fact have.
But this is a grand jury subpoena, so presumably the theory is that the subpoenas are relevant to some criminal investigation. My sense is that one should be able to quash such a subpoena as well, if there is no legally sufficient basis for the investigation, or for the conclusion that the information would be relevant to the investigation. Yet that requires us to know what is being investigated. It can’t be an investigation of libel, since Pennsylvania doesn’t have a criminal libel statute. In principle, since some tweets from the relevant twitterers might be read as accusing Corbett of criminal misconduct, the twitterers’ identities might be relevant so they could be asked for further evidence of such misconduct. But I have no reason to think that Corbett is indeed being so investigated.
So this looks like an interesting case; I hope Twitter does move to quash the subpoena, so we can get some better sense of whether the subpoena indeed has a legal basis. And if you have any further information you can share about the underlying investigation, please let me know. Thanks Steve Piercy for the pointer.Scientists announced the invention of the first functional electronic skin yesterday, a malleable field of pressure sensitive circuits thin enough to "wrap around irregular surfaces". It seems like an announcement like this comes almost every few days. So, can we make a whole person yet?
I mean, we have everything from brain-controlled robot arms to bionic eye implants to robot hearts, stinky cyber armpits to a robot jellyfish. And then of course, there's this guy. Way back in 2005 scientists were claiming it'd be possible to download your brain onto a computer by 2050, and it looks like the opposite, uploading information directly to that gooey mass of tapioca in your head, is just about there. (As long as the robot doing the surgery doesn't get tense and have a swordfight in your cranium.)
We may be a ways away from I, Robot or the Six Million Dollar Man (willing to bet inflation's going to have an effect on that one), but as I procrastinate heading to the gym, it's nice to think about simply strapping on the ol' exoskeleton instead, just like having a cup o' Joe in the morning.
Oh, yeah, and we can't leave her out.Throughout the offseason, we'll ask questions about the Flyers to our resident hockey analysts and see what they have to say.
Going End to End today are CSNPhilly.com reporters John Boruk, Tom Dougherty, Jordan Hall and Greg Paone.
The topic: If Nolan Patrick makes the Flyers, where is he best featured in the lineup?
Boruk
Despite the surge of momentum that led to Nico Hischier going No. 1 overall to the New Jersey Devils, the Flyers were more than thrilled that Patrick fell into their lap. Here's a player the organization and its scouts had seen for two seasons playing with Ivan Provorov when the two were teammates with the Brandon Wheat Kings. Sources connected to the Flyers' organization had told me that Patrick's skill set coupled with his size, leadership and hockey sense had him ranked higher on its draft board than Hischier, who may have a little more of a learning curve when it comes to developing into a solid two-way center.
Patrick should make the opening night roster coming out of training camp with the only concern being his health. Will he have any setbacks from the core muscle surgery he had back in June? Assuming he's with the Flyers, there's absolutely no way he doesn't play center, and it doesn't appear Ron Hextall is willing to experiment. Patrick has played only a few shifts at wing, but even he admitted it's not a position he's too comfortable with.
With that said, where do you slot the rookie when you have Claude Giroux, Sean Couturier, Valtteri Filppula and Jori Lehtera, whom all primarily played down the middle last season. First, I would like to see the two Finns (Filppula and Lehtera) on a line together, with Lehtera at center since Filppula is a more versatile forward. Couturier is the team's best two-way center at even strength, and if he stays healthy, this could be his breakout year (which seems to be the most repeated phrase over the past three years).
So why not experiment a little during the preseason? How about a Jakub Voracek-Patrick-Giroux line just to see how well they could work together? Giroux has been the opposition's bullseye for the past five years and his body has taken a toll as a result. He led the team in 2010-11 with 76 points primarily playing right wing, so this wouldn't be a novel idea for him. The Flyers need to find a way to extend Giroux's career since he's locked up through 2022. I'm not sure the Flyers have entertained the thought, but during the preseason you have very little to lose.
Where Patrick can really assert himself is on the team's second power-play unit that really struggled last season to contribute anything, especially when the top unit was mired in a drought. The natural inclination would have Patrick replace Schenn on that No. 1 unit, but as long as the Wayne Simmonds-Giroux-Voracek-Shayne Gostisbehere combination remains in tact, Patrick would give the second unit a little more firepower.
Dougherty
This one is simple. It's either second- or-third line center or the WHL. He is not playing wing. He will not be in a fourth-line role. It is as clear-cut as that. I'm a firm believer Patrick will be here in 2017-18. I don't see how he doesn't make the team. Where does he slide into the lineup? I see him as the third-line center.
We can get carried away with labels — first line, second line, third line, whatever. It doesn't matter. You need to be able to roll four lines to be successful in today's NHL. The Flyers should be able to do that. Whether Patrick is on the second or third line, it doesn't matter. For the logistics of this discussion, I'll proceed with how I see it playing out.
I believe Couturier will start the season as the second-line center and play penalty kill with Patrick as the third-line center and seeing power-play time. Couturier will still see top minutes against opponents' top lines and be in a role in which he's proven he can succeed. He'll still make his linemates better and score efficiently at even strength. Everyone will be happy.
Patrick will give the Flyers a formidable third line — a line that could see fellow rookie Oskar Lindblom and the veteran Filppula on his wings. Whether Patrick remains on the third line all season long is another question. I can see him moving up to the second line and Couturier taking over as the third-line center.
The point I'm making is this: With Patrick here, the Flyers will be able to roll out four lines with skill on each one centered by legitimate NHL talent. Giroux, Couturier and Patrick is a helluva one-two-three punch.
Hall
It's important to remember if Patrick makes the roster, his presence is big for the Flyers, but it's also significant developmentally for the teenager.
As an organization, you always want to put your players in spots where they have the best chance to succeed. With Patrick, this might be a special case.
So what does he do best and what makes him feel most comfortable?
By those who know him, Patrick has been lauded for his ability to make others better, and it's not just that sports cliché here. Patrick may not be a dynamic goal scorer, but surround him with talent and he'll thrive by augmenting others.
"If he's playing with some skilled guys, he will get them the puck, he will make plays," Patrick's uncle, James, said to CSNPhilly.com in June. "He's shown that he can do that. Certainly, the last three years in the Western Hockey League, put the best players on the ice with him and they will get chances, and chances all night. I think that's what his offensive upside is."
With that said, Patrick should play in a top-six role. Give him the minutes and setting to make a true impact in which he can develop through playing. Giroux is this team's obvious first-line center. Couturier can center the third unit in which there will be greater offensive depth but still the defensive focus.
So for Patrick, I'd love to see him flanked by Jordan Weal and Simmonds. Both are scorers that finish plays and bring a variety of ways to put the puck in the net. The skill sets of Weal and Simmonds complement Patrick's, while the three would compose a nice mixture of size and speed, a tough-to-play-against second line.
The fun thing is the Flyers should have options — much more than before — depending on roster decisions at the end of training camp. How the lines are constructed by Dave Hakstol will be even more polarizing in 2017-18.
Paone
Let's get something out there loud and clear to start this off: You don't fall backwards into the No. 2 overall pick and arguably the most talented player in the draft only to move him out of position and have him basically start from scratch as a 19-year-old in a new position in the best league in the world.
Patrick is a natural center and will be playing center for the Flyers. No questions asked.
OK, now that we have that issue all tidied up, the question now shifts to where Patrick fits into the lineup when it comes to linemates.
Giroux is still the Flyers' top-line center. Couturier is likely slotted in at the second-line center spot.
You don't take an uber-talented 19-year-old and put him in a fourth-line, defense-based role where his minutes become limited. He needs as much exposure as he can get on the ice.
Those factors above are why I feel Patrick has the third-line center spot sewed up to start the season, granted he's healthy.
It's a good spot for him because it'll give him time to feel out the NHL game and make the coming adjustment period to this level a little smoother because the pressure to produce won't be as great right away as it would be if he were in a top-six role. There is wiggle room to ease in.
Time for another question shift — who plays alongside Patrick on his wings? It's an important question and it's obviously way too early for Hakstol to even tip his cap yet as to what he's thinking for the Flyers' line combos.
But, if we're just spitballing here with the current roster as of Aug. 5, here's what I believe the Flyers' third line could look like: Filppula-Patrick-Michael Raffl.
Having Filppula alongside Patrick gives the rook a veteran presence who's a natural center himself to guide him when on the ice. That's a valuable intangible. In Raffl, you have a veteran who's not afraid to go into the dirty areas and do the greasy work to free things up for Patrick to make plays. Lindblom is another name to watch for Raffl's spot, but having two rookies on the same line may not be an enticing endeavor for Hakstol, knowing the way he operates.
And of course, if Patrick excels while others in the top-six roles meddle, the door is open to moving up the lineup as soon he's proven he's ready.
And don't be surprised to see him on the power play, either.[1] Jibin Arula, in a 2009 interview, recalled that his unit patch displayed "skull markings".[2] Recreation of the Jabidah unit patch as described by Benigno Aquino Jr. in a privilege speech delivered at the Legislative Building, Manila, on March 28, 1968.Jibin Arula, in a 2009 interview, recalled that his unit patch displayed "skull markings".
The Jabidah massacre was the killing of Moro soldiers by members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on 18 March 1968.[3] It is also known as the Corregidor massacre as the killing took place on Corregidor Island in the Philippines.
Author Cesar Adib Majul said that the state, at that point in time, had suppressed the affair in the interest of national unity[4] which therefore led to little or no documentation on the incident. This then led to speculations on the number of trainees killed, varying from 11 to 68[5][6] and the reasons behind the massacre.
Background [ edit ]
The north-eastern part of Sabah had been under the rule of the Sulu Sultanate since it was given to them by the Sultanate of Brunei in 1658 for the Sulu Sultanate's help in settling a civil war in Brunei[7] before being "ceded"[8] (in which a translation in Tausug/Philippine Malay translated the word as padjak)[9] to the British in 1878.[8] During the process of decolonisation by the British after World War II from 1946, Sabah was integrated as part of the Malaysian Federation in 1963 under the Malaysia Agreement.[10] The Philippine government however protested this, claiming the eastern part of Sabah had never been sold to foreign interests, and that it had only been "leased" (padjak) by the Sulu Sultanate, and therefore remained the property of the Sultan, and by extension, the property of Republic of the Philippines. Diplomatic efforts to Malaysia and the United Nations during the administration of President Diosdado Macapagal proved futile.
Operation Merdeka [ edit ]
In 1962, President Diosdado Macapagal renewed the Philippines' 1922 claim over Sabah although the territory has been incorporated into Malaysia.[11][12] Operation Merdeka is a follow-up to this claim. The plan was for trained commandos to infiltrate Sabah and destabilise the state by sabotage which would then legitimise the Philippines' military intervention in the territory and claiming the state which many Filipinos felt was rightfully theirs.[13]
In 1967, President Ferdinand Marcos secretly authorized Major Eduardo "Abdul Latif" Martelino, a Muslim convert, to take charge of the operations of a secret commando unit code-named "Jabidah" and embark on an operation called "Project Merdeka" (merdeka means "freedom" in Malay) to destabilize and take over Sabah.[14] The alleged mastermind, however, included leading generals in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), Defense Undersecretary Manuel Syquio, and Marcos himself.[5]
The first phase of the operation saw Martelino, with an advanced party of some 17 agents entering Sabah three times to conduct reconnaissance and psychological warfare.[14] It was during the second phase of the operation that the massacre took place. After 180 young Tausugs from Sulu received basic training, they were transported to a remote section of Corregidor Island at the mouth of Manila Bay[13] where they were further trained in guerrilla operations and jungle warfare. Once on the island, the code name was changed to 'Jabidah'.[5] The real purpose of the formation of Jabidah was never publicised therefore leading to wide speculations and controversies regarding this top secret military plan.[4]
The massacre [ edit ]
There are various accounts about the massacre. One version states that it was caused by a mutiny of the recruits, who were angered by the delay in receiving their allowance.[4][5][13] The poor living conditions and miserable rations for three months led to general discontent among the Muslim trainees who then demanded to be returned home. The recruits were disarmed, some were returned home and some were transferred to a regular military camp in Luzon, but on 18 March one of the two batches of recruits who were supposed to be released were killed by army troops.[5] A lone survivor, Jibin Arula, managed to escape the mayhem with a single gunshot wound to his leg. He gave an account about the atrocity but scholars have opined that the media attention given Arula may have, to some extent, distorted his accounts.[15] The actual events remain unclear as documents were allegedly destroyed by Major Martellino.[5] Arula died in a traffic accident in Trece Martires, Cavite, sometime in August or September 2010.[16]
On the other hand, another school of thought posits that the project, code-named Jabidah involved the recruitment of Muslims trainees who were supposed to be trained to infiltrate and cause chaos in Sabah to strengthen Philippines' territorial claim.[17] These trainees were informed beforehand that they were joining the AFP to fight "communists", but subsequently learned the true nature of their mission during the latter part of their training.[18] Within this camp, some scholars argue that the massacre was due to the mutiny of the Muslim trainees who denied orders to infiltrate Sabah because they felt that the sabotage against Sabah was unjustified and that they also felt connected with fellow Muslims in Sabah.[19] Other scholars argue that the trainees were killed upon learning the truth of their recruitment to ensure that the information was not leaked.[20] The official narrative denied that the reason for training the recruits were for infiltration in Sabah and that the massacre as stated in the Manila Bulletin, the government-controlled leading print media, occurred because the trainees could not endure hardship during the training.[21] With the lack of substantial evidence, it proved difficult to convict the officers involved in the massacre and thus they were acquitted, which further angered the Muslims.[22][23]
Aftermath [ edit ]
Political play [ edit ]
The opposition senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. exposed that Jabidah was a plan by President Ferdinand Marcos to ensure his continuity of power.[1][24] The incident was used by members of the opposition to criticise Marcos' administration and this was largely covered by the press which caught the government off-guard.[18] The massacre can be seen as a political tool by the opposition to discredit President Ferdinand Marcos for his poor administration and neglect of the Muslims during his term.[25]
International attention [ edit ]
In July 1971, then Prime Minister of Libya, Muammar Gaddhafi, wrote to President Marcos to express his concern. As the Philippines relied on Arab oil, the government tried to defend itself against any accusation and denied any religious repression taking place in Mindanao. The acting foreign Minister added that the problems stemmed from land and political issues which it was ready to solve internally.[23] Then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman, also condemned the Philippine government and requested for congressional trial against the officers involved in the massacre.[5] Diplomatic ties between the Philippines and Malaysia were severed[23] as this event also further indicated to Malaysia that the Philippine government still had strong determination in its territorial claim to Sabah.[18] In general, this affair had increased the international community's awareness of the Moro issue in the Philippines.[23]
Protest and formation of the Muslim Independence Movement (MIM) [ edit ]
Many scholars agree that the Jabidah Massacre was one of the most important events in Philippines that ignited the Muslims uprising during Marcos' regime[26] notwithstanding the truth behind the massacre. Despite undergoing numerous trials and hearings, the officers related to the massacre were never convicted which served as a clear indication to the Muslim community that the Christian government had little regard for them.[27] This created a furore within the Muslim community in the Philippines, especially among the educated youth.[18] The Muslim students saw the need through this incident to unite in protests and organised demonstrations and rallies in Manila with financial backing from Muslim politicians and university intellectuals. One such demonstration was situated near the Malacañang Palace, where the President and his family resided. The students held a week-long protest vigil over an empty coffin marked 'Jabidah' in front of the palace.[4]
The massacre significantly brought the Muslim intellectuals, who, prior to the incident had no discernible interest in politics, into the political scene to demand for safeguards against politicians who were using them.[26] Apart from the intellectuals, Muslims in Philippines in general saw that all opportunities for integration and accommodation with the Christians were lost and further marginalised.[5] In May 1968, former Cotabato governor Datu Udtog Matalam announced the formation of the Muslim Independence Movement (MIM) which was regarded by observers as the spontaneous backlash of the Jabidah Massacre.[26] The strong feelings and unity of the Muslim intellectuals were seen as the immediate reaction to the establishment of the MIM[28] which carried far-reaching impacts such as the formation of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and continued armed struggle in the Southern Philippines until today.
Contradictions [ edit ]
Some sources differ with the official account:
Andrew Tian Huat Tan numbers the victims between 28 and 64, and says that author and social anthropologist Arnold Molina Azurin has written that the massacre is a myth. [17]
William Larousse says that a survivor described recruits being shot in groups of twelve. Note 5 on page 130 gives a number of estimates by other sources ranging from 14 to 64. [27]
Authors at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies say that Jibin Arula, described as the sole survivor of the massacre, as numbering his fellow trainees killed at 11, while others numbered them at over 60. [29]
Alfred W. McCoy puts Arula in a second group of 12 recruits taken to be killed, and describes his escape. [13] Artemio R Guillermo puts the number of recruits at "about two hundred" and says that only one man escaped being massacred. [30]
Artemio R Guillermo puts the number of recruits at "about two hundred" and says that only one man escaped being massacred. Rigoberto Tiglao, an activist previously incarcerated during the martial law, contends that Jabidah massacre was a ploy by the Liberal Party to fatally blow President's Marcos re-election bid.[31]
Official acknowledgement [ edit ]
President Benigno Aquino III acknowledged the incident on 18 March 2013, when he led commemorations on the 45th anniversary of the massacre. This notably marked the first time that a ruling President had acknowledged the massacre as having taken place. Aquino also directed the National Historical Commission of the Philippines to designate the Mindanao Garden of Peace on Corregidor as a historical landmark.[32] Ground was broken to construct the landmark during a ceremony marking the 45th anniversary of the massacre.[33] During a ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the massacre, a symbolic peace marker: 'Mindanao Garden of Peace: Corregidor Island' was turned over to the families of the survivors of the massacre.[34]
In popular culture [ edit ]
A 1990 film based on the event starred Anthony Alonzo. It shared the same name however details are fictionalized for the sake of artistic license.[35]
See also [ edit ]Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) on Sunday suggested that President Barack Obama’s health care law would make some people so lazy that they didn’t want to work at all.
Last week, Republicans used a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that said 2.3 million less hours would be worked after the Affordable Care Act was implemented to claim that the law was destroying jobs.
A Washington Post fact check, however, pointed out that access to health care meant that people would no longer be forced to work if their only reason for working was to receive insurance benefits.
But on Sunday, Blunt stuck to the Republican talking point, saying that providing health care “can’t be a good idea” if it allowed people who were only working for health insurance benefits to leave the workforce.
“I think any law you pass that discourages people from working can’t be a good idea,” the Missouri Republican asserted. “Why would we wanna do that? Why would we think that’s a good thing? How does that allow people to prepare for the time when they don’t work?”
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), who also appeared on Fox News Sunday, was ready with an answer.
“They’re in employment solely because they get health benefits,” Cardin explained. “This is a voluntary choice.”
“In some cases, these people might have two jobs because of these health benefits,” he added. “Now, they don’t need to work two full-time jobs to get their health benefits.”
Blunt refused to accept Cardin’s argument.
“The best face you can probably put on that is that people who don’t wanna work don’t have to work,” Blunt insisted. “Surely that’s not what we wanna encourage.”
Watch the video below from Fox News Sunday, broadcast Feb. 9, 2014.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Information about an F-22 fighter jet was targeted by the hackers
A 50-year-old Chinese man has pleaded guilty to being involved in a plot to hack into systems containing sensitive US military data.
Su Bin is believed to have been part of a group targeting data relating to fighter jets, cargo aircraft and weapons.
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement that Mr Su sought "commercial gain" from his actions.
Mr Su, a Chinese resident, was arrested while working in Canada in 2014. He faces five years in prison and a $250,000 (£170,000) fine.
The DoJ stopped short of saying the Chinese government was involved in buying the secrets from Mr Su and his co-conspirators.
However, theft of sensitive data is a general accusation the US has frequently levelled at China in the past.
"Su Bin admitted to playing an important role in a conspiracy, originating in China, to illegally access sensitive military data, including data relating to military aircraft that are indispensable in keeping our military personnel safe," said the US Assistant Attorney General for national security, John Carlin.
He added: "This plea sends a strong message that stealing from the United States and our companies has a significant cost; we can and will find these criminals and bring them to justice."
Middle man
Mr Su Bin admitted to working with two people in China from October 2008 to March 2014 to gain unauthorised access to protected computer networks in the US. California-based systems belonging to military contractor Boeing were among them.
Once information was stolen, the DoJ said it was illegally exported to China.
Due to his grasp of English, Mr Su appeared to act as a form of middle man, advising co-conspirators in China who and what to target. He also translated the English data into Chinese for the "final beneficiaries" of the stolen information.
Mr Su reportedly ran a Chinese aviation technology company with an office in Canada. He was arrested while trying to gain Canadian citizenship.
Following the plea, Mr Su's lawyer said: "In resolving this matter Su Bin hopes to move on with his life."
Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC or on FacebookDonald Trump is an early riser. Around 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time Friday he went on one of his famous tweetstorms, attacking former Miss Universe Alicia Machado as “disgusting,” a “con,” and even making references to a sex tape. How did those 16 Republicans lose to this guy again?
Easy. By not knowing they had the antidote in hand the whole time. It isn’t Trump University or his failed casinos or his personal piggy bank of a foundation. His supporters—even the white Evangelical ones—truly don’t care what he has done or to whom he’s done it. Trump’s real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).
Know that if Kellyanne Conway batch deletes those tweets by noontime, the screenshots will live forever, probably in campaign ads by 12:30. And it’s not just the manic tweeting.
Three times now, women in debates have forced Trump to confront the ugly things he has said over the years about women he doesn’t deem beautiful enough, fit enough or compliant enough for his gilt-laden standards. And three times, Trump flailed: onstage with Carly Fiorina, whose “face” he had insulted; facing off last August against moderator Megyn Kelly, who had challenged Trump for calling women “fat pigs,” “dogs,” and more; and again this week in that sniffle-filled, verbal Kamikaze mission against Hillary Clinton.
Indeed during Monday night’s kick-off presidential debate, Clinton skillfully exposed and exploited Trump’s seeming inability to control his boorish attitude toward women.
Of all of the preparation Team Clinton did, purportedly including drawing up a psychological profile of the erratic businessman, perhaps the most valuable thing it did was memorizing that moment from the first Republican debate. Hillary Clinton threw roughly the same punches Monday night that Kelly did, and Trump’s retort as he interrupted Clinton—something he did more than 50 times in 90 minutes—sounded familiar.
Trump took Clinton’s bait over and over in the debate. Responding to Lester Holt’s reminder that he claimed Clinton doesn’t have that presidential look, he spat out: “she doesn’t have the look, she doesn’t have the stamina”; repeating the word “stamina” over and over again as if he was auditioning for a Viagra ad.
And when Clinton dropped a clearly planned anecdote about his shaming of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado for gaining weight after winning the beauty contest in 1996, Trump seemed to come undone. He sputtered and spattered and demanded to know, “Where’d you find her?” Turns out the Clinton team had an online ad about Trump’s berating of Machado up by the time the debate wrapped. And then of course Trump compounded matters Tuesday morning to his pals at Fox & Friends.
Trump’s woman trouble is not exactly surprising. He’s running against the potential first woman president. And despite the intractable nature of Clinton Derangement Syndrome in a big chunk of the American electorate, Clinton is exceeding normal Democratic polling among white women, particularly white college -educated women, while holding Democrats’ traditional and huge margins among women of color. Mitt Romney carried white women by 14 points in 2012, and George W. Bush racked up an 11-point margin in 2004. John McCain, saddled with Sarah Palin, did less well—just 7 points—but he still won.
Clinton is currently up 16 points in the new ABC/Washington Post poll with white women (versus being down 13 points with white men), and she leads among white college-educated women by a whopping 31 points. Clinton even leads among white women without a college degree, by 8 points. If those numbers hold, Clinton would be the first Democrat to carry a majority of white women since her husband did so in 1996.
Even without the euphoria of “yes we can,” Hillary Clinton is to white women what Barack Obama was to African-Americans. She represents the opportunity to see a like image in the Oval Office for the first time. That has to be tempting even for Republican women who would never support a Democrat, let alone a Clinton, and Trump’s demeanor and debate performance is making it easier for white independent and even Republican women to cross over.
And Trump is uniquely vulnerable because his record of insulting and demeaning women is as long as his love of Putin’s Russia is deep. According to the documentary Trump: What’s the Deal, he verbally harassed first wife Ivana, before dumping her for Marla Maples, whom he resisted marrying in a most public and embarrassing way, only to dump her and marry Melania before reportedly berating her for not losing her baby weight fast enough after giving birth to their now-10-year-old son Baron. The most effective Clinton ads this season have been the ones showing women and girls listening to Trump’s cruel words in his own voice.
Trump is at further risk due to his almost limbic inability to control himself when attacked, particularly by a woman. Consider that there’s no one who gets under his thin skin the way Elizabeth Warren does. She and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd have shared the sobriquet “goofy” as stars of Trump’s infamous Twitter tirades—though Warren has the smear “Pocahontas” all to herself.
During the campaign, Trump has gone after white women, Latinas (Machado and Susana Martinez, the governor of Mexico), Asian-American and Muslim women (Gold Star Mother Ghazala Khan). His Fox News chest thumping at a black Flint, Michigan pastor, Faith Green Timmons, came a day after he sheepishly backed down when she stopped him from politicking in her pulpit. Interestingly, he has yet to have a go at Michelle Obama, who just cut a national ad for Hillary Clinton. One can only imagine how that might go.
The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection. Trump has given Ivanka extensive control over both his business and his campaign, even agreeing to put a mothers-only parental leave plan into his campaign plank at her behest. When allegations of sexual harassment beat a path to his door, it was Ivanka who was sent out to publicly refute them.
Team Trump clearly understands his vulnerabilities. It’s no coincidence that while Hipster Nazi stenographer Steve Bannon was named the campaign CEO, the campaign manager and public face is Kellyanne Conway, a respected pollster who reportedly got the job by speaking softly to “Mr. Trump,” and giving him bad news in the way a mother might cajole an obstinate child. Team Trump deploys a small army of female spokespeople, including Katrina Pierson, Hope Hicks and Apprentice alum Omarosa Manigault to flack for him on TV.
Despite that, he is likely to get his proverbial clock cleaned at the hands of women in November, meaning he’ll need to run up historic margins with white men in order to get to 270.
Democrats have arguably underplayed questions of Trump stiffing the little guy, from employees to contractors he has done business with. And clearly, Trump is extremely vulnerable to questions about his wealth, which is why Team Clinton trolled him by putting confirmed billionaire Mark Cuban in the audience at Hofstra.
But Trump has telegraphed his real weak spot over and over again. He is incapable of reconciling his relationship with women to the modern world. He cannot stop himself from lashing out at female rivals, and he cannot hide his disrespect for half the human population.
To be sure, Hillary Clinton needs to add an affirmative case for herself to the negative case against Trump, including with women—younger women and women of color in particular—who might not be as motivated to vote as Trump’s eager followers. But with just weeks to go before Election Day, and with women typically voting in larger numbers than men, Democrats have a Trump trigger they can pull again and again.The Islamic State jihadist group claimed it executed British aid worker David Haines, in retaliation for British leader David Cameron entering a coalition with the United States against the militants.
This would be the third such execution in recent weeks, after two US journalists taken hostage in Syria were shown murdered. The beheading of James Foley was shown in a video released on August 19, and the killing of Steven Sotloff in a video released on September 2. Foley and Sotloff were both American journalists. Sotloff also held Israeli citizenship.
The Islamist group released a video, available late Saturday on the website of private terrorism monitoring group SITE, purportedly showing a masked militant beheading Haines.
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Britain’s Foreign Office said it was seeking to verify the authenticity of the video. If true, the killing would mark “another disgusting murder,” it said.
The video was entitled “A Message to the Allies of America.” Haines’ purported killer, who appeared to be the same man speaking with a British accent as in the previous videos, tells the British government that its alliance with the US will only “accelerate your destruction” and will drag the British people into “another bloody and unwinnable war.”
Haines was abducted in Syria in 2013 while working for an international aid agency.
The clip, which appeared authentic, featured Haines reading an Islamic State script in which he said he held British Prime Minister Cameron directly responsible for his execution. “You followed Americans into Iraq, following the trend of British prime ministers who cannot find the courage to say no to Americans,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is we the British public, that in the end that will pay the price for our parliaments selfish decisions.”
The killer said the United States must end air strikes against jihadi groups in Iraq. “This British man has to pay the price for your promise, Cameron,” he said. “Ironically, he has spent a decade of his life serving under the same Royal Air Force that is responsible for delivering those arms. Your evil alliance with America which continues to strike the Muslims of Iraq and most recently bombed the Haditha Dam will only accelerate your destruction.”
The video closes with a threat to kill another alleged British captive Alan Henning, believed to be an aid worker.
Earlier Saturday, Haines’s family had pleaded with the terror group to make contact with them.
“We are the family of David Haines,” a statement relayed by the British Foreign Office said Saturday. “We have sent messages to you to which we have not received a reply. We are asking those holding David to make contact with us.”
David Cawthorne Haines, 44, was kidnapped by IS militants in March of last year while working with refugees in northern Syria. The extremist organization, which has taken |
purchase?
Some of the perceived offense may have come from inattention. In 2011, the Washington Times asked me for a little piece celebrating the anniversary of the classic 1981 BBC mini-series version of Brideshead Revisited. And after its publication, David Boaz, the gay-marriage supporter from the libertarian Cato Institute, dropped me a note taking me to task for using the word “homosexuals” instead of “gays” in my opening description of the series’ reception. He understood that I was trying to recapture the tone of those early 1980s days, when homosexuals was still more or less the polite term of reference. But we are long past all that, he insisted, and I should realize that the word, taken as a generic noun, had picked up enough negative connotations that writers ought not to employ it even in a historical way.
I think I replied with a casual apology and a hackneyed quip about how one should never give offense unless one actually means it. But I didn’t mean personal offense with any work I did on same-sex subjects—and still I managed to give offense.
How rarely the subject actually came up surprises me now, looking back. In the hundreds of essays, poems, and reviews I published over those years, opposition to legalized abortion and rejection of the death penalty are constant themes. Raging themes, to the point where I probably lost most of even the best-willed readers. But gay topics? A brief contribution as the token Catholic in a little-noticed symposium in Newsweek. A 2004 editorial co-written with Bill Kristol. A review of Bawer’s anthology in the Weekly Standard. Another of Andrew Holleran’s depressing novel The Beauty of Men. And not much else that I can still find.
In my editorial jobs at the Weekly Standard and First Things, of course, I came to know some of the people fighting same-sex marriage. Ryan T. Anderson, for example, co-author of the widely discussed, career-defining 2011 essay “What Is Marriage?” in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Later expanded into a book, it remains the clearest, most cogent defense of traditional marriage. David Orgon Coolidge, too, founder of the Marriage Law Project before his untimely death in 2002: Richard John Neuhaus helped raise money to support Dave’s work, and we would often sit together and drink at Fr. Neuhaus’s innumerable theological and social-policy meetings.
I was much under the influence of the Christian poetics of W. H. Auden in those days—a man who, though gay himself, hated organized homosexuality: “the Homintern,” he mockingly named the gay establishment in poetry (playing off the Comintern, the international arm of party-line Soviet policy). Under the influence, for that matter, of the suspicions of attempts to claim victimhood expressed by René Girard—the contemporary writer who most formed my mental universe. Then, too, as the mantle of gay rights passed from the wild contrarians and countercultural figures of its early days to become the received view of the entire elite liberal class, it came to seem increasingly bland and uninteresting, with little in it tempting me to reject the general conservative position.
“At times one remains faithful to a cause,” Nietzsche writes, “only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.” It’s a sad observation of human behavior, but who among us hasn’t been guilty of it? “Same-sex marriage is the great civil-rights struggle of our time,” a young newspaper writer grandly announced to me in 2009. She had come to interview me for some article she was planning, but she spent most of her time lecturing me on how immoral it is that anyone opposes the right of gays to marry.
As it happens, when I asked, she proved to know almost nothing about the controversy: hadn’t read the legal decisions, hadn’t followed the arguments, hadn’t examined DOMA, hadn’t even tried to keep up. Only the warmth of her conviction of her own moral superiority seemed necessary, and I remember thinking: This is supposed to persuade me? Insipid self-righteousness—delivered in exactly the hectoring tones with which her Protestant great-grandparents would have lectured me about lack of Catholic support for Prohibition?
At the same time, looking back, I can see that even in my editorial choices I was avoiding the topic. Not entirely: there are some pieces the institutional weight of a magazine simply won’t let an editor refuse. But generally I turned down pieces on same-sex topics—and I did so by telling myself I found the subject dull. That’s an editor’s privilege, of course, and a lot of the thinking genuinely was dull. Dull as dishwater, gray from all the old, similar writing that had already been washed in it. But the avoidance was also, I now realize, a species of dishonesty: an unwillingness to sit down and decide what I really thought about it all.
Not that the world was waiting breathlessly for my nattering asseverations on the topic—and, anyway, the moment for being genuinely serious about same-sex marriage may have passed while I wasn’t looking. Or while I was refusing to look.
Still, it all came to a head for me when, one morning down in Lansdowne, Virginia, Chuck Colson woke up with a plan to gather every religious leader he could find and decry the destruction of Christian culture in America—promising civil disobedience, if necessary. The outcome was The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience, a manifesto issued in November 2009 that equated abortion, same-sex marriage, and intolerance of religion, and vowed to oppose any mainstream consensus that licensed them. Dozens of important religious figures met with Chuck Colson in New York to become the initial signers, and The Manhattan Declaration would go on to find half a million additional signatories.
One of the problems with the document was that none of the people on the drafting committee—Chuck himself, Princeton’s Robert P. George, and the very smart Baptist divinity-school dean Timothy George—were primarily writers. They were activists and teachers who happened to write, sometimes (as in Robby George’s 1995 book Making Men Moral) with real skill. But the genuine literary talent behind an entire generation’s set of manifestos had been Richard John Neuhaus—first as a Christian protester against segregation and Vietnam, and then as a Christian neoconservative. And with Richard’s death from cancer earlier in 2009, they had to produce The Manhattan Declaration in his absence.
The result would prove turgid, politically clumsy, and strangely disorganized. Just as there’s a rule in some online discussion groups that you’ve automatically lost an argument if you compare your opponents to the Nazis, so there ought to be a rule in public discourse that you’ve guaranteed your failure if you compare modern America to the decline of Ancient Rome. But that’s how the declaration opened, and as it wandered through its various complaints about the nation, it came to seem more and more a laundry list in search of a thesis: there’s bad stuff out there, people hate us, and it all adds up to, well, a picture—a modern reflection of the moral collapse of Rome from the stern glories of the republic to the satyricon of the empire.
I spoke to Chuck privately about the draft several times, urging him to reorganize it and tone it down, but he was too enamored of the frisson of rebellion in its call for civil disobedience to agree. Finally, at the New York meeting, I got up and announced publicly my unease: The equating of these three concerns is a mistake; not only do the possible negative results of same-sex marriage fail to match the horrors of abortion, but religious freedom isn’t even the same kind of thing. It’s like equating a small weed to a giant sequoia—and then lumping them both together with an umbrella. The entire text needs to be recast, I said. If the document has to threaten civil disobedience, then it ought to be about freedom: religious Americans may accept a culture that recognizes same-sex marriage, but they hereby announce that they will not accept a legal regime that uses same-sex marriage as a wrecking ball with which to knock down every religious building in the public square.
And in response, Maggie Gallagher stood up in that crowded room to call me a coward—or, at least, she declared that any reduction in the status of the fight over same-sex marriage was a counsel of cowardice, born from a fear that same-sex marriage was inevitable. A writer and activist, former president of the National Organization for Marriage, Gallagher has always struck me as a fearless and contrarian figure, and in this case, I think, she was correct.
Oh, not about the law: the legal victory of same-sex marriage actually was inevitable; not a single persuasive legal argument emerged against it in the courts. But right in her accusation of cowardice—although maybe not in quite the way she thought. My worry with The Manhattan Declaration wasn’t about the consequences of defeat, as Gallagher suggested; if something is wrong, you oppose it even though the heavens fall. But cowardice about my own mind, yes: my profamily friends were a strong public-intellectual force opposed to abortion, and I went along with them on same-sex marriage mostly because I lacked the seriousness and strength of mind to work through it for myself. I was just like that young woman journalist I found so insipid and self-righteous for pronouncing uncritically the views of her class.
In the end, my friends...but why should I continue to blame them for my own fault? In the end, I let myself be talked into publishing the (only slightly altered) document, despite my objections—talked into becoming one of the original signers of The Manhattan Declaration myself. It was a mistake, and one I regret.
LET'S TURN AT LAST to the actual intellectual questions raised by same-sex marriage. At the time Americans were waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the two pending marriage cases, Catholics were waiting to see if the new reign of Pope Francis would signal any change in the church’s views. And if, as I suggested earlier, the Supreme Court basically punted when it handed down its opinions on June 26, the pope refused to punt at all when he promulgated his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, on July 5.
There’s something in the new encyclical to disappoint everyone who longs for direct political action from the Vatican. Those who were hoping that a radically leftist Pope Francis would repudiate what they saw as the radically rightist work of his predecessor are bound to be saddened. A draft was prepared under Benedict XVI before his retirement on February 28, and Francis himself has described the completed document as written with “four hands”—Benedict’s and his own.
At the same time, disappointment must haunt those who hoped that a radically traditional Francis—a lifelong churchman instead of an academic theologian like his predecessor—would step back from the softness of Benedict’s economics and confront the world with the hardest edges of the institutional church. Faith is at “the service of justice, law, and peace,” Francis insists. We need it “to devise models of development which are based not simply on utility and profit, but consider creation as a gift for which we are all indebted.” Yes, he notes, all “authority comes from God,” but it is meant for “the service of the common good.”
Not since John Paul II’s great crusade against Soviet Communism has the Vatican been easily classifiable by the world’s political categories, despite the incessant effort of the world, left and right alike, to pin the church with those categories. That unclassifiability may be the best way to understand our new pope. He is an advocate of the poor who opposed many of the Argentinian government’s programs for the poor. A social activist who cannot be counted on to support social reform. A churchman who refused the elaborate trappings of his office even while he promoted the power of the church. A radical who rejects the state power and cultural change demanded by the secular left. A traditionalist who despises the accumulation of wealth and libertarian freedoms praised by the secular right. No attempt to impose liberal and conservative definitions on him will succeed. Pope Francis simply won’t fit in those categories.
Still, in Lumen Fidei he grants the faithful Catholic little room to maneuver on same-sex marriage. In “Faith and the Family,” section 52 of the encyclical, he calls the family the “first setting in which faith enlightens the human city”—a political-theory reading of the church’s interest in the institution. Indeed, “I think first and foremost of the stable union of man and woman in marriage,” he explained. “This union is born of their love, as a sign and presence of God’s own love, and of the acknowledgment and acceptance of the goodness of sexual differentiation, whereby spouses can become one flesh (cf. Gen 2:24) and are enabled to give birth to a new life, a manifestation of the Creator’s goodness, wisdom, and loving plan.” In marriage, “a man and a woman can promise each other mutual love in a gesture which engages their entire lives and mirrors many features of faith.... Faith also helps us to grasp in all its depth and richness the begetting of children, as a sign of the love of the Creator who entrusts us with the mystery of a new person.”
But perhaps Francis does offer us an opportunity to think about marriage in terms of the politically unclassifiable that constitutes much of Catholic teaching. The stony ground on which the church must sow is the landscape created by the sexual revolution. Made possible by the pill, accelerated by legalized abortion, aided by easy pornography, that revolution actually needs none of these any longer to survive, because they never defined it. They merely allowed it, and the completed change is now omnipresent. The revolution is not just in the way we use our bodies. It’s in the way we use our minds.
One understanding of the sexual revolution—the best, I think—is as an enormous turn against the meaningfulness of sex. Oh, I know, it was extolled by the revolutionaries as allowing real experimentation and exploration of sensation, but the actual effect was to disconnect sex from what previous eras had thought the deep stuff of life: God, birth, death, heaven, hell, the moral structures of the universe, and all the rest.
The resulting claim of amorality for almost any sexual behavior except rape reflects perhaps the most fascinating social change of our time: the transfer of the moral center of human worry about the body away from sex and onto…well, onto food, I suppose. The only moral feeling still much attached to sex is the one that has to hunt far and wide for some prude, any prude, who will still condemn an aspect of sexual behavior—and thereby confirm our self-satisfied feeling of revolutionary morality. Of course, the transfer of moral anxiety away from sexual intercourse might not be so peculiar. Think how often ancient thinkers, from the pagan stoics to the church fathers, would reach to gluttony and fasting, instead of lust and chastity, when they needed examples for their discussions of virtue and vice.
The turn against any deep, metaphysical meaning for sex in the West, however: that is strange and fascinatingly new, unique to late modernity. Jean-Paul Sartre once denounced Michel Foucault as one of the “young conservatives” for his refusal to embrace Communism, but in other ways, the radical gay philosopher, the very model of a star French philosophe before his death from AIDS in 1984, was the key explicator of the sexual revolution. And just as he saw a change in moral understanding of the body slowly developing among Christian writers from the fourth-century John Cassian to the eleventh-century Peter Damian, so he saw yet another change emerging in modern times. The comic line that “sex was invented in 1750” is an exaggeration of his thought, but Foucault quite rightly understood that there were bound to be consequences to what Max Weber called the great “disenchantment of the world” in the joining of the “elective affinities” of the Protestant Reformation, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and the triumph of Enlightenment philosophy.
Those consequences were, in essence, the stripping away of magic—the systematic elimination of metaphysical, spiritual, and mystical meanings. Science, Francis Bacon told us, could not advance in any other way. Real democracy, Diderot explained, would not arrive “until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” When the Supreme Court gave us the infamous “mystery passage” in the 1992 abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey—“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”—the justices were merely following out to its logical conclusion the great modern project of disenchantment. And it’s worth noticing that the mystery passage was quoted approvingly and relied upon in the 2003 sodomy-law case Lawrence v. Texas and by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 2005 when it ordered the state to register same-sex marriages.
As a practical matter, the gay-rights lawyers were probably smart to take the mystery passage and run with it. You use what tools you’re given, even if they confirm your opponents’ inchoate sense that all social issues are somehow joined, abortion of a piece with same-sex marriage. But as a theoretical matter, I’m less convinced. What kind of moral or social victory do you obtain if the marriage you’re granted is defined as nothing more than a way in which individuals define the concept of their own existence? Marriage seemed one of the last places left where Weber’s “great enchanted garden” of traditional societies could still be found.
And yet, again, I could be wrong, even about a premodern enchantment perduring in marriage. G. K. Chesterton once suggested that if there truly exists such a thing as divorce, then there exists no such thing as marriage. The root of the paradox is his observation of the metaphysics implicit in marriage ceremonies: “There are those who say they want divorce in the second place without ever asking themselves if they want marriage in the first place. So let us begin by asking what marriage is. It is a promise. More than that, it is a vow.” If we allow divorce, then we have already weakened the thick, mystical notion of marriage vows. Adultery is an everyday sin. Divorce is something more: a denial of a solemn oath made to God.
I’m not trying to argue here directly for an end to the culture’s embrace of legalized divorce, much as the sociological evidence about the harm to children now appears beyond dispute. Rather, the point is that the legal and social acceptance of divorce, building in Protestant America from the late nineteenth century on, culminated in the universal availability of no-fault divorce. And if heterosexual monogamy so lacks the old, enchanted metaphysical foundation that it can end in quick and painless divorce, then what principle allows a refusal of marriage to gays on the grounds of a metaphysical notion like the difference between men and women?
Think of the parallel with laws against sodomy. Justice Thomas may actually have been right that, bad as such laws were, it’s better to have our feckless legislators accept democratic responsibility and replace them than it is to have the courts rule on their constitutionality. But whatever the cruelty and prurience of such laws in the first place, they had become entirely ungrounded by the time of the 2003 Lawrence case. If marriage is nothing more than a licensed sexual playground, without any sense of sin attached to oral sex and anal sex and almost any other act, then under what intellectually coherent scheme can one refuse to others the opportunity for the same behavior?
And, of course, not only did marital relations become a value-free zone in the sexual revolution, but non-marital relations did as well. The seal of virginity, the procreative purpose, the mystical analogy of marriage to Christ’s espousal of his church, the divinely witnessed vow, the sexual body as a temple, the moral significance of chastity: all that old metaphysical stuff got swept away. And regardless of whether the metaphysics was right or wrong, without it there is simply no reasoning that could possibly outweigh the valid claims of fairness and equality. Same-sex marriage advocates don’t just have better public relations than their opponents. They have better logic, given the premises available to the culture.
THIS POINTS US toward the general problem with arguments that rely on natural law—natural law, that is, in the modern sense, as developed most notably by the philosophers John Finnis and Germain Grisez, and explicated for political application by Robby George and many subsequent conservative writers. As deployed in our current debates, this kind of thing has always seemed to me a scientized, mainline-Protestantized version of the thicker natural law of the medievals: natural law as awkwardly yoked to the “elective affinities” of modernity.
On point here is Russell Hittinger’s critique of “new natural law” as an attempt to have a theology-free version of a rational philosophy that depended, by its original internal consistency, on premises of God, creation, and Aristotelian natural forms. Natural law was always a little theologically thin. It derived from a rich understanding of the world, yes, but it was something like the least common denominator of spiritual views: a “mere metaphysics” (to misapply a concept of C. S. Lewis’s). And it worked well enough as a philosophy in a time when people generally agreed that the world was enchanted, however vehemently they disagreed about the specifics of that enchantment. Natural law broke spirituality down to its most basic shared components and then built a rationally defensible ethics up again from that foundation.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in a thick natural law. To read the questions on law in the Summa is to watch Thomas Aquinas assemble a grand, beautiful, and extremely delicate structure of rationality. As the Duke theologian Paul Griffiths pointed out in a prescient 2004 Commonweal article (“Legalize Same-Sex Marriage,” June 28, 2004), the premises may not be provable, but they are visible to faith, and from them a great and careful mind like Thomas’s can logically derive extraordinary things. The delicacy is revealed, for example, in his analysis of the questions of marriage. Too careful, too honest, simply to condemn everything except the sanctified monogamy that Christianity had given him, Thomas works through an escalating series that ends up preferring the Christian idea of nuptials as the richest, most meaningful form of marriage—without condemning even polygamy as necessarily a violation of the most philosophically abstract application of the natural law.
In this, I think, is a model for how Catholics might think about the world in which legal recognition of same-sex marriage has emerged. The goal of the church today must primarily be the re-enchantment of reality. This is the language in which Pope Francis speaks: Marriage “as a sign and presence of God’s own love.” Birth as “a manifestation of the Creator’s goodness, wisdom, and loving plan.” Mutual love as something that engages our entire lives and “mirrors many features of faith.”
Is sex the place in which that project of re-enchantment ought to begin? I just can’t see it—not after the nearly complete triumph of the sexual revolution’s disenchantment, not after the way “free love” was essentially sold to us by the Edwardians as an escape from narrow Victorian Christianity, not after part of the culture’s most visible morality became the condemnation of those perceived as condemning something sexual. The campaign for traditional marriage really isn’t a defense of natural law. It revealed itself, in the end, as a defense of one of the last little remaining bits of Christendom—an entanglement or, at least, an accommodation of church and state. The logic of the Enlightenment took a couple of hundred years to get around to eliminating that particular portion of Christendom, but the deed is done now.
We should not accept without a fight an essentially un-Catholic retreat from the public square to a lifeboat theology and the small communities of the saved that Alasdair MacIntyre predicted at the end of After Virtue (1981). But there are much better ways than opposing same-sex marriage for teaching the essential God-hauntedness, the enchantment, of the world—including massive investments in charity, the further evangelizing of Asia, a willingness to face martyrdom by preaching in countries where Christians are killed simply because they are Christians, and a church-wide effort to reinvigorate the beauty and the solemnity of the liturgy. Some Catholic intellectual figures will continue to explore the deep political-theory meanings manifest in the old forms of Christendom, and more power to them, but the rest of us should turn instead to more effective witness in the culture as it actually exists.
In fact, same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in chastity in a culture that has lost much sense of chastity. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in love in a civilization that no longer seems to know what love is for. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in the coherence of family life in a society in which the family is dissolving.
I don’t know that it will, of course, and some of the most persuasive statements of conservatism insist that we should not undertake projects the consequences of which we cannot foresee. But same-sex marriage is already here; it’s not as though we can halt it. And other profound statements of conservatism remind us that we must take people as we find them—must instruct the nation where the nation is.
For that matter, the argument about unforeseen consequences is a sword that cuts both ways. Precisely because human social experience has never recognized same-sex marriage on any large scale, we don’t know the extent to which metaphysical meanings—the enchantment of marriage—can be instantiated in same-sex unions. How faithful will they prove? How much infected by the divorce culture of modern America? How spiritual? How mundane? How will they face up to the woe of the quotidian that, as Schopenhauer insisted, marriage forces us to see? How will such unions aid their participants to perceive the joy of creation?
The answer is that we can’t predict the effects of same-sex marriage. I think some good will come, I hope some good will come, but I cannot say with certainty that all must go well with this social change. Still, as the church turns to other and far more pressing ways to re-enchant the world, we’ll have time to find out. And when we are ready to start rebuilding the thick natural law that recognizes the created world as a stage on which the wondrous drama of God’s love is played, we will have the information we need to decide where same-sex marriage belongs in a metaphysically rich, spiritually alive moral order.
I UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS not the answer my traditional-marriage friends demand. But then, it’s not the answer same-sex marriage advocates want, either. Far too many people on both sides see the issue in such stark terms that they dismiss any nuance as merely giving excuse to immorality. As only lending countenance to evil.
Certainly it will not satisfy Jim Watson, my old friend from New York. How could he accept talk of the Catholic Church’s charity and evangelizing? He wants the church hurt, its tax exemptions and even property-holding rights stripped away until it not only accepts laws allowing same-sex marriage, not only encourages same-sex marriage, but actually performs same-sex marriage. Even that might not be enough; the institutional weight of the history of Catholic bigotry, he thinks, is probably too much for repentance and reformation to overcome. Best, really, if the Catholic Church is systematically outlawed.
And that is one Catholic fear about same-sex marriage with force—the fear that the movement is essentially disingenuous. That gays don’t actually want much to marry, but Catholic resistance to the idea is just too useful a stick not to use. That modern Americans, heirs to the class-based self-satisfactions of their Protestant ancestors, look at same-sex marriage and think how wonderful a device it proves for a little Rome bashing.
But how can we not take same-sex marriage advocates at their word, accepting that they really seek the marriages they say they desire? For that matter, I still believe in the general resilience and common sense of America, which will halt those who wish to hijack the movement. Christians are sometimes called to martyrdom: “The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants,” as the interesting lesbian Catholic commentator Eve Tushnet once observed here in Commonweal (“Homosexuality & the Church,” June 11, 2007). But I just don’t think that same-sex marriage is going to be the excuse America uses to go after its Catholic citizens.
At the same time, there’s been damage done in the course of this whole debate, some of it by me. And I’m not sure what can be done about it. I certainly lost my friend Jim along the way. Some come here to fiddle and dance, I remember he used to sing. Some come here to tarry. / Some come here to prattle and prance. / I come here to marry. You remember how it goes. “Shady Grove,” the song is called. A bit of old-timey Americana, the stuff we all still share.
Funding for this essay has been provided by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.By Daniel Cabrera, M.D.
Author: Eric T. Boie, M.D. Assistant Professor Emergency Medicine. Mayo Clinic.
First impressions are very important, and can doom you or poison working relationships for quite a period of time. For this reason, prudence dictates thought before action, and careful investigation of what underlies a problem.
#1 ESTABLISH KEY RELATIONSHIPS
You should take the time to meet with several key players. For many, this will be the first time that an EM physician has done so. I have received feedback from several of our graduates that have done this that they feel it paid tremendous dividends. You be the judge…
Medical Director: (your boss). Be certain that you have no further questions about your contract. Assure that the orientation period is reasonable. Ask under what circumstances they would want you to call them at home about a problem during a shift. Be certain that you understand how the arbitration system works when you disagree with a consultant. Clarify transfer policies, psychiatric case treatment plans, floor coverage during the time of a busy shift and order writing. Clarify what your GOALS are for the upcoming year. Have a list of your own in case your director doesn’t have any. Be certain to include time needed for ABEM prep and testing. Ask what the sick call protocol is… for instance frame questions as “what if I get a call from my relief saying that they are too ill to work”?
Nurse Manager of the ED: Often the second most powerful individual within your workplace. Don’t get off to a bad start. Find out what their (nursing’s) perspective is about EM, the ED and the hospital. What are their expectations of you? How would they like you to handle praise for a nurse (this one usually knocks them over…a doctor looking for ways to praise a nurse!)? How should disputes with a nurse be handled? Would it be OK for you to check back in a few weeks for some feedback?
Hospital CEO: A quick, 15 minute session to introduce yourself and find out what their vision is for EM at the hospital. Do they have any specific concerns about the ED? What aspects are they most proud of (hospital and ED)?
Medical Staff President: 15 minutes (in some hospitals this may become a breakfast or lunch meeting). Again, a simple introduction and query about strengths/weaknesses of the hospital and the ED. You may wish to broach the hypothetical situation of a consultant who is impaired at this meeting, or what to do if you strongly disagree with a consultant’s recommended plan.
Department/Section chairs for the major clinical patients that you deal with. A short sweet, strengths and challenges type meeting. In addition, find out what they would recommend that you do in the “hypothetical” situation of one of their on call colleagues that refuses to see a patient, or if you have a disagreement over management.
Other key people may include the EMS director (medic praise or concerns, protocols for your county), social work director or chaplaincy representative for the ED.
**Meet with both the medical director and the nursing manager after about 7 and 30 shifts to get their feedback about your performance. This affords an opportunity to correct any misperceptions about you that may have developed. Ask for honesty
#2 BE PREPARED CLINICALLY
Before your first shift:
Familiarize yourself with the airway kits & materials (adult & pediatrics). Be prepared for a less sophisticated “difficult airway kit” than you’ve come to expect. Do they have intubating LMAs? Gum elastic bougie? Glidescope?
Review location of code equipment (IO lines, E-Z IO, chest tubes, central lines)
Review protocols (e.g. for conscious sedation, infiltrative anesthesia, NG tubes & foleys, wound cleansing).
Review referral patterns for things that “cross” boundaries, and how the primary care doctor influences such decisions (back pain, GI bleeding, hand injuries, facial injuries and foot problems). Who does surgical subspecialty work such as “plastics”?
All set to do a precipitous delivery? The nurses will be impressed that you asked. Know where to locate the equipment too.
Review limitations on the availability of diagnostic tests (US, MRI, Dopplers). How do you get an expedited wet reading, or what do you do if you have questions about a remotely generated reading? Are patients ever transferred due to the lack of availability of a consultant or diagnostic study?
The “Discrepancy/Culture Log”. Are you responsible for contacting patients with radiograph discrepancies or positive cultures? If so, how do you document those activities?
Review the base station protocols for ambulances (so you don’t embarrass yourself asking for something that they don’t have). Do the nurses or do you speak on the radio? There will be a wide array of differing practice patterns … no IV pain meds w/o order, routine use of pre-hospital 12 lead EKGs, formal reporting of stroke scales, etc.
References and resources (social work, legal, chaplaincy) available to you in the ED.
Clarify responsibilities that may exist outside of the ED … when should you respond to a code? Do you cover ICU pts? L&D? What if the EDs busy with volume? What if you have a really sick pt. and are called to one of these??
#3 KEEP EYES OPEN, MOUTH SHUT
Don’t say “At my old hospital, we would do.....”. You aren’t at in your residency any more, so instead adapt ideas or concepts that did well here to your local environment. Don’t try to change a guideline in the middle of a shift. There must be buy in from the nursing and physician management, and sometimes from the medical staff itself. If this is an issue worthy of “falling on your sword over” (e.g. the patient’s welfare is compromised), do it yourself, or tactfully beg the nurses to do it with a promise to fully explain later. More likely this is a “style” issue, and better worked out at a later time. This IS different from teaching providers during your shift (that’s always appreciated).
#4 LISTEN AND LEARN
Ask for advice liberally, and listen to it in a non-judgmental fashion. Use actual questions that pop up during your shift to ask more “hypothetical” questions about admitting strategies, referrals, transfers, etc. Above all, don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know, can you help me”?. While you are expected to be well trained, your group should also understand that you lack experience (remember that it takes 7 years to become an expert…those 40,000 patient encounters). Also, nobody likes a “know-it-all”. Caveat: don’t play “dumb” as that’s not respected by nurses. Instead play “receptive” to learning how they approach a problem.
#5 BE EXTRA NICE – JUST LIKE KINDERGARTEN
Be generous with your appreciation and manners. Give people the benefit of the doubt, and say “Thanks” a lot. Compliment people on their work. After your first critically ill patient or code, take a few minutes to reassemble the team and praise them for their work (dwell on the behaviors that you thought were good). Caveat: Nurses expect you to be decisive and to lead a code or management of a critically ill patient. Ask for input and ideas as you do this, but be a leader. Over the years there’s been an impressive litany of challenging “1st shift” pts – 2 week old congenital heart, precip delivery, multiple trauma simultaneous arrival, etc.
#6 TIMELINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS
Be on time - even a few minutes early, for your shifts. Dress professionally and take the lead from others that you work with. Stay over at the end of shift to tie up loose ends. And DO NOT be the doctor that everyone hates to follow because the WR is bursting at the seams or your patients are only half dispositioned. Make yourself indispensable to your new group, and a favorite amongst your partners and nurses.
#7 PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE
Be PATIENT for your first 6 months. Again, anyone can identify a problem...the challenge lies in finding the correct solutions for the local system. Don’t make waves early! Study the problem, research possible solutions and present them...or volunteer to work with a group of people that are tasked with finding a solution. Presenting problems to the director without recommendations is usually perceived as whining. It takes a while to learn the local politics and history of the institution…both strongly impact operations. Chances are, if there was a simple solution, it would already have been solved.
#8 FACTIONS WILL FRACTURE
Avoid being pressed into “taking sides” in disputes that have a history and growth that predates you. It may take over a year to sort through these. Politely explain that you don’t have enough background information to make a judgment on the issue.
#9 WIN OVER NURSING STAFF
Ask the nurses for their perception about consultants prior to placing the call....may help you better prepare for a “crusty” consultant, or understand their treatment preferences. Again, making a good first impression with these consultants can pay dividends.
Check the work of the nurses (e.g. wound cleansing, splint application, discharge instruction). If you identify concerns, try to decide if it’s a systems problem (need for education, understaffing, etc.) or an individual nurse problem. System concerns should be brought to your boss. Be prepared to offer your services to solve the issue (e.g. put together an in-service for the nurses).
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statute book.
There is a very noble tradition of banning things in the 10 years of the new parliament's tenure. Smart, successful Scotland has no peers in the practice of forbidding, forfeiting and classifying. Our MSPs wasted very little time in using their limited powers to insinuate themselves into the lives of their citizens. It started when Mike Watson, while representing the people of Castlemilk, brought forward a bill to ban hunting with hounds. It was Holyrood's first-ever private member's bill and it left the good people of this benighted and sprawling arrondissement to Glasgow's south in a state of bemused fascination. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Castlemilk are poverty, drugs, knives and alcohol; not once have the locals ever heard a huntsman's bugle. Yet the only equine menaces that Mr Watson could see were wearing silly hats, red coats and looking for foxes.
After that, it became a feeding frenzy as MSPs and councillors realised how easy it was to ban things. Soon there was a bill to ban fur farming. And only after the legislation was passed was it discovered that, er... there were no fur farms in Scotland. Nevertheless, they harrumphed, it would serve as a warning to les autres... just in case anyone was considering the establishment of these obscene rural charnel houses.
And when our politicians discovered what a fat little country we had become they became obsessed about obesity. Soon, every MSP and councillor in the land was trying to rid us of this national embarrassment. Fizzy drinks would be banned from schools and hamburgers would be replaced by couscous and guacamole suppers. Indeed, the selling of lemonade to impressionable youngsters almost became a capital offence. There was a proposal to rewrite Enid Blyton's Famous Five books to delete all references to the vile substance.
And not only were we the Fattest Small Nation in the World, we were also, according to Jack McConnell and his acolytes, the Most Sectarian Small Country in the World. And so an entire range of hate laws was arranged, sorted, packaged and sent to the four corners of the kingdom. Now the offence of chibbing a fellow citizen would not be deemed to be as serious an offence as chibbing him while calling him a Protestant, Catholic or Anabaptist bastard. Uttering any of those unspeakably sordid prefixes could see you do two extra years in the pokey.
The forbidders and their fundamentalist acolytes had the fire of righteousness in their gimlet eyes as they sought to place their fiery crosses all over Scotland. Emboldened by their astonishing banning successes they now sought out the big one: smoking cigarettes. Even when a nationwide public consultation rejected overwhelmingly an outright ban on smoking in all public places, they still went ahead and did it anyway, fortified by the conviction that, spiritually, they were right and that poor people would thank them in years to come for granting them another 10 years in the urban squalor that a generation of Labour government had bequeathed to them and their children.
Now no one is saying that the roots of the recession in Scotland started when hundreds of small pubs were forced to close as smokers began drinking at home. But do you think the Scottish government would have forced an outright ban in the first months of 2009?
Meanwhile, the denizens of Holyrood's secret chamber of the banned wring their hands and seek out other practices to forbid. Didn't someone hear of an Asbo being dished out to an English couple last week for fornicating too vigorously? A shagging curfew? Now wouldn't that be wonderful.North Korean leader Kim Jong Un salutes during a visit to the Ministry of the People's Armed Forces on the occasion of the new year, in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on January 10, 2016. REUTERS/KCNA
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on Friday on legislation broadening sanctions against North Korea that is expected to pass with overwhelming support, sending the measure to the White House for President Barack Obama to sign into law.
The House backed the sanctions measure 418-2 in January, but the Senate included some new provisions, including cybersecurity measures, in the version of the bill that it passed 96-0 on Wednesday, sending it back to the House.
The proposed sanctions come after a satellite launch seen by Washington and its allies as cover for development of ballistic missile technology that could be used to deliver a nuclear weapon.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said the House would consider the amended version of the bill this week, and aides said the vote would likely take place on Friday morning.
“We have moved one step closer to a new round of North Korea sanctions,” Ryan told reporters in his weekly news conference.
Obama is not expected to veto the bill, given its huge support in Congress.
Ben Rhodes, his deputy national security adviser, said the White House would review the measure but does not oppose Congress’ efforts.
“I think this is an area where we and Congress are in the same space and agree on the need for increased sanctions,” Rhodes told an event at the Center for American Progress on Thursday.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday threatened to "chop off the heads" of traitors, in a speech marking the first anniversary of the failed coup bid that aimed to oust him from power.
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"First of all we will chop off the heads of those traitors," Erdogan told a rally in Istanbul, prompting cries from the crowds that capital punishment should be restored in Turkey.
Reaffirming previous comments, he vowed to sign any bill passed by parliament to restore capital punishment in Turkey, a move that would effectively end Ankara's European Union membership ambitions.
"We are a state governed by rule of law. If it comes to me after parliament, I will sign it," he said.
Erdogan also said the suspects being tried on suspicion of involvement in the failed coup should wear uniform clothing like the notorious orange jumpsuits used at US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
"I spoke to the prime minister and... when they appear in court, let's make them appear in uniform suits like in Guantanamo," Erdogan said.
A controversy erupted last week when one suspect was seen going into court with the word "hero" in large letters in English on a T-shirt.
Erdogan was speaking to hundreds of thousands of supporters gathered at the bridge over the Bosphorus that saw some of the fiercest fighting on the night of the July 15, 2016 attempted coup.
"We paid a price... but there is no price for the independence and future we obtained in return for that sacrifice," he said, referring to the deaths of 249 people at the hands of the plotters.
He meanwhile lashed out at claims from the opposition that the government had foreknowledge of the coup and let it play out to its own advantage in a so-called "controlled" putsch.
"This is a shame, this is an immorality," Erdogan said. "This is a disrespect, an insult to our people," he added.
(AFP)For more than a decade TorrentFreak has covered the latest copyright and file-sharing news in written text. Today we're trying something new with the first episode of the Steal This Show podcast, which will discuss recent news events and feature in-depth interviews with leading innovators.
Steal This Show (STS) is a TF-supported initiative produced by Jamie King, who’s known for the Steal This Film documentaries and the independent filmmaker platform VODO.
STS plans to release high quality episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary and analysis.
The guests for our news discussions will vary and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the big innovators and minds, one-on-one.
Below is the first pilot of STS’s first discussion show, we hope you enjoy it.
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Guests: Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson
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NOTE: Please comment on the STS page.Two men, one with a suspected broken jaw, have been airlifted from the Antarctic's most remote research facility after an incident described as a "drunken Christmas punch-up".
The brawl happened at the US-operated Amundsen-Scott South Pole station, located at the heart of the frozen continent. The station, where staff carry out a range of scientific investigations from astrophysics to seismology, is currently being rebuilt in a £76m project.
After reports of the fight reached staff at McMurdo station, the headquarters of the US Antarctic Programme, which is located on Ross Island, a US Air Force Hercules was sent to pick up the injured man and the other worker.
They were flown back to McMurdo, but it was decided the man's injuries were too serious to be treated in Antarctica and he was taken on to Christchurch, New Zealand, accompanied by a nurse and a paramedic.
Many of the McMurdo staff had been expecting a day off for Christmas but support workers returned to work to deal with the rare emergency medical evacuation.
A spokeswoman at Christchurch Hospital said a man was admitted on Christmas Day and discharged the following day.
"There was an altercation between two people -- there's no indication of the cause or of the background between the two folks," said Peter West, spokesman for the National Science Foundation which manages the US Antarctic programme.
The injured man is an employee of Raytheon Polar Services, one of America's largest defence contractors. A company spokeswoman, Val Carroll, said an investigation into the incident would be held. She said it was company policy not to release names of the two men.
The other man involved in the incident has flown back to the United States.
Polar medivac flights are rare occurrences, one of the most dramatic being a midwinter flight in 1999 for a woman doctor who developed breast cancer and needed urgent treatment.
It is currently summer in Antarctica, with light snow falling and daytime temperatures hovering around freezing, making it relatively easy to fly back and forth to New Zealand.Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly’s move to White House chief of staff is ushering in a cloud of uncertainty at the department that has led some of President Donald Trump’s most controversial undertakings — from its roundup of undocumented immigrants to his travel ban and proposed border wall.
It may also set the stage for a brutal confirmation fight if President Donald Trump tries to replace the retired Marine general with an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration instead of a seasoned bureaucrat or lawmaker.
Story Continued Below
A person close to Kelly said it's unclear who will replace him.
But several White House and former DHS officials proffered a slate of names of possible replacements for Kelly, with Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, emerging as a leading candidate.
Other potential picks include Thomas Homan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who accompanied Trump on Air Force One on Friday, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration who is helping to lead the president's controversial commission on alleged voter fraud.
Separately, department staffers have been talking about the possibility that the role might go to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to two sources with contacts at DHS, but a person close to the Trump administration said he's unlikely to get the job.
Which direction Trump takes could have a dramatic effect on soothing or stoking the uncertainty gripping his White House.
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"So much of Trump's agenda is tied to DHS," said one Republican lobbyist close to the White House. The consultant added: "Kelly was one of the best decisions he has made thus far. Considering how central DHS is to his agenda, he's got to make another great decision."
Homan got praise from one former DHS official, who called him “a career tough guy” who “plays right to Trump's sweet spot.” ICE is the agency leading Trump’s street-level enforcement push, and Homan traveled with Trump on Friday to Long Island, N.Y., where the president spoke about the link between street gangs and illegal immigration.
Kobach, on the other hand, would ignite a firestorm among Democrats, who accuse him of carrying out an agenda of denying voting rights to minorities. Seth Stodder, who held assistant secretary roles at the Homeland Security Department from 2015 to this year, said a Kobach pick would be “radioactive.”
“It would be one hell of a confirmation hearing,” Stodder said, adding that he would probably oppose the nomination himself. “I just can’t imagine that happening.”
Picking Sessions, meanwhile, would empower Trump to select a new attorney general who could exert more control over the Russia probe, perhaps an ally like Rudy Giuliani. But that option would likely set up a major clash with senators of both parties.
One source familiar with the process cautioned that it's "very early," and things could change in the coming hours and days.
For now, the department announced Friday, Kelly will remain in his DHS role through Monday. After that, Deputy Secretary Elaine Duke — a Kelly confidante and well-respected leader — will become acting secretary.
Duke, who previously worked as DHS undersecretary for management from 2008 to 2010, would be a capable choice in the eyes of some former DHS officials. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for Homeland Security in the Obama administration, called her smart but not overly political, a good mix for the department. Still, she’s skeptical Duke would get the nod.
“[You] couldn't meet a nicer person who has nurtured and managed that department for three different presidents,” Kayyem said. “Trump doesn't want nice.”
Blain Rethmeier, the sherpa who guided Kelly through his confirmation hearing, said that “nobody is better or smarter on the policy” than Duke, but that “she isn't a known brand to the public.”
Trump's choice for the next secretary will be crucial, and not only because of the agency’s sprawling portfolio, which includes border security and visa processing along with airport security and disaster relief.
Kelly successfully piloted the president’s immigration crackdown under his watch: ICE has arrested roughly 75,000 undocumented residents to date. At the same time, reports of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally have fallen dramatically. Now Kelly's departure for the West Wing will leave a void as the department deals with the details of enforcing Trump’s travel ban, his proposed border wall and terrorist threats against aviation.
Kelly is seen inside and outside the White House as a capable manager. Even some Democrats see him as the most palatable member of the Cabinet. But that is likely to change once he enters the White House, where he'll become a political target for the left.
McCaul, meanwhile, may have the easiest path toward being confirmed as Kelly’s replacement.
The Texas Republican competed for the secretary role in November. He introduced an immigration bill on Friday that would provide $10 billion for Trump’s border “wall,” a pot of funds that would pay for a mix of wall, fence, technology and aerial surveillance over four years, while boosting Border Patrol by 5,000 agents — the level Trump called for in a January executive order.
McCaul even published an op-ed on Fox News in December that pledge his support for Trump’s signature project.
“We are going to build the wall. Period,” he wrote. “In the process, I pledge to stand side-by-side with the Trump administration to throw out Obama’s reckless immigration policies and start enforcing our nation’s laws.”
He followed up Friday with another Fox op-ed that praised Trump's approach to foreign policy as "strong and decisive."
"The Trump White House relishes American exceptionalism and enjoys promoting Western values," McCaul wrote, citing examples such as his handling of ISIS. "It clearly understands that there is no such thing as leading from behind when it comes to tackling the most pressing international security issues."
Still, the congressman faced backlash from border hawks when his name was floated for the DHS role after the election. Activists in favor of lower immigration levels tweeted under the hashtag "#NeverMcCaul" and derided him as soft on the issue.
Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.CARSON, Calif.—Jerome Kiesewetter was 13 when the World Cup came to Germany in 2006, and he doesn't remember much except one thing: watching the US play on the big screen constructed at the Brandenburg Gate in his native Berlin.
That was the day Kiesewetter proudly wore his US jersey for the first time, and if things didn't go so well for the Yanks – they didn't win a game in a difficult group – it hardly shook his allegiance.
The son of an American serviceman and a German woman, Kiesewetter (who took his mother's last name) grew into a fine soccer player. When US Soccer, alerted by his childhood friend John Brooks, came knocking 5 1/2-years ago, Kiesewetter didn't need a moment to contemplate the offer.
The 22-year-old striker has deeply identified with his American half all his life, even if he'd had, until his mid-teens, no contact with his father.
“I always did [feel like an American],” Kiesewetter, a US Under-23 standout who made his debut for the senior national team with an impressive late stint in Sunday's 3-2 win over Iceland at StubHub Center, told MLSsoccer.com. “My mom always told me about my dad, about the things they did. I grew up around American people -- her friends were American.
“The Feeling was There.”
Kiesewetter called getting his first cap the “greatest feeling in the world,” but it might be even better Friday night, when the Yanks take on Canada at StubHub Center. His father, Robin Riley, will be in attendance.
Riley, who lives just outside Austin, Texas, tracked down his son after he'd joined the US program, and they quickly built a relationship. Kiesewetter has since visited his dad, his half-brother and half-sister – he has another half-sister in Berlin – on several occasions.
“We didn't have much contact when I was little, like 7 or 8 years old,” Kiesewetter said. “But right now we talk to each other, like, every week. Twice a week … I always knew about him, but USA and Germany is far away, and it's not easy for a child. You can't travel, you have to go to school, and if you have off [from school], you're with your friends.”
He insisted that he never felt deprived of having a father before building a relationship with his dad.
“I didn't notice it, really, to be honest, because I was just paying attention to school,” Kiesewetter said. “I was just a kid. I didn't pay much attention to it. But right now it's great. It's great that we have our relationship getting better every week, every day.”
Ascension
Kiesewetter is a rising star within the US youth national teams, advancing from the U-20s to the U-23s, whom he hopes to help overcome Colombia in a two-game March playoff for a berth in the Rio 2016 Olympics. And if his performance against Iceland is any indication, he might soon pay dividends for the senior team.
U-23 head coach Andreas Herzog says Kiesewetter “could be a huge part for US Soccer in the future.”
“I know him for a long time,” said the former Austria national team star. “He's a very physical player with a lot of speed up front. Honestly, through the whole year [in 2015], he was one of my best players overall.”
Kiesewetter, who plays for VfB Stuttgart, grew up in Berlin's Tempelhof neighborhood, where he and Brooks, a fellow German-American who is just two weeks older, started palling around when they were barely out of diapers. They grew up playing soccer together, and Brooks was the best player in the neighborhood.
“He was, I would say, a famous player in my little area in Berlin,” Kiesewetter said. “He was very famous, a good player, and I always looked up to him. He used to play striker and I used to play striker, too, and I was like, 'Yeah, I want to play like this guy.' ”
Brooks, who was converted into a defensive player and developed in Hertha Berlin's academy before signing a pro contract with his hometown club nearly five years ago, was called into a US camp by former U-20 coach Thomas Rongen in summer 2010. The center back quickly alerted Rongen to check out his buddy.
Kiesewetter, then 17, has been part of the scene ever since.
“It was great for me,” he said. “Always as a kid, I said I wanted to play for the US national team. It's funny that we're standing here right now.”
He played with the U-20s through his teens and made his U-23 debut last year, when he scored six goals in 16 games while usually teamed up front with fellow young striker standout Jordan Morris. He moved from Hertha Berlin, where he started about the same time as Brooks, to Stuttgart four years ago and has played primarily for the club's second team.
Kiesewetter made two Bundesliga appearances last spring and has trained with the first team but has not played a first-team match in quite some time. His playing time has been affected by an unstable coaching situation at Stuttgart, due to poor results. Huub Stevens was succeeded in July by Alexander Zorniger, who was then replaced in November by Jurgen Kramny.
Herzog says “he [Kiesewetter] didn't grow” during the first half of this season because his playing time diminished, and the player acknowledges that he’s considering other options, including MLS, when his contract expires this summer.
“I don't know [if I'll stay]. I'll see what happens,” he said. “Right now, I didn't get that much playing time. I just want to go out and play, that's about it, and if I have a chance to play someplace else, I'd do it.”
Versatile Impact
Despite being a natural forward, Kiesewetter has proven his versatility by playing wide. He was on the right wing for his 15-minute stint for the US Sunday, when he brought a spark to the attack, setting up a couple of chances with fine crosses, then drew the foul that led to Steve Birnbaum's 90th-minute winner.
“I think he's better as a winger, because then it's a different game,” Herzog said. “If you play in the center, then there's more pressure from different sides. As a winger, he kills most of his defenders because of his pace and his power.”
US midfielder Lee Nguyen, who has watched Kiesewetter the past month during the January camp, likes that the youngster is “not scared.”
“He gets the ball, and he goes right at you,” the New England Revolution star said. “He wants to attack, wants to score, and it's good to see that kind of confidence in a young guy like that.”
Despite being born in Germany, wearing the US jersey just feels right for Kiesewetter. He admitted that he's happy when Germany does well: “If they win the World Cup, it's nice for them, but it doesn't gave much to do with me,” he says. But like 2006, Kiesewetter's always leaned toward the Yanks.
“I bought my first jersey at Niketown,” he said. “I don't remember much [about that World Cup], I just remember I brought my first shirt – a US jersey – and I saved all my money for that that, like 50 euros.
“It was a lot of money for me. We didn't have that much money, so my first jersey was an expensive one, and I wore it every day.”(CNN) -- The rescheduled launch date of the space shuttle Endeavour, whose mission was scrubbed last week due to an electrical problem, remained uncertain Wednesday, but sources told CNN the next liftoff could be as late as May 13.
The launch, which will be the final flight for the Endeavour, won't be any earlier than May 10, NASA said.
Technicians continue to test the electrical system to determine what caused a circuit to short out, causing the cancellation of Endeavour's April 29 launch, officials said. The liftoff was delayed until this past Monday and then to no earlier than May 10 at 11:21 a.m., officials said.
NASA repair crews have already replaced the power distribution box that shorted out a circuit supplying power to heaters for the orbiter's hydraulics system.
The scrubbed April 29 launch postponed what promised to be an emotional moment for the shuttle's commander, Mark Kelly.
Kelly's wife, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, traveled to Florida to watch the shuttle's ascent. Giffords was shot in the head during a January 8 assassination attempt at a public event in Tucson, Arizona. She has been recovering at a Houston rehabilitation hospital.
Giffords returned Sunday to Houston and TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital, according to a post on her Facebook page.NEW YORK, March 10, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The founders of the most advanced Bitcoin 2.0 project to date, Counterparty, have joined forces with MathMoney f(x) to found symbiont.io. Symbiont.io is a FinTech company focused on fostering the symbiotic relationship between traditional financial markets and cryptographic blockchain technology. Its efforts will be centered on the creation of SMART SECURITIES™: self-executing digital contracts that are stored on a global, shared database called a "blockchain," which no one party controls.
"I founded MathMoney f(x) (a SenaHill Partners portfolio company) to address the severe infrastructural problems associated with the emerging math-based currency trading ecosystem. After studying the intricacies of the blockchain over the last few years and working with Counterparty on a separate project it became clear that blockchains in general, and Counterparty specifically, could solve long standing, previously intractable problems that exist in modern financial markets. This epiphany made the decision to join forces with the Counterparty team a logical one," said Mark Smith, CEO of symbiont.io.
Robby Dermody, co-founder of Counterparty and President of symbiont.io, added: "Since we founded Counterparty over a year ago, our focus has consistently been on the creation and positioning of this technology as a solution for structural issues in the larger financial markets. Symbiont is the next step in achieving that goal."
Evan Wagner, one of the founders of Counterparty and the Managing Director of Operations at symbiont.io, noted: "We're excited about the positive impacts blockchain adoption will have in the systems that power modern finance, and we look forward to seeing this technology put into use in a way that increases transparency, liquidity, and the overall functioning of capital markets."
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http://symbiont.ioPitman's goal was his eighth of the season
Brett Pitman's injury-time winner snatched victory for Ipswich as they moved up to fifth with a triumph at home to Leeds.
The hosts trailed after just 12 seconds of the match as Souleymane Doukara stroked home after stealing possession.
Leeds kept Ipswich at bay until the break, but Luke Chambers met Ryan Fraser's cross to head an equaliser.
Fraser again supplied the assist for the winner with an inch-perfect centre for Pitman to nod in.
Ipswich's Twitter account was caught out by Souleymane Doukara's swift opener
Doukara's goal - the fastest in the Football League this season - caught Ipswich's official Twitter account out, as it admitted it "had no idea what happened".
It could have been even better for the visitors shortly after when Mustapha Carayol's low cross was almost deflected past Dean Gerken for a second.
But it was Gerken's Leeds counterpart Marco Silvestri who was by far the busier of the two goalkeepers, and it was only Ipswich's wastefulness that kept the scoreline level into injury time.
Cole Skuse and Freddie Sears both went agonisingly close, before Pitman buried his 92nd-minute header to spark wild celebrations.
Ipswich boss Mick McCarthy: "It was a bonkers start but a magnificent end. It was a really good game and I thought we thoroughly deserved to win.
"Leeds obviously started well and they were the better team for the first 15 minutes, but after that we were different class and created enough chances to win two matches."
Leeds boss Steve Evans: "I can't fault the efforts of my players, though the referee will be getting a low mark - I thought he was absolute garbage.
"I don't think Ipswich deserved the win. In spells, they were disjointed and just as bad as we were.
"It demonstrated to me that we need to bring some more quality into the football club and we are trying to do that."The US House reintroduced bipartisan sanctions on Syria on March 22 as the bloody conflict enters its seventh year.
The bill from Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., passed the House by voice vote in November and is expected to rapidly clear the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Its fate is less certain, however, in the Senate, where key senators will want to put its own mark on the legislation.
"After six years of brutality, we have to jolt this bloody crisis out of its status quo," Engel, the top Democrat on the foreign affairs panel, said in a statement. "The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act would impose new sanctions on anyone who does business with the Assad regime — going after the money, airplanes, spare parts, oil, military supply chain and Assad’s enablers that drive this horrific war machine.”
The bill is named after a Syrian military photographer who fled the country, taking with him thousands of photographs that appear to document widespread torture and executions by President Bashar al-Assad's regime. House lawmakers and staffers of both parties met with Caesar in Washington just hours before the bill was reintroduced.
The bill would notably slap sanctions on countries that support Assad, such as Russia and Iran. It also encourages negotiations to end the conflict and supports prosecution of war criminals.
The Barack Obama administration sought to delay the bill last year amid negotiations over a Syria cease-fire. The Donald Trump White House has so far stayed out of the fray, House and Senate aides said, either because it doesn't have any concerns with the bill or is unaware of its existence.
The bill largely mirrors last year's effort with several tweaks, notably the addition of a section authorizing reconstruction and transition assistance. The section appears to be aimed at getting buy-in in the Senate, where Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Bob Casey, D-Pa., have filed Syria legislation that authorizes seed funding for a Syria Reconstruction Fund.
It may not be enough, however.
"We're interested in figuring out a way to punish Assad," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told Al-Monitor. "We don't know that what's been laid out is actually the right way to do so."
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., has already endorsed the bill, suggesting rapid action on the House side.
"Last week, I met with Syrian doctors who endured barrel bomb and chlorine gas attacks as they treated thousands of people in eastern Aleppo. Earlier today, I met with Caesar, whose incredible testimony three years ago provided stark evidence of the atrocities being committed by Assad and his backers. Both Caesar and these brave doctors stressed that this slaughter will continue across Syria until Assad and his backers are held accountable," Royce said in a statement. "That is why I am joining Rep. Engel in reintroducing legislation to impose new sanctions on Assad’s war machine. This bill, which passed the House unanimously last year, will give the US much-needed leverage to help stop the slaughter of more innocent Syrians.”Why would an Iranian proxy in Yemen provoke a fight with America?
There was almost most universal puzzlement among several Middle Eastern diplomats I talked to in the last few days. They were trying to game out what exactly happened when US Navy ships, including the destroyer USS Mason, came under rocket fire off the coast of Yemen earlier this month. The likely culprit: a Yemeni militia known as the Houthis.
The Houthis denied involvement and — as is always the case in the region — speculations abound about other possible aggressors. In Washington, officials went back and forth several times, quite confidently implicating the Houthis, Iranian allies, at first — then raising doubts about their involvement and, later still, implicating them yet again.
On the ground, though, the US targeted three radar posts that the Pentagon said served to home in on the Mason. That response was described by Washington officials as “measured” and “limited.”
Which may answer the mystery as to why would Iranians, or their Yemeni proxies, pick a fight with America: because they can. And because soon a new US president may change all that.
Donald Trump often describes President Obama’s response to foreign threats as a “disaster” and has vowed to restore America’s military deterrence. So does Hillary Clinton. “We need to respond to evolving threats from states like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea,” she said in August at the American Legion in Cincinnati. “We need a military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats and operate on short notice across every domain,” she added.
After eight years of retreat, that may prove a tall order.
Russia, for one, increasingly provokes American allies in Europe and elsewhere. Since April, Russian fighter planes have buzzed American planes and warships with barely a protest. On Friday, a Russian armada, led by the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov, provocatively sailed the English Channel. American and British ships watched.
China, meanwhile, steadily turns man-made islands into naval military fortresses, transforming the South China Sea into its private lake — much to the chagrin of our allies, who’ve relied on American defense treaties for decades. Beijing also restricts commercial flights over disputed areas and constantly confronts Japanese fishermen in the East China Sea, where Tokyo has administered several territories for a long time.
Washington advises Pacific allies to use international arbitration to regain sovereignty back from increasingly belligerent China. But when a Hague court ruled for the Philippines recently on one such dispute, China simply ignored the verdict.
This week, Manila’s new president, Rodrigo Duterte, announced his “separation” from the US and swore allegiance, instead, to China and Russia.
The next president must demonstrate that there’s a new sheriff in town, starting by significantly upping military budgets
‘The next president must demonstrate that there’s a new sheriff in town, starting by significantly upping military budgets.’
Then there’s North Korea. At odds with America and much of the rest of the world since the 1950s, the Hermit Kingdom is increasingly pushing the envelope, testing ballistic missiles and nuclear devices — with various degrees of success, perhaps, but certainly at an accelerated rate.
These trends have been building for several years, but “the pace is accelerating and intensifying,” says John Hannah, senior councilor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
America’s enemies and competitors have “tested and tested, and found that there’s not much resistance,” Hannah says.
“Once deterrence begins to wear down, restoring it can, perhaps, be done by the next administration, but at higher costs. And that’s the danger.”
To be sure, no president wants to turn every minor incident into war. James Jeffrey, a former Ambassador to Iraq who worked under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, gives the latter fairly high marks. “He can leave office and say, ‘I didn’t start any war, I killed Osama bin Laden and, maybe soon, I defeated ISIS in Mosul.’ And that will probably be right,” Jeffrey says.
But Obama, Jeffrey says, has a blind spot on Iran.
Which brings us back to the Red Sea incident and the puzzle as to why the Iranian proxies, the Houthis, would try to pick a fight with America.
After numerous incidents in the Persian Gulf in which small speedy boats belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have buzzed large American ships, this new incident seems different, Jeffrey says. It actually threatened American lives. If any had been lost, it would necessitate a forceful response.
For Iran, there are political and other benefits in “slapping America in the face,” Jeffrey says. Especially if Tehran believes that “President Obama would do nothing against an Iranian provocation, because he is afraid it would cancel the nuclear deal.”
And, he adds, Tehran is afraid that a president Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be much tougher on Iran, which explains the timing.
Washington should warn Iran through diplomatic channels that the response to such provocations will not be a strike against proxies but against Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards, Jeffrey says.
The next president must demonstrate that there’s a new sheriff in town, starting by significantly upping military budgets. Climbing out from the hole we put ourselves in may exact a high cost, but without it, America — and the rest of the world — may find things sharply change for the worse.
Russia
On Friday sailed through English Channel as American and British ships watched — an escalation after a year spent buzzing US planes with nary a protest
Yemen
The Houthis, Iran’s proxies here, have fired rockets on US Navy ships off the coast; Washington vacillated as to who was responsible
Iran
Taunts US by sending military speedboats to buzz American ships in Persian Gulf; our Navy seacraft (pictured) remain a watchful presence
China
Unilaterally expanding its geopolitical reach by building man-made islands in the South China Sea, angering American allies in the region
North Korea
Despite dubious progress, North Korea continues to aggressively pursue nuclear weapons that could reach the West Coast of the United StatesPokemon Go Pro-Tipps
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they are victims in 14 percent of religious discrimination cases. These range from homicides and mosque burnings to job, school and zoning law abuses, according to the Justice Department.
In running the hearing, Senator Richard Durbin tried to set the record straight about the patriotism of a vast majority of American-Muslim citizens and the continuing assaults on their civil rights. He warned against the “guilt by association” whipped up by Mr. King’s broadsides — that there are “too many mosques” in the nation, that most of them are extremist, and that American Muslim leaders have failed to cooperate with law enforcement against home-grown terrorism.
It was former President George W. Bush who first warned against turning on Muslim Americans after Sept. 11, 2001, stressing the fact that Islam is “a faith based upon love, not hate,” regardless of the religious veneer the fanatics of 9/11 tried to attach to their atrocities. Since then, American Muslims have served as the largest source of tips to authorities tracking terror suspects, according to a recent university study.
The Senate hearing was not designed as a full refutation of Representative King’s wild thesis, but it put a more human and factual face on a community that has been badly slurred. Mr. King is promising more committee haymakers. This is unfortunate. At least Mr. Durbin’s hearing made clear that the nation’s struggle against terrorism is best served by information, not dark generalizations.× Oklahoma officials release breakdown of how $140 million will be spent
OKLAHOMA CITY – After millions of dollars were mistakenly cut from state agencies last fiscal year, those agencies are getting a partial refund.
Last fiscal year, state agencies were forced to make drastic cuts to cover a $1.3 billion budget shortfall.
Many of those cuts resulted in the loss of jobs, programs and assistance for Oklahoma families.
Oklahoma school districts say nearly 1,500 teaching positions were eliminated, popular programs were disbanded and class sizes grew. Also, districts reported eliminating 1,300 support positions since last year.
In the meantime, officials at the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services say they’re in crisis mode. In May, the agency had to cut therapy services for 70,000 patients to save $14 million.
At the same time, the Department of Human Services froze a program that helps low-income Oklahoma families pay for child care.
Just a couple months later, state leaders announced that $140 million no longer needed to be cut, and have since been working to decide what to do with the funds.
Gov. Mary Fallin announced that she was considering holding a special session to discuss using the money for teacher pay raises.
On Tuesday, Fallin met with legislative leaders to ask them about using the money for teacher pay raises and giving substantial refunds to some of the departments that help Oklahomans the most.
“Legislative leaders want the $140.8 million initially cut from agencies in the 2016 fiscal year and now available again returned equally to agencies. The governor asked legislative leaders to priority-base the distribution of those funds so pressing needs at agencies like the Department of Education, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Corrections, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority and the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services could be more fully addressed, but a consensus to do so could not be reached. The funds will instead be sent to agencies with September general revenue allocations,” said Michael McNutt, communications director for Governor Mary Fallin.
On Friday, we got a better look at how the money will be distributed.
Click here to see the full breakdown of $140 million.
The Department of Corrections will receive a little more than $10 million back after cutting $27.5 million from their budget.
“We are assessing and prioritizing our biggest needs as an agency and where the funds will best be utilized to maintain essential services to ensure continued public safety. The department is facing major infrastructure needs; facilities that are understaffed; probation and parole officers with overwhelming caseloads and employees who have not had raises in more than a decade. The funds are much needed and appreciated,” Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh said.
The Oklahoma Health Care Authority is getting $23.5 million back to its agency, while the Regents of Higher Education get $20.7 million.
The Board of Education received the biggest refund with a little more than $40 million coming back to the agency, which suffered cuts worth $109 million.
The Department of Human Services is expected to get $16 million back in its budget after cutting $43.7 million.
Also, the Department of Mental Health will also get $8.4 million back after $22.7 million in cuts.
According to the data, the Department of Transportation will not be receiving funding back after losing $30.8 million to budget cuts.
Officials with the Office of Management and Enterprise Services says that the ROADS fund, which is maintained by ODOT, only receives income tax revenue. State law says that ROADS allocations have to be reduced at the same level as general revenue allocations during a revenue failure. However, state law does not call for the return of money to the ROADS fund if there is a refund, like in this case.
On Tuesday, state officials announced that ODOT will receive $11.4 million in other funds returned.Image caption Hayley Court worked as South Yorkshire Police's Hillsborough communications specialist
The police watchdog has launched an investigation after a former South Yorkshire Police press officer claimed she was asked to "spin" news during the Hillsborough inquests.
Hayley Court claimed she was asked to encourage the media to report evidence favourable to the police, including that fans were partly to blame.
She said she was told to "get the media together and tell them what to write".
The force has said Ms Court's claims were "not substantiated".
'Wholly unethical'
A spokesman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission said: "Following an assessment of the available evidence, the IPCC has decided to conduct an independent investigation into this matter."
Ms Court claimed she felt trapped when she realised she had been given an "impossible job" that was "wholly unethical".
"It seemed to me to be more about how we could share the blame," she said.
"If South Yorkshire Police was going to be found partly responsible for what happened then all the other interested parties should be found partly responsible as well.
"If that meant perpetuating comments about fans being drunk, if that meant perpetuating comments about fans forcing gates then that was how they were going to do it."
Image copyright Hillsborough inquests Image caption Ninety-six football fans died after crushing in the 1989 disaster at Hillsborough stadium
Ninety-six football fans died in the 1989 disaster, which unfolded during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.
A jury at the inquests concluded the fans had been unlawfully killed.
They also criticised SYP's planning for the match, and highlighted a catalogue of failures by senior officers on the day.
The stadium was also said to have contained "defects" that contributed to the disaster, and Sheffield Wednesday FC and South Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service were criticised.
The supporters were exonerated of any blame.
SYP's chief constable David Crompton was suspended the day after the inquests concluded because there had been an "erosion of trust".
Meanwhile, the 96 victims of the disaster are to be awarded the Freedom of Liverpool.
Other key figures in the 27-year campaign to receive the city's highest civic honour are former Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish and his wife Marina; the former Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev James Jones and Prof Phil Scraton from the Hilllsborough Independent Panel.
The victims' families were awarded freedom of the city of Liverpool in 2009.In Cologne, Germany, the Intermot motorcycle show is about to wrap up. We’ve been deluged with press releases and images all week, so we’ve picked out the four new launches that tickled our fancies the most—and will be competing for your dollars in 2017.
BMW R nineT Racer and Pure The inevitable has happened: the runaway success of the R nineT has spawned new models. We’ve already covered the Scrambler, so here are the new café racer and stripped down variants.
The engine now meets the Euro 4 spec, there’s a stainless steel single-muffler exhaust hanging on the left, and the frame is the same version used on the Scrambler. Wheels are 17 inches front and back, the forks are conventional rather than USD, and fuel tanks are steel rather than aluminum. ABS is standard, but traction control becomes a factory-fit option.
Pricing should be competitive, making the R nineT even more appealing to riders who aren’t focused on doodads and gizmos. The ‘Pure’ will be the new base model, available in Catalano Grey, but we’ll take the ‘Racer’ (top)—it’s hard to resist the vintage BMW motorsport-themed graphics and 1970s-style half-fairing.
New Triumph T100s and Street Cup Triumph is on fire at the moment. Twelve months ago, we were in London for the launch of the new Bonneville range. Now we have the first range expansions, with the retro-styled T100 Bonneville and T100 Black (above), and the sportier Street Cup (below). All feature the 900cc engine seen in the Street Twin.
The T100s have a similar heritage look to the existing T120s, but with modified frame geometry: a slightly shorter wheelbase, less rake and trail, and a more upright seating position. We’re told that they are lighter too, which should make them even easier to ride.
The Street Cup is for those who like the style of the Thruxton, but want a less intimidating package—or have less cash to drop. The chassis is similar to the Street Twin’s, but raised at the back via longer KYB shocks to sharpen the steering response.
Despite using Triumph’s smaller engine, it doesn’t look like corners have been cut. The build quality and detailing are still superlative, and you get ABS, traction control, Triumph’s ‘Torque Assist’ clutch system, a USB charging socket and an immobiliser. What’s not to like?
Moto Guzzi Audace Carbon Despite being immune to the charms of most big cruisers, we have a soft spot for Moto Guzzi’s heavyweights. At Intermot, the Mandello factory revealed the new Audace Carbon—and there’s more to it than just a couple of carbon fiber pieces.
The new weave is in the front fender and fuel tank, but it’s the 1400cc engine that has received the most work. It’s been upgraded to meet the Euro 4 standard, with a slight boost in torque to 89 lbs ft. There’s also a selectable ‘Eco’ mode that balances power with economy to reduce fuel consumption over long rides. New drag bars offer more pullback for relaxing long distance travel, and cosmetic tweaks include snazzy red valve covers and red Brembo brake calipers.
Nothing radical here, but the best-looking cruiser on the market just got even more appealing.
Honda CB1100 EX and RS Honda’s attempt to jump on the retro bandwagon has failed. Launched six years ago, the CB1100 has been mostly ignored by the cafe and custom crowd—while BMW, Yamaha and Ducati have surged ahead, building connections with the scene as well bikes that are on-point.
A switch to a six-speed transmission a couple of years ago failed to turn the CB1100’s fortunes around, so Honda is now trying harder with two revamped models, the spoked-wheel EX and the RS. To add more character, Honda has subtly tweaked the bodywork and seating, added 43mm Showa forks, and fitted shorter mufflers for a sportier exhaust note. The RS model has 17-inch wheels, Tokico four-piston brakes and sharper geometry.
But weight is an astonishing 555 pounds (252 kilos). That’s 65 pounds more than the BMW R nineT, and over 40 pounds more than the Triumph Thruxton—itself no lightweight. Even the Harley Sportster Roadster is lighter.
They’re good-looking bikes, and will no doubt benefit from Honda’s famed build quality and reliability. But is that enough to make the CB1100 a force in the modern-retro market?
For full Intermot coverage, we highly recommend Motofire.A US TV station has captured the moment an 'eternal' flame at Martin Luther King Junior’s grave went out on live television – just as the country celebrated the human rights pioneer’s 83rd birthday.The unexpected hitch happened when an evening news reporter from station WXIA-TV was doing a live cross from outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta.The anchor was describing the activities lined up to celebrate the Martin Luther King Day holiday, but just as the camera panned over the eternal flame it suddenly extinguished itself.A short time later the flame was re-lit and burning again, the UK’s Daily Mail reported the TV station as saying.This is not the first time the so-called ‘eternal’ flame has gone out.The company which supplies gas to the flame, Atlanta Gas Light, has reportedly had trouble keeping the flame burning since installing a new cauldron in 2009.King, who was assassinated in 1968, was initially buried in a public cemetery but his remains were moved to a public tomb at the King Center in 1997.Source: NinemsnInnovation is one of the driving forces in our world. The constant creation of new ideas and their transformation into technologies and products forms a powerful cornerstone for 21st century society. Indeed, many universities and institutes, along with regions such as Silicon Valley, cultivate this process.
And yet the process of innovation is something of a mystery. A wide range of researchers have studied it, ranging from economists and anthropologists to evolutionary biologists and engineers. Their goal is to understand how innovation happens and the factors that drive it so that they can optimize conditions for future innovation.
This approach has had limited success, however. The rate at which innovations appear and disappear has been carefully measured. It follows a set of well-characterized patterns that scientists observe in many different circumstances. And yet, nobody has been able to explain how this pattern arises or why it governs innovation.
Today, all that changes thanks to the work of Vittorio Loreto at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and a few pals, who have created the first mathematical model that accurately reproduces the patterns that innovations follow. The work opens the way to a new approach to the study of innovation, of what is possible and how this follows from what already exists.
The notion that innovation arises from the interplay between the actual and the possible was first formalized by the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffmann. In 2002, Kauffmann introduced the idea of the “adjacent possible” as a way of thinking about biological evolution.
The adjacent possible is all those things—ideas, words, songs, molecules, genomes, technologies and so on—that are one step away from what actually exists. It connects the actual realization of a particular phenomenon and the space of unexplored possibilities.
But this idea is hard to model for an important reason. The space of unexplored possibilities includes all kinds of things that are easily imagined and expected but it also includes things that are entirely unexpected and hard to imagine. And while the former is tricky to model, the latter has appeared close to impossible.
What’s more, each innovation changes the landscape of future possibilities. So at every instant, the space of unexplored possibilities—the adjacent possible—is changing.
“Though the creative power of the adjacent possible is widely appreciated at an anecdotal level, its importance in the scientific literature is, in our opinion, underestimated,” say Loreto and co.
Nevertheless, even with all this complexity, innovation seems to follow predictable and easily measured patterns that have become known as “laws” because of their ubiquity. One of these is Heaps’ law, which states that the number of new things increases at a rate that is sublinear. In other words, it is governed by a power law of the form V(n) = knβ where β is between 0 and 1.
Words are often thought of as a kind of innovation, and language is constantly evolving as new words appear and old words die out.
This evolution follows Heaps’ law. Given a corpus of words of size n, the number of distinct words V(n) is proportional to n raised to the β power. In collections of real words, β turns out to be between 0.4 and 0.6.
Another well-known statistical pattern in innovation is Zipf’s law, which describes how the frequency of an innovation is related to its popularity. For example, in a corpus of words, the most frequent word occurs about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as frequently as the third most frequent word, and so on. In English, the most frequent word is “the” which accounts for about 7 percent of all words, followed by “of” which accounts for about 3.5 percent of all words, followed by “and,” and so on.
This frequency distribution is Zipf’s law and it crops up in a wide range of circumstances, such as the way edits appear on Wikipedia, how we listen to new songs online, and so on.
These patterns are empirical laws—we know of them because we can measure them. But just why the patterns take this form is unclear. And while mathematicians can model innovation by simply plugging the observed numbers into equations, they would much rather have a model which produces these numbers from first principles.
Enter Loreto and his pals (one of which is the Cornell University mathematician Steve Strogatz). These guys create a model that explains these patterns for the first time.
They begin with a well-known mathematical sand box called Polya’s Urn. It starts with an urn filled with balls of different colors. A ball is withdrawn at random, inspected and placed back in the urn with a number of other balls of the same color, thereby increasing the likelihood that this color will be selected in future.
This is a model that mathematicians use to explore rich-get-richer effects and the emergence of power laws. So it is a good starting point for a model of innovation. However, it does not naturally produce the sublinear growth that Heaps’ law predicts.
That’s because the Polya urn model allows for all the expected consequences of innovation (of discovering a certain color) but does not account for all the unexpected consequences of how an innovation influences the adjacent possible.
So Loreto, Strogatz, and co have modified Polya’s urn model to account for the possibility that discovering a new color in the urn can trigger entirely unexpected consequences. They call this model “Polya’s urn with innovation triggering.”
The exercise starts with an urn filled with colored balls. A ball is withdrawn at random, examined, and replaced in the urn.
If this color has been seen before, a number of other balls of the same color are also placed in the urn. But if the color is new—it has never been seen before in this exercise—then a number of balls of entirely new colors are added to the urn.
Loreto and co then calculate how the number of new colors picked from the urn, and their frequency distribution, changes over time. The result is that the model reproduces Heaps’ and Zipf’s Laws as they appear in the real world—a mathematical first. “The model of Polya’s urn with innovation triggering, presents for the first time a satisfactory first-principle based way of reproducing empirical observations,” say Loreto and co.
The team has also shown that its model predicts how innovations appear in the real world. The model accurately predicts how edit events occur on Wikipedia pages, the emergence of tags in social annotation systems, the sequence of words in texts, and how humans discover new songs in online music catalogues.
Interestingly, these systems involve two different forms of discovery. On the one hand, there are things that already exist but are new to the individual who finds them, such as online songs; and on the other are things that never existed before and are entirely new to the world, such as edits on Wikipedia.
Loreto and co call the former novelties—they are new to an individual—and the latter innovations—they are new to the world.
Curiously, the same model accounts for both phenomenon. It seems that the pattern behind the way we discover novelties—new songs, books, etc.—is the same as the pattern behind the way innovations emerge from the adjacent possible.
That raises some interesting questions, not least of which is why this should be. But it also opens an entirely new way to think about innovation and the triggering events that lead to new things. “These results provide a starting point for a deeper understanding of the adjacent possible and the different nature of triggering events that are likely to be important in the investigation of biological, linguistic, cultural, and technological evolution,” say Loreto and co.
We’ll look forward to seeing how the study of innovation evolves into the adjacent possible as a result of this work.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1701.00994: Dynamics on Expanding Spaces: Modeling the Emergence of NoveltiesThe official website for "Indigo Ignited," first project for Japan-based, American-run animation studio D'Art Shtajio, began streaming a trailer for the upcoming five-minute pilot film on Thursday. The staff also announced the lead voice cast: Nathan Sharp (Luck & Logic, NateWantsToBattle) is voicing Kieran, Sean Chiplock (Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans) is voicing The Alderman, and Amanda Lee (Rio - Rainbow Gate!, LeeandLie) is voicing Galena.
The trailer reveals a planned August 8 release date. The staff plan to launch a Kickstarter campaign to release the anime on Blu-ray Disc and DVD.
Henry Thurlow (animator on Sweetness & Lightning, Naruto Shippūden, Tokyo Ghoul ) is directing the anime, Arthell Isom (A Letter to Momo, Blood-C, Gintama) is painting the backgrounds as art director, Yoshiharu Ashino (D.Gray-man Hallow, Azuki-chan) is serving as the storyboard artist, Asuka Tsubuki (Gugure! Kokkuri-san) is the animation director, Rejean Dubois is designing the characters, and David Butler is directing the musical score. D'Art Shtajio will be the main production studio, though the project was initially tied to Bang Bang Animation, where Thurlow previously worked. Bang Bang Animation is no longer involved with the project.
The anime is based on an independently published comic of the same name by Americans David Pinter and Samuel Dalton. The website describes the story:
Enter the world of INDIGO IGNITED, a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy anime. A shattered world sustained by bloodshed and built upon the remnants of an ancient order that was abolished in their conquest to rid the world of Fear. Driven out of their homeland, KIERAN and his comrades descend into a maddened environment driven by chaos in hopes of being the last ember of light within a darkened world.It was a day like any other. I spent most of my afternoon acting like I was working, you know, browsing r/cowboys & r/nfl. When all of a sudden, my trusty and obviously jealous colleague brings in this somewhat innocuous package while commenting, "friend in Hawaii?" I lightly disarm his comment with a shrug and light shake to my head.
I can hardly contain my excitement when I see the Star artfully drawn on the side of the box and "aloha from Hawaii" written on another side. "An artist," I say to myself as my mind starts to swim with thoughts of what thoughts this wonderful person has put into this gift. This anonymous person spent so much time on the outside! They had to put the same or even more into the gift.
The box was slightly dinged here and there so I could only hope that my new masterpiece would be unscathed. Damn the delivery person! Or was it a passive aggressive gesture from my envious co-worker? Either way I must open this gift to confirm its health.
I peel back the tape and start to smell something not common in the suburbs of the Mid-Atlantic in which I reside. Was it the sweet sea-air of Maui or the jungle aroma of an Oahu rain forest?
Well kind of, ladies and gentlemen, it was the smell of a brand spanking new camouflaged Cowboys hat. My first thought was, "HOT DAMN, a new hat!!!" My second thought was, I was absolutely right, my Closet Clause was an absolute genius!
My gifter must know that as a Cowboys fan nothing would be more tasty than to hunt and slay the Eagles! This started my mind racing, “but what else could I use the hat for?”
Now, I’m not a hunter but consider myself a bit of an amateur chef. Now that I could hunt my own prey with this amazing cloaking helmet, I began to plan the amazing meals that I would be able to bring to my family's table this football season. I’m no cannibal, so I'll keep it to the non-human football teams this year.
Let's see:
09/20 Eagle with Sage, Celery and Blood Orange - I'm a sucker for Sage, the kids love cooked celery and the blood orange will be in honor of the Eagles blood spilled on the snowball and battery laden field in Philly.
09/27 Faucon Fricassee - apparently Falcon is tough so I think marinating and then frying would be the best way to enjoy this bird of prey.
11/01 Seahawk Jägerschnitzel - Seahawk breasts pounded thin, dusted in flour and served with a mushroom gravy. A riff of the German classic jägerschnitzel. A Seahawk is basically a Seagull which are rats with wings, therefore interchangeable with pigeons. I figured they would be pounded so much from losing to us it would save me that step.
11/08 Eagle Tamale Casserole - Hey we're in Texas this week, so might as well stick to the Southwest theme!
11/22 Burger King Fish Sandwich - OK, this is reddit afterall. I know the last thing people are supposed to mess with are cats & Dolphins. This is war though people! I once heard a rumor back in the 90's that Burger King had dolphin in their fish sandwiches. Take that Flipper!
11/26 Deep Fried Turkey Panther with all the fixin's - It's Thanksgiving... Sorry kids, fluffy is on the menu tonight! forgive me, gods of reddit
12/13 Fondue - My wife is an avid Packers fan and was even born in Milwaukee. I will harness my years of reconnaissance being married to this one of cheese & PBR. I will skillfully use the powers of my new hat of invisibility to sneak past the Bratwurst distracted Cheese Packers to retrieve only the best fondue cheeses in the nation. I will have to be very careful as their king, the one they call Rodgers apparently has a gaze that makes even the best of us fall deeply in love with him (poor, poor Olivia).
12/27 Buffalo Burgers - I mean come on, have you ever had one? YUMMMM! Plus they move really slow and are dumb. Easy pickings! (That said, Go Tyrod Taylor!)
BON APPETIT!
To Santa,
Thanks so much for the hat! I look forward to wearing it well this year and beyond!!!
Have a great football season and Go Cowboys & F*** the Eagles!!!WASHINGTON—Admitting that their behavior in previous years had left them embarrassed and ashamed, the nation’s dogs announced Thursday that they intend on keeping their shit together during this year’s Fourth of July fireworks displays. “Though we recognize we have not always demonstrated the most poise and self-control on this particular holiday, we want to assure everyone that this will finally be the year we don’t completely lose it and freak out upon hearing the booming of distant fireworks,” said Duchess, a 6-year-old cocker spaniel, adding that the country’s 80 million dogs aim to avoid cowering under the coffee table or uncontrollably urinating on the kitchen floor in a moment of pure panic after neighbors light off firecrackers or bottle rockets. “We’ve been preparing for the past few months, and we think we’ll finally be able to maintain our composure this time around. We can’t promise that we won’t whimper a little or try to jump up and sit next to you on the couch, but we’re definitely not going to sprint in circles around the living room or howl continuously until the noises stop.” The nation’s dogs concluded by acknowledging they could not guarantee that they won’t go completely apeshit the next time the doorbell rings.Photo via Flickr user Les Howard
Eastern Europe is full of rich and varied food traditions. The wooly Mangalitsa pigs of Hungary make for beautiful sausage. Albania's version of borek is the ultimate incarnation of simple comfort food. The khachapuri of Georgia even gives pizza a run for its money.
Putting flavor aside, however, it is not a land of healthy diets.
But you may be surprised to hear that West Africa is. Far more so, actually, than our land of supersized milkshakes and potato chips covered in barbecue flavor crystals. The world of science hath spoken.
First, let's back up. A recent review of global dietary habits published by The Lancet Global Health has effectively ranked what 187 nations eat on the basis of nutrition. The good news: The world is eating more healthy food than it has in the past. The bad news: It's also eating a lot more shitty food.
Surely this is a contradiction, you say! Not quite. Researchers examined data from 320 self-reported diet surveys collected between 1990 and 2010 and analyzed them using three dietary patterns. The first included the consumption of healthy fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes, nuts and seeds, whole grains, fish, and milk, as well as total polyunsaturated fatty acids, plant omega-3s, and dietary fiber. The second pattern included unprocessed red meats, processed meats, sugary beverages, saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, and sodium. The third pattern looked at all of those food groups at once, and performed an overall assessment based on all 17 food groups. The study covered 187 nations representing 4.5 billion world adults.
The researchers examined varying degrees of adherence to these dietary patterns in order to score nations on a scale of heart-attack-inducing zero to a Jack-Lallane-juicing 100.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, well-heeled Western nations—including the US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand—tend to eat more healthy items, but balance that out, or even outweigh it, with a lot of crap. More kale chips purchased, sure; but that doesn't mean that bacon-wrapped pizza doesn't make our country's tongue salivate.
Some parts of the world have seen little flexibility either way. The average diet of a citizen in China, India, or sub-Saharan Africa hasn't changed much since 1990.
Some low-income nations actually scored higher for healthy foods than you might expect, with places such as Chad, Gambia, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, and Uganda receiving some of the highest marks. Maybe they don't have cold-pressed juice spots on every corner, but the West African diet of lean meats, vegetables, beans, legumes, and rice does a body good.
But our dear friends in and around the former Eastern Bloc did not fare so well. Central Asia's Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan—land of those greasy, meaty bowls of plov—were among the lowest-scoring nations for healthy food, along with Hungary, Belarus, and the Czech Republic.
The overall takeaway from the report, sadly, was that the world's affinity for junk food is outpacing its adoption of healthy goods. Even more alarming: young people are actually eating more poorly than older adults, signaling that the trend towards garbage-diets could be worsening in the future.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him stop eating sausages, pastries, and dense breads.Downloadable video: Event b-roll and SOTs
His Eminence Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York City, was recognized Thursday at an interfaith event for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. He was honored that day with the Visionary Leadership Award from the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association.
“One of the reasons I jumped at this chance [when I got the invitation to attend the interfaith event],” said Cardinal Dolan, “[was that] I've been wanting to sit down with LDS leaders in this community.”
More than 450 people attended the interfaith event held at the landmark nondenominational Riverside Church in upper Manhattan. The honorary keynote speaker at the event was Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Both church leaders were greeted with standing ovations throughout the night.
“I feel very much at home with you. And I think that's because you and the LDS family seem just to radiate a very sincere friendliness and hospitality that I've experienced,” said Cardinal Dolan.
“It seems fitting that we are paying honor to Cardinal Dolan here in The Riverside Church, something of a legendary venue for interfaith activities,” said Elder Holland, whose grandparents were Roman Catholic.
He continued, “With his Irish charm and unshakeable faith, he has won our hearts. He has been as firm in his friendship to us in the LDS Church as he has been resolute in his many clerical responsibilities to his mother church.”
Elder Holland also praised Cardinal Dolan for his efforts to preserve religious freedom while serving as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2011, when the Catholic leader called it “the foundational principle of our country — its first freedom.”
“His Eminence certainly has been a stalwart in defending religious freedom, another interfaith bond he has forged with us and others,” he said.
“When religion flourishes, and when people are encouraged to bring their deepest-held beliefs to the public square, that's when America is greatest,” emphasized Cardinal Dolan.
“Religion has been the principal influence — not the only one, but the principal one — that has kept Western social, political, and cultural life moral to the extent these have been moral,” stressed Elder Holland.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Patricia Holland laugh during an award ceremony at the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association's annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.1 / 9 Cardinal Timothy Dolan receives an award from the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association during the organization's annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, right, and former U.S. Sen. Gordon H. Smith, left, presented the award. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.2 / 9 Cardinal Timothy Dolan shares a laugh at the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association at the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association's annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.3 / 9 The crowd looks on as Cardinal Timothy Dolan speaks to the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association at its annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.4 / 9 Cardinal Timothy Dolan shares a laugh with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland at the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association's annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.5 / 9 Cardinal Timothy Dolan speaks with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland at the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association's annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.6 / 9 Cardinal Timothy Dolan shares a laugh with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland at the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association's annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.7 / 9 Cardinal Timothy Dolan with an award given him at the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association's annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.8 / 9 Cardinal Timothy Dolan speaks to the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association at its annual Fall Banquet in New York City on October 13, 2016. The group of Mormon professionals honored the Catholic leader for his focus on issues involving faith, family and religious freedom. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.9 / 9 Download Photos
He added, "It doesn't need to be my religion over anyone else's religion but we can cherish — and protect — our shared religious rights and a belief in God. I don't know of a single society that has ever remained moral without that. I don't want to lose that virtue in this or any other country."
Cardinal Dolan said the two faiths have a “real cherished concord” on many issues, including issues of “religious freedom, the dignity of the human person, the sacredness of human life, a solicitude for the immigrant, the poor; a preference for peace over war in the world; [and] the defense of marriage and family as God has revealed. You and I also enjoy a beautiful amity and agreement when it comes to the defining nature of faith. We believe the sovereignty of almighty God. We believe in the objective truth of revealed religion. And we believe, yes, that one of our sacred responsibilities is to bring the truth of that religion to the public square.”
The New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association said Cardinal Dolan has called on lawmakers and others to “obey their religious |
he understands what people are saying on the leave side of the argument. Labour faces that responsibility too.
“As far as Labour voters are concerned, there are two issues. There is obviously immigration, but beneath that there is a whole set of issues about people’s lives and the fact that they don’t feel politics is listening to them.”
Pat McFadden, the party’s MP for Wolverhampton South East and a former shadow Europe minister, said: “It shows a country just split down the middle. Certainly for people voting to come out, immigration is very high on their list of concerns but there is also something else here too, a real sense of pessimism among people and their place in the UK.”Those of you following election integrity may know about the suspicious 1996 Nebraska Senate election. Chuck Hagel, a businessman completely new to politics, managed to beat popular Democratic governor Ben Nelson in a landslide. Hagel was trailing in the polls nearly the whole time, yet he won a 14% victory.
It turned out he was heavily tied to AIS, the elections vendor whose machines counted the votes to put him in office. He served as chairman and CEO of AIS, as well as president of the McCarthy Group, the Omaha investment bank that owned AIS. Hagel resigned before running for Senate, but he unethically failed to disclose that he had worked for a voting machine company. And Mike McCarthy, founder of the McCarthy Group, became his campaign treasurer.
AIS is now known as ES&S, the largest voting system vendor in the US. This article provides a good summary (with sources) of the Chuck Hagel election suspicions.
Hagel's anomalous performance, and his conflicts of interest regarding vote counting, make it look like his election was stolen. But why? He didn't need the money or elite connections from being a Senator; he already had those. Senator would probably be a step down from a millionaire corporate executive.
After learning about the disturbing extent of pedophilia in elite circles, I started to wonder if there was some connection to the Franklin scandal. For those who don't know, the Franklin scandal involved a child sex ring run by Larry King, owner of the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha. He threw child sex parties at his home for top Nebraska businessmen and politicians, and flew children to DC as well.
It seems that many of the people and groups involved in Hagel's stolen election were also connected to the Franklin scandal:
Chuck Hagel was a businessman in DC and Virginia at the time of the scandal, and had connections to Reagan/Bush, considered to be implicated in it.
Ben Nelson, the Democratic governor whom Hagel defeated, was likely involved in covering up the Franklin scandal when Ted Gunderson set out to investigate it in the early 1990s.
Mike McCarthy was a prominent Omaha businessman, so it's quite possible that he attended Larry King's child sex parties. He also ended up on the executive boards of several Omaha corporations that advised the Franklin Credit Union: both Union Pacific and Peter Kiewit Sons'.
ES&S's other owner, aside from the McCarthy Group, was the Omaha World-Herald newspaper, whose executives either partook in or covered up the pedophile ring.
And the McCarthy Group is a Clinton Foundation donor, tying it more closely to Pizzagate. EDIT: It's actually a different McCarthy Group than the one that owns ES&S. Mike McCarthy is, however, a donor to Hillary's campaign.
I'm not entirely sure what these connections all mean. In particular, the motivation behind stealing an election for Hagel escapes me. But these connections seem important to raise, especially since it looks like this pedophile network is in direct control of vote counting. What do people here think?(Update: Late Friday night, Microsoft said it had patched the vulnerabilities related to the NSA leak. Original story below).
A group known as the Shadow Brokers chose Good Friday to publish a sweeping set of confidential hacking tools used by the NSA to exploit software vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows software.
The leak is the latest and, according to security experts, the most damaging set of stolen documents published by the Shadow Brokers, which is widely believed to be tied to the Russian government.
Experts say the document dump—which is mostly lines of computer code—amounts to an emergency for Microsoft because the hacks consist of a variety of “zero-day exploits” that can serve to infiltrate Windows machines for purposes of espionage, vandalism, or document theft.
The Good Friday timing is especially bad because, as the LawFare blog points out, all sorts of juvenile hackers (known as “script kiddies”) will be active over the holiday weekend, while many defenders will be away.
“I’m only being somewhat glib in suggesting that the best security measure for a Windows computer might be to just turn it off for a few days,” notes the blog.
Meanwhile, a security executive who runs the Twitter account @HackerFantastic called the development a “Microsoft apocalypse.”
This isn't a data dump, this is a damn Microsoft apocalypse. #0day #shadowbrokers — Hacker Fantastic (@hackerfantastic) April 14, 2017
This is really bad, in about an hour or so any attacker can download simple toolkit to hack into Microsoft based computers around the globe. — Hacker Fantastic (@hackerfantastic) April 14, 2017
Other well-known figures in the security community also underscored the severity of the event for Microsoft. According to Cris Thomas (a.k.a. Space Rogue), a strategist and Tenable Network Security, the vulnerabilities affect a wide variety of products.
“There appears to be at least several dozen exploits, including zero-day vulnerabilities in this release. Some of the exploits even offer a potential ‘God Mode’ on select Windows systems. A few of the products targeted include Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, IIS, SMB, Windows XP, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2012,” said Thomas.
This is a huge deal. MS17-067 ;) https://t.co/xql6ZAo2Yc — the grugq (@thegrugq) April 14, 2017
In response to a question about how the company is addressing, the issue a Microsoft spokesperson said, “We are reviewing the report and will take the necessary actions to protect our customers.”
Meanwhile, in its data dump, the Shadow Brokers also published another set of documents that indicate the NSA penetrated the SWIFT banking network in the Middle East. This reportedly gave the U.S. spy service a window into the financial activities of a range of organizations, including Palestinian banks.
Shadow Brokers did not provide a coherent explanation of why they chose to publish the Microsoft and SWIFT vulnerabilities. Instead, the group used its customary odd syntax—a form of affected Borat-style English—in an apparent attempt to troll the U.S. government.
“Is being too bad nobody deciding to be paying theshadowbrokers for just to shutup and going away. TheShadowBrokers rather being getting drunk with McAfee on desert island with hot babes,” said the group’s brief blog post.
The Shadow Brokers have been taunting the U.S. government for some time, warning they would publish a variety of the NSA’s secret hacking tools. Doing so both undercuts the agency’s ability to collect covert intelligence, and can also be damaging from a public relations standpoint.
Until today, though, the Shadow Brokers have not published anything critical, but instead released information apparently related to the theft of documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In its Good Friday blog post, though, the Shadow Brokers appear to allude to current global tensions, writing “Maybe if all suviving WWIII theshadowbrokers be seeing you next week.” This suggests the document dump could be a retaliation by Russia (if the Shadow Brokers are indeed a front for Russia) to recent U.S. military actions.A little while back one of my old bandmates went off to school in London, Ontario. He took a course in music marketing management and music production at Fanshawe College. While he was there he had a number of guest speakers come in. One of which he decided to take some notes and share them with me.
Below are the rough notes cleaned up from the single page both sides of notes taken. Hopefully there are some insights here that will be of benefit to you. Sorry if there are some points out of context.
You show people music, to share yourself, your thoughts, your beliefs and open the eyes and hearts of your listeners or peers. This is the best way to connect, engage, and make a hit! You can expose yourself to death, but you need to get your songs into the hands or ears of some of the big wigs and people who matter. Know the audiences expectations, humans expect things to happen a certain way, as a creator, you have to fulfill this expectation 120bpm is optimal dance song and walking pace The Bridge is the “what if” side of the story Its important to remember, you’re singing to women. Studies and demographic tracking shows that women buy records, men don’t and therefore if you want a big hit, you should be writing with the female demographic in mind. This may be why many, many love songs are big hits. All hit songs invite you in, give you the info, and lead you into the hook. Humor, Irony, & detail. These are three direct songwriting tips that will draw people in. The pro-noun “you” also has huge power to invite people in. Once you use the “you” card, immediately connect with them emotionally. Lastly, make sure you tell the WHOLE story, bring it full circle and close it out.
A few things to avoid
Writer’s Assumption (You assume the audience knows what you’re talking about) The moment you do this, you exclude your audience. Don’t force words to fit in (The Rule of Accessibility) Ex. Don’t fit a three-syllable word into a two-syllable spot You can change the rhyme scheme throughout verses to keep the listener interested, but things still need to stay somewhat repetitive. You don’t want things to change too much through out the song or the listener becomes confused
Thanks again for stopping by!
See ya next week!
KevinHarvard Beats Yale 29-29 Directed by Kevin Rafferty Produced by Kevin Rafferty Starring Tommy Lee Jones
Brian Dowling Cinematography Kevin Rafferty Edited by Kevin Rafferty Production
company Kevin Rafferty Productions Distributed by Gravitas Ventures
Kino International Release date September 5, 2008 ( )
Running time 105 minutes Country United States Language English
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is a 2008 documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, covering the 1968 meeting between the football teams of Yale and Harvard in their storied rivalry. The game has been called "the most famous football game in Ivy League history".[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Story [ edit ]
For the first time since 1909, the football teams of Harvard and Yale were each undefeated with 6-0 records in their conference (8-0 overall) when they met for their season's final game on November 23, 1968[1] at Harvard Stadium.[7] Led by their quarterback captain Brian Dowling, Yale was heavily favored to win and they quickly led the game 22–0.[8] With two minutes remaining on the clock they still led 29–13.[1] As the last seconds ticked down, Harvard, coached by John Yovicsin, tied the game, scoring 16 points in the final 42 seconds.[1][8] The Harvard Crimson declared victory with a famous headline, "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29,"[1][8] providing the title for Rafferty’s documentary.[2][3][4][5][9]
Production [ edit ]
Created essentially as a one-man production, Rafferty followed a simple production plan by inter-cutting broadcast video of the game with interviews he'd done with close to 50 of the surviving players.[4] The broadcast video was a color kinescope of the WHDH telecast, with Don Gillis doing the play-by-play.[10] The film was set to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1968 game between Yale and Harvard.[11]
The documentary includes game footage with contemporary interviews with the men who played that day, as well as contextual commentary about the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, Garry Trudeau's Yale cartoons, and various players' relationships with George W. Bush (Yale), Al Gore (Harvard), and Meryl Streep (Vassar).
Cast [ edit ]
Tommy Lee Jones as himself – Harvard Guard
Brian Dowling as himself – Yale Quarterback (Team Captain)
Don Gillis as himself – Sportscaster
George Bass as himself – Yale Tackle
Frank Champi as himself – Harvard Quarterback
George Lalich as himself – Harvard Quarterback
Gus Crim as himself – Harvard Fullback
Bruce Freeman as himself – Harvard End
Rick Frisbie as himself – Harvard Cornerback
Vic Gatto as himself – Harvard Halfback (Team Captain)
Kyle Gee as himself – Yale Tackle
J.P. Goldsmith as himself – Yale Safety
Calvin Hill as himself – Yale Halfback (archive footage)
Ray Hornblower as himself – Harvard Halfback
Ron Kell as himself – Yale Defensive Back
Mick Kleber as himself – Yale Guard
Bob Levin as himself – Yale Fullback
Ted Livingston as himself – Yale Tackle
Fred Morris as himself – Yale Center
Ted Skowronski as himself – Harvard Center
Bruce Weinstein as himself – Yale End
Mike Bouscaren as himself – Yale Linebacker
Robert Dowd as himself – Harvard Tackle
Fritz Reed as himself – Harvard Tackle
Pat Conway as himself – Harvard Cornerback
Pete Varney as himself – Harvard Tight End
Nick Davidson as himself – Yale Halfback
Jim Gallagher as himself – Yale Defensive End
Fran Gallagher as himself – Yale Defensive End
John Ignacio as himself – Harvard Cornerback
Del Marting as himself – Yale End
Bruce Weinstein as himself – Yale Tight End
Dick Williams as himself – Yale Middle Guard
Jim Reynolds as himself – Harvard Halfback
Pete Hall as himself – Harvard Defensive End
Tom Peacock as himself – Yale Tackle
Joe McKinney as himself – Harvard Defensive End
Rick Berne as himself – Harvard Defensive Tackle
Alex MacLean as himself – Harvard Middle Guard
Dale Neal as himself – Harvard Linebacker
Gary Farneti as himself – Harvard Linebacker
Rich Mattas as himself – Yale Tackle
Scott Robinson as himself – Yale Defensive End
Tom Wynne as himself – Harvard Safety
Neil Hurley as himself – Harvard Cornerback
Mike Ananis as himself – Harvard Cornerback
John Cramer as himself – Harvard Defensive End
John Waldman as himself – Yale Cornerback
Bill Kelly as himself – Harvard Quarterback
Ken Thomas as himself – Harvard Safety
Brad Lee as himself – Yale
Reception [ edit ]
The documentary received numerous positive reviews: Steven Rea of Philadelphia Inquirer wrote "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is a comeback story, a classic underdog yarn. But this winning doc also offers serious reflection on how events from our past continue to loom large in our lives - as regrets still counted, as lessons learned, as triumphs that awe and amaze."[12] J. Hoberman of Village Voice wrote "This may or may not be the greatest instance of college football ever played, but Brian's Song, Jerry Maguire, and The Longest Yard notwithstanding, Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time."[11] Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun called the film "Kevin Rafferty's magnum opus".[13] Mark Feeney of Boston Globe called the film "terrifically entertaining".[2] Manhola Dargis of the New York Times found the film to be "preposterously entertaining".[14] Tom Keogh of Seattle Times called it "a delightful documentary".[15] In greater depth, Bob Hoover of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote "Despite his annoying style of lingering a bit too long on his subjects, Rafferty, mainly a TV documentary maker, pries fascinating stories and insights from the now aging players,"[16] and Kenneth Turan of Los Angeles Times wrote "A look at the legendary Nov. 23, 1968, game, "Harvard Beats Yale" is both an irresistible human story and as fine a documentary on football as "Hoop Dreams" was on basketball", calling the film "a memorable winner". He further notes that the passage of 40 years allowed a unique perspective as the players spoke about "what was not only the game of their careers but possibly the experience of their lives", and made note of how time led to other celebrity for some of the players, with Tommy Lee Jones becoming an Oscar-winning actor, Brian Dowling becoming the character "B.D." in the Doonesbury comic strip (Garry Trudeau attended Yale), and player Bob Levin remembering dating a Vassar undergraduate named Meryl Streep."[4]
Underscoring that the film had appeal to more than just sports fans, Bruce Eder of All Movie Guide began his review with "it is only fair of this writer to point out that he cares not one whit about, and has not a scintilla of interest in football. Having said that, we can also say, without equivocation, that Kevin Rafferty's Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is a dazzling, engrossing, must-see piece of film all about...football. Except that it's also about a lot more."[17]
References [ edit ]Carl Mears and team at RSS have published a new paper describing a revision of their data for atmospheric temperature. The focus is on improving the “diurnal correction,” which is necessary because different regions of Earth are observed at different times of day. The upshot is that the lower atmosphere has warmed faster than was previously believed.
Perhaps the abstract says it best:
Abstract Temperature sounding microwave radiometers flown on polar-orbiting weather satellites provide a long-term, global-scale record of upper-atmosphere temperatures, beginning in late 1978 and continuing to the present. The focus of this paper is the middle tropospheric measurements made by the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) channel 2, and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) channel 5. Previous versions of the RSS dataset have used a diurnal climatology derived from general circulation model output to remove the effects of drifting local measurement time. In this paper, we present evidence that this previous method is not sufficiently accurate, and present several alternative methods to optimize these adjustments using information from the satellite measurements themselves. These are used to construct a number of candidate climate data records using measurements from 15 MSU and AMSU satellites. The new methods result in improved agreement between measurements made by different satellites at the same time. We choose a method based on an optimized second harmonic adjustment to produce a new version of the RSS dataset, Version 4.0. The new dataset shows substantially increased global-scale warming relative to the previous version of the dataset, particularly after 1998. The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites. We also show that the new dataset is consistent with long-term changes in total column water vapor over the tropical oceans, lending support to its long-term accuracy.
The effect on TMT (middle-troposphere temperature) globally looks like this:
The black line shows the old version, the light blue line the new. Note that the overall trend in the new version is 60% bigger than in the old version. The green line at the top shows the effect of their improved diurnal correction.
This should dampen the enthusiasm of deniers like Ted Cruz who have relied on satellite data from RSS to dispute global warming. But I doubt; I suspect instead that Ted Cruz will either find some new reason to deny global warming, or will go on a witch-hunt of Carl Mears and the RSS team, accusing them of fraud because the data don’t say what Ted Cruz and his ilk want it to say.
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O'Reilly: Donations From George Soros 'May Present a Problem' for Hillary
Donald Trump will make the case for his strategy to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terror TONIGHT in an exclusive hour-long Hannity town hall.
The conversation with Trump was held at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee and will air on Fox News Channel at 10:00pm ET.
The show was originally scheduled for Tuesday night, but was pre-empted by Trump's address on "law and order" in Wisconsin.
The sit-down with Hannity follows Trump's address Monday in Ohio where he laid out his plan to combat the terror group.
He called for a new "ideological" test to screen people who want to come to the United States, pointing back to Cold War policies.
“In addition to screening-out members and sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen-out any with hostile attitudes or beliefs that Sharia law should supplant American law," he explained.
Trump told Hannity that right now, the United States is waging a "politically correct war" when it comes to going after ISIS. But he noted that Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.) and other generals have told him ISIS can be taken out "very rapidly."
"Now, very rapidly is longer than you would like, but they could get the job done and get it done with precision and get it done. We have no choice, Sean. We have no choice. We have to take them out," said Trump.
He added that more terror attacks will occur on American soil if the strategy does not change.
"What we're doing by allowing thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people in here that we just don't know anything about. It's going to happen again because there's something wrong, and until we figure it out, we have to stop it," he said.
Watch this sneak peek of @seanhannity's town hall with @realDonaldTrump that airs tonight at 10p ET! pic.twitter.com/AcPv5uNIPt — Fox News (@FoxNews) August 17, 2016
Also joining Sean and Trump will be Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, terrorism expert and author Dr. Sebastian Gorka, and Americans impacted by terror attacks: the widow of Tyrone Woods, who was killed in Benghazi, victims of the Fort Hood and Boston Marathon attacks and Benghazi hero Kris "Tanto" Paronto.
Watch a clip above and tune in for the must-see event, tonight at 10:00pm/1:00am ET on "Hannity."
Hannity Blasts GOP 'Never Trumpers': Helping Hillary Is 'Disgusting & Dangerous'
Trump on Uproar Over 2nd Amendment Remark: 'Give Me a Break'
Judge Jeanine: 'Clinton Foundation a Money Laundering Op, Not a Charity'The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued a new audit claiming the City of Fresno may have misused millions of dollars in community development block grant money.
The audit claims the city misspent or failed to properly track money intended improving living standards in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
In other words, the audit claims the city can’t prove the money was being spent in the highest need areas, which is required by law.
In all, the HUD Office of Inspector General says the city may have misused or failed to track about $8 million in federal money, which the city may need to repay.
The money was being spent primarily on activities like code enforcement and graffiti abatement.
A spokesman for the City of Fresno says the city acknowledges some records keeping shortcomings that they are trying to fix, but he added that the administration is confident the money that was spent went to help low-income areas.Under a new law published on Monday and due to be in force in April, mobile phone companies will have a year to build up a database of their clients, complete with fingerprints. The idea would be to match calls and messages to the phones' owners.
Hundreds of people are kidnapped in Mexico every year and the number of victims is rising sharply as drug gangs, under pressure from an army crackdown, seek new income.
Politicians who pushed the bill through Congress last year say there are around 700 criminal bands in Mexico, some of them operating from prison cells, that use cell phones to extract extortion and kidnap ransom payments.
Most of Mexico's 80 million mobile phones are prepaid handsets with a given number of minutes of use that can be bought in stores without any identification. The phones can be topped up with more minutes via vendors on street corners.
The register, detailed in the government's official gazette, means new subscribers will now be fingerprinted when they buy a handset or phone contract.Attraction announces it is shutting down nine days before Christmas after financial backer pulls out
It was blighted by accusations – mostly completely unfounded – of tipsy Santas, smoking elves and biting reindeer. Now the Christmas attraction the Magical Journey has hit the buffers after a financial backer pulled out.
The experience in Birmingham announced on its website that it had shut up shop with Christmas still nine sleeps away, depriving hundreds of youngsters of a festive treat and leaving scores of employees without a job.
A statement on the attraction’s website said: “We are really sorry to have to tell you this, but as of [Tuesday] the Magical Journey, based at the Belfry, Sutton Coldfield, will no longer be in operation.
“We are truly sorry. After all we’ve been through having to shut down in the final week is devastating … We are very sorry to have to break the news like this but we have explored all our options, and the situation leaves us with no alternative other than close the Magical Journey.”
The attraction, which has creative input from the celebrity designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, opened with a fanfare last month but had to quickly shut again after a flurry of reviews from disappointed customers – and baseless attacks by many who had clearly not visited.
Organisers admitted that they had opened before they were really ready. They ironed out the problems, threw open the doors again and the vast majority of those who have visited in recent weeks seemed satisfied.
“Although we had quite the time of it in the press and on social media, feedback was great with over 600 four- and five-star reviews,” the website statement said. “However, today a key financial backer has dropped out leaving us in the lurch. We have tried desperately over the last few hours to find a replacement but to no avail.”
Llewelyn-Bowen said he was “extremely surprised” after finding out on Twitter the Magical Journey had closed.
He said: “It’s absolutely shocking. We found out by Twitter. Everybody was in bed feeling Christmassy and now we are not feeling very Christmassy at all. I was really impressed with the way they addressed all the issues the first time around and the energy and resources that went into it so I’m extremely surprised the towel’s been thrown in at this stage.
“I feel appalling it is not the happy experience I really want it to be. I feel extremely sorry for everybody let down in the next nine days and also for the staff who worked on the frontline.”
Llewelyn-Bowen said he had been commissioned to create some design concepts for the experience but was not involved in the management and had not provided any financial backing. “I feel very much I was the designer and I’m a very public face so people are cross with me,” he said.
The presenter added that he would be donating his fee, the amount of which he would not confirm, to a Birmingham children’s hospice and said: “I do not want to make any money at all out of this experience.”
When the Guardian visited at the end of November staff were working hard to make sure visitors had a great time.
A myth-busting section of the event’s Facebook page tried to put to bed some of the wild allegations that attracted a slew of negative headlines. It accepted there were problems such as the train, designed to whisk visitors around the winter wonderland, breaking down. It admitted that elves may have been spotted smoking – but said they were in the staff rest area at the time.
It denies that a child had been bitten by a reindeer. “Our reindeer enclosure is safe with our elves supervising it. Reindeer are herbivores and lack bottom teeth – they won’t try to bite you because they can’t.”
Santa was not seen boozing or swearing. “Honestly?” says the myth-buster. “We can’t believe the papers picked this up. It came from a joke Facebook post.”
Disappointed visitors took to the attraction’s Facebook page to express their disappointment. One woman posted: “Our baby girls first Christmas memories are RUINED!!!!”
Another asked: “How are parents who have told their children about the event, going to explain the cancellation? Should be ashamed.”
The attraction’s homepage gives details of how disappointed visitors can get refunds.Rapper Macklemore led the crowd at his sold-out show in Tempe, Ariz., in a chant against President Trump on Saturday night, Fox News Rapper Macklemore led the crowd at his sold-out show in Tempe, Ariz., in a chant against President Trump on Saturday night, Fox News reported
Video of the concert posted to Video of the concert posted to Youtube shows Macklemore leading the crowd in a chant of "F--k Donald Trump " during his performance of the song that goes by the same name.
One concert attendee, Vanessa Richards, told Fox News that Macklemore "gave a speech about immigration and acceptance" during the show and said "everyone should be welcome here no matter which side of the 'line' you stand on."
Richards said Macklemore told the crowd, "We should be welcoming and encouraging everyone to live the American Dream."
Macklemore and hip-hop artist G-Eazy remixed the original "F--k Donald Trump" song by YG during the 2016 election. The song peaked at number 50 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs list last year.
After Trump was elected president in November, Macklemore shared an After Trump was elected president in November, Macklemore shared an Instagram post in which he said he was "disappointed, shocked and shaken at my core" by the election results.
"I don't have control over Donald Trump becoming president. That has been decided. But what I do have control over is where I go from here. I will teach my daughter to love. All people, regardless of the color of their skin, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or where their birth certificate says they're from," the rapper wrote in the post.On his radio show yesterday, Bryan Fischer covered a major scientific breakthrough: Apparently scientists are having serious doubts about that whole “evolution” thing. It’s “a complete sham,” Fischer said. “It’s a scam. It’s a hoax.”
And he made sure to reiterate where this information was coming from in case there were any concerns:
“Here’s a story from Reuters to start the program off today about the creation/evolution controversy; this is Reuters, now, this is not a press release from the American Family Association or from the Institute for Creation Research, this is a Reuters piece on ChristianToday.com.” “Listen to this,” Fischer declared as he began to read the article. “‘The long-standing debate between Creationism and evolution just recently tipped once again in favor of the biblical belief that God created all living and non-living things here on Earth, thanks to the discovery of lizards encased in ambers.'”
Reuters, of course, is the international news agency with a solid reputation. If they’re reporting this, it’s worth taking seriously…
But this is Bryan Fischer. He doesn’t do research. He doesn’t care about getting stories right. If it suits his narrative, he’s running with it. You have to question anything that comes out of his mouth because being honest isn’t a value he holds dear.
And wouldn’t you know it? That story didn’t come from Reuters at all. Only the image used in the Christian Today article came from Reuters, not the content.
Not that Fischer noticed. He was praising the article left and right — well, except for the part about how certain lizard specimens were an estimated 99 million years old.
“We don’t believe these are 99 million years [old],” he stated. “I believe the earth is about 6,000 years old, maybe 10,000 at the max, but the Bible does not permit you to believe that the universe is 99 million years old. That’s just not going to work.”
That says everything about how warped worldview, doesn’t it? When confronted with the scientific evidence, Fischer stuck by his myth. The Bible didn’t permit him to accept reality.
And how did he begin this segment? By saying of the Bible:
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he concluded. “Do. Not. Doubt. This. Book.”
Riiiiight. Even though his faith in that book led him to accept a complete lie.
Fischer inadvertently gave us a perfect example of why doubting the Bible is exactly what we should be doing. The Bible doesn’t have all the answers. We’re always better off thinking critically about information than blindly accepting it just because it conforms with our beliefs.
(via Right Wing Watch)SARASOTA, Fla. – Two or three years ago, it was almost impossible to find a Phillies player on social media.
Now, with a mostly 20-something crowd dominating the clubhouse, nearly every Phillies player is active on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram … and Snapchat, too.
Enter Odubel Herrera. The outfielder used snapchat to send a photo of his right middle finger wrapped in bandaging.
So the Phillies outfield, already without Aaron Altherr and Cody Asche, has another injury? Not so fast.
“He’s been playing with that and he’s been hitting rockets all over the place,” manager Pete Mackanin said of Herrera, who is hitting.391 (9-for-23) in seven games this spring.
But apparently his finger has at least been sore, since Herrera did have an X-ray on it.
“Thankfully,” Mackanin said, “it’s negative.”
Herrera suffered the injury while sliding into home plate earlier this spring. He’s played through it, but was scratched from Monday’s lineup.
“He went in headfirst at home, which we tell everybody not to do because of that,” Mackanin said.
The manager said Herrera could return to the lineup as soon as Tuesday.
Walk like Goeddel
Before Maikel Franco ’s latest home run show, Tyler Goeddel led off Tuesday’s game with a solo home run off of Baltimore right-hander Yovani Gallardo.
It was Goeddel’s first home run of the spring. The 23-year-old Rule 5 pick went 1-for-3 with two runs scored, two walks and a strikeout.
“The thing I like about him is he seems to have good plate discipline because he takes a lot of pitches,” Mackanin said. “I even mentioned to (bench coach) Larry (Bowa ) and (hitting coach Steve Henderson ) this guy, the way he works the count, he’s almost like a leadoff-type guy you’re looking for, the way he works the count and makes the pitcher throw a lot of pitches.”
Goeddel is hitting.273 (9-for-33) with four walks and seven strikeouts in 11 games this spring. He is a certainty to break camp with the Phillies, who are already two outfielders short, but Mackanin wouldn’t go as far as to say that Goeddel has won a starting job.
“(We have) lot of options (out there),” he said. “We have options to look at. Possibly starting, possibly platooning.”We received Mafia 3 code this afternoon, and I've started work on the review. But I noticed that the controls felt kinda sluggish, before realising that, if my Fraps readings (and my eyes) are correct, the game is locked to 30fps.
I thought maybe my PC just couldn't handle it, so I shifted down 720p and the lowest graphics settings, but it was still locked to 30. I'm running a GTX 970, an i5-6600K overclocked to 4.5GHz, and 16GB of RAM, which should be more than enough. And it still happens when I disable the in-game vsync option.
So yeah, not great. Whether this is something that'll be fixed in a day one patch, or will be sorted via a forthcoming graphics driver update, remains to be seen, but as it stands it feels like Lincoln is trudging through sludge as I walk around the (very pretty) city of New Bordeaux. We've reached out to 2K to see what the deal is.The Liberal Democrats could suffer for a generation as a result of the decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives, the former party president Tim Farron has warned. Farron, seen as a potential successor to Nick Clegg, said it was obvious that the party would be tarnished by the decision.
Clegg told the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference in Liverpool that the party would have suffered if it had gone into coalition with either the Tories or Labour in 2010, and acknowledged that the deal with David Cameron was highly controversial.
Farron told the Mail on Sunday that the decision would have a long-lasting impact on the party. “In 2010, many people said: ‘I am not voting for you because of the (1970s) Lib-Lab pact’, when I was seven years old,” he said. “Just think what going into coalition with the Tories will do to our brand over the next generation.”
Farron, seen as being on the left of the party, criticised Clegg’s U-turn over tuition fees when he entered government. “Integrity is important,” he said. “You must not only keep your word but be seen to keep your word. You can say no.”
The Westmorland and Lonsdale MP warned that any future coalition deal could leave the party dead unless it was handled properly. “If you believe what really matters is that ministerial car, you will give way to the other side more than you should”, he said. “We are curating the party of Gladstone. We must not crash it by making short-term decisions in any coalition agreement.”
If the party makes too many concessions in the crucial few days after the election, “whoever’s leader, whether it’s Nick or somebody else … we’re dead”. He suggested that rebuilding the party after the election, in which pollsters predict it will lose dozens of seats, would require the “absolute bloodyminded refusal to lie down and die” character |
I can place you at a financial institution in a receptionist position!”
“Woah,” says Matt. “That would be amazing!”
“NO!” comes the muted yell from Foster.
“I’m sorry,” says Landerfin, picking up the phone. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” He pecks a few buttons and swivels in his chair, barking hushed imperatives to someone on the other end. A few seconds later, outside, there are firm tones and protestations. Foster’s voice is distant now as he yells:
“DON’T TAKE ANY OF HIS CRAPPY JOBS, M-DOG!”
Landerfin swivels back, smiling.
“Now,” he says. “Where were we?”
“Uh,” says Matt. “You were saying you could get me a receptionist position at a financial institution?”
“Ah, yes. Definitely. The only problem is –”
“Yes?” says Matt.
“The only problem is,” says Landerfin. “You know, I just don’t have anything right now. With the recession and all. We’re dealing with some significant financial headwinds. We just really don’t have anything at the moment.”
“…Oh,” says Matt.
There go the shoulders.
“I promise, we’ll call you the second we have something!” says Landerfin. “There’s just really nothing right now. The economy –”
“—I understand,” says Matt. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”
Landerfin stands. So does Matt.
“Have a nice day,” says Matt.
“Have a wonderful rest of your day,” says Landerfin.
Unwashed Hands shake Fish Hands.
* * *
I wouldn’t describe Matt’s head as “held high” as he crunches his way toward Government Center, would you? Downcast. Downtrodden. Knackered. Buggered. Wolluped. Wiped. Spent.
Seems Old Man Despair may be setting up permanent operations after all. He’s probably in there right now, cackling as he slides on his dropped boot.
ACK!
Wha?
What just flashed past us?
Barely missed us!
Matt ducked (good thing).
Something from the sky.
There it is.
An enormous paper airplane.
Crash-landed in that mound of grey city-snow.
Matt’s looking up from where the plane came.
There’s Foster.
He’s waving down from the open office window. What the hell is he doing? He’s gesturing wildly. At the paper airplane.
Matt leans down.
Picks up the plane.
It feathers out into a large sheet of paper.
Oh, of course. It’s the chart. An X/Y axis with a curved red arc extending from one million to ten million dollars.
At the top, it says, in bold red marker:
MATTHEW LAROSE: PROJECTED INCOME
Matt’s just standing there, staring at the paper.
Presently, he shakes his head.
He clutches his belly.
His chest is convulsing!
Oh, my god!
Is he ok?
What can we do?
MATT!
Wait. Is he grinning?
Wha?
He’s laughing!
Matt comes back up, face flush. Smiling. Sanguine. He takes a deep breath.
Head up?
Shoulders back!
Foster’s still hanging out the office window. He’s giving Matt an enthusiastic double thumbs-up.
“REMINDER!” he shouts down.
Matt holds up the chart. He returns the thumbs-up to Foster. Now he’s saying something.
What was it? He mouthed something to Foster.
Did you catch it? I didn’t.
Thingy…do?
No. Rewind! What did he say?
That…dude?
Nope. Rewind again!
Thatched…roof?
Duh. No.
Tell you what. Let’s put it in slo-mo.
Ah ha!
Got it!
It’s so obvious now!
Did you catch it?
Matt said “Thank you”.
[centup]Released by the UK Ministry of Defense, this image shows the periscope of the American submarine USS Dallas cutting through the surface as UK aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious sails past.
Both units, along with RFA Fort Victoria, RFA Fort Austin and USS Bulkeley and the American Los Angeles Class took part in a joint ASW (Anti Submarine Warfare) exercise in the waters of the Gulf.
The exercise foresaw three phases.
The sonar sonar environment of the warm and shallow waters of the Middle East is particularly challenging, hence, during the first one, ships and submarines tested acoustic and non-acoustics sensor performance against known positions, gaining useful real life data for the region.
The second phase saw ships escorting HMS Illustrious as the Mission Essential Unit (MEU) along a passage whilst evading detection and simulated torpedo attacks by the American submarine.
Finally, the Los Angeles class USS Dallas tried to locate and destroy RFA Fort Austin as the MEU, in a holding box which simulated an anchorage, as the UK and US naval ships provided protection.
The exercise, saw also Merlin, Seahawk and Lynx helicopter support to the ships.
Image credit: UK MoD
Related articlesHAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) - A Hagerstown woman who smothered her 2-month-old daughter by passing out drunk on top of her while breast-feeding is going to jail.
Twenty-two-year-old Yadina Morales was sentenced Tuesday to 15 months in the Washington County jail after entering an Alford plea to involuntary manslaughter. An Alford plea is not an admission of guilt but an acknowledgement that the state has enough evidence to convict.
Prosecutors agreed to drop charges including child abuse and reckless endangerment as part of the plea deal.
Morales was arrested in November after the girl's father came home and found her passed out on top of the unresponsive girl.
Morales registered a blood-alcohol level of 0.256, more than three times the level needed for a drunken driving conviction. The judge says her actions were grossly negligent.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Malik Obama is related to the president through his Kenyan father
US President Barack Obama's half-brother, Malik Obama, says he will vote for Donald Trump because he "comes across as a straightforward guy".
Malik Obama, a Muslim with Kenyan and US citizenship, also told the BBC that the Republican presidential nominee's proposal for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US was "common sense".
Mr Trump's plan - pitched as a security measure - has been widely condemned.
Malik Obama has accused the president of turning his back on his family.
He told the BBC's Newsday programme it was "sort of disappointing, somewhat hypocritical" that no representatives of the Obama family from Kenya were attending the Democratic convention, taking place in Philadelphia.
The president, he said, had "made a big deal about his heritage... and now it's a complete blackout".
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Barack Obama and his father, pictured here in the 1960s, had limited contact when he was growing up
Malik Obama, who said he was also voting for Mr Trump in order to shift his allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
The president's half-brother has reportedly lived in Washington since the mid-80s.
He is also an aspiring politician in Kenya, running for office in 2013, but failing in his bid to become governor of Siaya county.
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father who left when he was two years old.
The president visited Kenya for the first time last year since his election in 2009.
Mr Trump, a billionaire property developer, is hoping to succeed him in November's election, where he will face Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton.Teen Mom 2 star Chelsea Houska looks like she is closer to getting engaged to boyfriend Cole DeBoer now more than ever after the two officially moved in together. The MTV star posted on Twitter the status of their cohabitation and it looks like it is almost done.
"I've literally spent hours trying to organize and go through my clothes & get rid of stuff I don't want so I can make room for Cole's stuff..," the reality star tweeted.
I've literally spent hours trying to organize and go through my clothes &get rid of stuff I don't want so I can make room for Cole's stuff.. — Chelsea Houska (@ChelseaHouska) July 15, 2015
Chelsea then posted a photo of the empty side of her closet where she made room for Cole's clothes.
The esthetician introduced her new love to fans of the hit series just recently on the new season which premiered in July.
As MStars News reported, the South Dakota natives met each other while getting gas at a station. She knew he was the "one" almost immediatel:
"He was across at the other pump," Chelsea told Us Weekly. "And I looked, and he was staring at me. We didn't even talk. We just kept looking at each other because we're both shy. And then we were passing each other when we left because we lived out towards the same way.
"I went home to my friend and I was like, 'I just saw the guy I'm going to marry at the gas station, but we didn't talk,'" she continued. "And a few days later, he contacted me on social media and was like, 'Hi. I got gas next to you the other day.' And I was like, 'Thank you, Jesus.'"
Love these crazies A photo posted by @chelseahouska on Jul 30, 2015 at 9:50am PDT
Luckily for Chelsea, Cole turned out to be the total opposite of her baby daddy Adam Lind with whom she had a tumultuous relationship that played out in front of MTV cameras.
"Honestly, there's just no one that I've met that's so respectful and just nice and I trust [Cole], which is a big deal, because it's hard for me to trust people or guys, mostly," she told the gossip mag. "And he's so sweet, kind of like old-fashioned gentleman type of guy."
Are you happy Chelsea and Cole moved in together or do you think it is too soon in their relationship?
© 2019 Mstars News, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
AdvertisementThe largest proof in mathematics is colossal in every dimension – from the 100-plus people needed to crack it to its 15,000 pages of calculations. Now the man who helped complete a key missing piece of the proof has won a prize.
In early November, Michael Aschbacher, an innovator in the abstract field of group theory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena will receive the $75,000 Rolf Schock prize in mathematics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his pivotal role in proving the Classification Theorem of Finite Groups, aka the Enormous Theorem.
If it were not for Aschbacher, the behemoth might still contain a gaping hole. In 2004, he and Stephen Smith of the University of Illinois in Chicago published a 1200-page guide through the last piece of the puzzle.
That 2004 tome brought together some of Aschbacher’s early works, and completed the proof. His contributions to the overall proof were “absolutely monumental”, says Ronald Solomon, a group theorist at Ohio State University in Columbus.
Advertisement
Elemental groups
The Enormous Theorem concerns groups, which in mathematics can refer to a collection of symmetries, such as the rotations of a square that produce the original shape. Some groups can be built from others but, rather like prime numbers or the chemical elements, “finite simple” groups are elemental.
There are an infinite number of finite simple groups but a finite number of families to which they belong. Mathematicians have been studying groups since the 19th century, but the Enormous Theorem wasn’t proposed until around 1971, when mathematician Daniel Gorenstein of Rutgers University in New Jersey devised a plan to identify all the finite simple groups, divide them into families and prove that no others could exist.
Gorenstein and his hundreds of collaborators spent a decade working on the proof. By 1981, Gorenstein could see the light at the end of the tunnel, though a few hurdles remained. The proof remained incomplete until the 2004 publication by Aschbacher and Smith, which completed the proof. It identified all the families – and showed no others could exist.
Diabolically difficult
It also identified all the known “sporadic groups”, 26 (or 27, according to some) outlying simple finite groups that get pooled as one family because they do not fit neatly into the other families.
Solomon estimates that only a few mathematicians in the world (including Aschbacher) understand the complete proof. It was a punishing read, says Mark Ronan, an honorary professor of mathematics at University College London. “Some of Aschbacher’s proofs were just diabolically difficult,” he adds.
Mathematicians cannot predict how the proof will influence the future of mathematics or the sciences. Ronan says that like many mathematical results, the applications may not surface any time soon. “Whatever it’s telling us, we haven’t yet found out,” he says. “I’d be willing to bet a million dollars that it has an application, but there’s no point in making the bet because I’ll be dead before I can collect.”1. Pictures of nursing men would dominate Facebook photostreams.
2. There would be no such thing as a nursing cover because men would nurse in the wide open. Other men would come up to nursing men and give them fist bumps. Conversations like:
"What are you lactating at these days?"
"Man, I can pump up to eight ounces from one side!"
Or
"Hey man, you look great."
"Yeah, I'm lactating."
Would be commonplace.
3. People would ask nursing men if they should leave the room to give the man and his baby some space.
4. Laws would require employers to allow four 30-minute pumping breaks for all lactating men.
5. Paternity leave policies would be extended to six months, so men could nurse their children exclusively as recommended by the World Health Organization.
6. Men who breastfed their infants would receive tax breaks from the government and rebates from their health insurance companies.
7. The National Center for Lactation Support would spend millions revolutionizing clogged duct therapies and preventative techniques for mastitis.
8. "Cow" would be a term of respect.
9. Men would brag about how long and how much. Terms like "he's a six-ouncer" would become compliments. Newspapers, morning shows and magazines would devote entire issues to the topic of nipple tenderness, cuts and bleeding.
10. Men would recount with pride the time their engorged breasts squirted milk while they were out to eat with their wives.
11. A whole market of breastfeeding aids would be developed. Peyton Manning would appear in ads for super absorbent milk pads. Shaq would be the spokesman for Man Milk, a line of supply-boosting lactation supplements. David Beckham would have his own line of nursing-friendly shirts.
12. All stores would have designated breastfeeding areas with comfortable chairs and televisions.
13. Restaurants would have complimentary portable arm rests and pillows for nursing men.
14. People who asked a man to "cover up" while breastfeeding could face a fine up to $2,000 or jail time for discrimination.
15. Conservative groups would hail the lactating man as evidence of intellectual and physical superiority over women, who need their man's help to feed their children. Liberal groups would work to advance the cause of women "shouldering the man's burden" by advocating for lactation implants in mothers.
16. TV shows and movies would regularly feature men nursing their children as storylines. In Two and a Half Men, Charlie Harper would seduce women with his tales of breastfeeding his son. Or how about the heart-wrenching episode of Law and Order where Detective Lennie Briscoe struggles with low milk production. And who can forget the iconic, Emmy Award-winning episode ofNCIS: Los Angeles in which LL Cool J catches the killer and successfully wet nurses the son of the murdered Marine?
17. Studies would show that men who breastfed were more likely to be promoted to upper management.
18. Far beyond being a titillating or sexual image, breasts would be revered as a fount of life and would be emblazoned on the National Seal.
19.The Washington Monument would be shaped like a boob.
This post originally appeared on LyzLenz.com
Also on HuffPost:A Calgary woman says the normal, happy life of her nine-year-old daughter is in jeopardy following a doctor’s decision to discontinue the girl’s medicinal marijuana treatment.
Sarah Wilkinson’s daughter Mia had suffered frequent, severe seizures throughout the early years of her life. On her worst days, the young girl would experience as many as 100 episodes.
In an attempt to reduce the frequency of the seizures, doctors prescribed a number of medications but, according to Mia’s mother, the dozens of pills taken on a daily basis did not help.
Nearly two years ago, Sarah found a doctor at the Alberta Children’s Hospital willing to prescribe medical marijuana to curb Mia’s condition.
Sarah says the herb, taken orally in oil form through a dropper, has resulted in a remarkable improvement in Mia’s health and the young girl has been seizure free for nearly a year and a half. Mia requires no other medication at this time.
In June, Sarah emailed the doctor requesting the renewal of Mia’s medical marijuana licence but the request was denied.
“It’s completely devastating,” said Sarah. “If she doesn’t get this, I’ll lose her.”
“I can’t have that happen.”
In an email to Sarah Wilkinson, the doctor said the Alberta Children’s Hospital’s protocols factored in the denial.
“Due to the strict nature of the policy implemented here at children’s, I am not allowed to fill the forms for renewal of medical marijuana.”
The doctor suggested seeking another physician to fill the prescription but Sarah’s search has been unfruitful.
Mia’s doctor is currently out of the country and CTV Calgary’s attempts to discuss the girl's medical progress have not garnered a response.
Alberta Health Services' position on medical marijuana for children was implemented nearly two years ago. In a statement to CTV Calgary, AHS officials explained the stance.
Alberta Health Services does not support the prescription of medical marijuana for pediatric patients with epilepsy at this time.
Physicians provide prescriptions on a case by case basis using their professional judgement.
Health Canada has not approved medical marijuana for the treatment of seizures in Canada, and AHS is unaware of any studies, data or recognized epilepsy organizations that recommend or endorse the use of medical marijuana in pediatric patients with epilepsy
The Wilkinson family has enough medical marijuana remaining to continue Mia’s medication regiment for the next three weeks. Once the supply runs out, Sarah says she is willing to go to extremes to ensure the health of her daughter.
“If I don’t find a signing doctor, then I risk going to jail or having my children taken away. I’m not going to watch her deteriorate and seize to death.”
The Wilkinsons are appealing the prescription denial to the Alberta Children’s Hospital ethics board. If the appeal is unsuccessful, Sarah plans to reach out to her MLA for assistance.
With files from CTV's Kathy Leby
I confess to being troubled rather than elated by the daily rumble of idols falling to accusations of “sexual misconduct,” the morbid masscult fixation that conceals private titillation, knowing smirks, and sadistic lip-smacking behind a public mask of solemn reproof.
Weinstein and Trump and Roy Moore and Bill Clinton are vile pigs and creeps, no doubt; I have always detested the smug neoliberal performance-art strut of Al Franken and the careerist-toady journalism of Glenn Thrush and Charlie Rose, the latest dominoes to tumble amid the barrage of public accusations of “inappropriate” advances or touching.
But the boundary between cultural tolerance/intolerance blurs and shifts with each passing revelation, as the litany of sins, ancient or recent, cardinal or venal, snowballs into an avalanche of aggrieved, undifferentiated accusation—a stampeding herd of “Me-Tooists.” Successive waves of long-forgotten gropes and slurps now overwhelm the news channel chyrons, leaving us with the sense that no greater crime against humanity is possible than an unsolicited horndog lunge of the hand or tongue, some of them from twenty or thirty years past but divulged only in the past few weeks.
Let’s be honest—these “shocking” revelations about Franken—that he tried to tongue-kiss a woman one time in a rehearsal and mock-grabbed her somnolent breasts in a silly frat-house pose or that maybe his hand strayed too far toward a woman’s derriere as he obliged her with a photo at a state fair five years ago—would have elicited nothing more than a public yawn just a few weeks or months ago in the BW (Before Weinstein) era; in fact, these two women, seemingly unperturbed enough to leave these incidents unreported for five or six years, would likely not have thought to join the solemn procession of the violated on national TV if not for the stampede effect of each successive cri de coeur.
But is it an advance in collective ethical consciousness when the public reservoir of shock and indignation is so easily churned up and tapped out over erotic peccadillos? And here I must of course distinguish between outright rape—always a viscerally sickening crime against human dignity— or implied or explicit threats to a woman worker’s livelihood over sexual “favors” on the one hand, and on the other the impetuous volcanic eruptions of erotic passion that inevitably leave one or both partners discomfited or embarrassed or forlorn by unexpected or unwelcome overtures, tactile or verbal. As the left blogger Michael J. Smith points out, “Not all acts are equally grave—an off-color joke is not as bad as a grope, and a grope is not as bad as a rape.” Then what interest of sanity or reason is served by this reckless lumping together of flicks of the tongue and forcible rapes into the single broad-brush term “sexual misconduct,” as though there is no important difference between an oafish pat or crude remark at an office party and a gang rape? This would be like applying the term “communist” alike to advocates of single payer healthcare and campaigners for one-party centralized control of the entire economy—oh wait, we have seen precisely that: during the McCarthy era. Now then... is all this beginning to have a familiar ring to it?
And not merely deeds but words have fallen under scrutiny: on Sunday Jeffrey Tambor joined the ranks of the accused, walking the plank by quitting his acclaimed Amazon series Transparent in the wake of two allegations of the use of “lewd” language in front of his assistant and a fellow actor. So the stain of ostracism has now spread from conduct to mere speech.
Alarmingly, the Pecksniffian word lewd has enjoyed a recent rehabilitation among the corporate-media “news” networks, cogs in giant infotainment conglomerates whose cash flow depends precisely on mass dissemination of HD depictions of explicit sexual “lewdness” and violence that their news departments then deplore when evidenced in real life. “Lewd” enjoyed a boomlet during the presidential campaign when the pro-Clinton newsies and talking-head strategists were professing daily bouts of horror at the revelations of the Donald’s coarse frat-boy talk on Access Hollywood. This seems to have been the first time this word had gained any traction since seventeenth-century Salem and Victorian England. This battalion of elite lewdness police are the same Ivy League graduates who in college probably considered Henry Miller a genius, not in spite of, but because of, his portrayal of raw lust in language that makes Trump’s private palaver or Tambor’s japes seem tepid and repressed by comparison. (It’s not impossible that some of these same people consider Quentin Tarantino, cinematic maestro of the vile obscenities of language and violence, a great auteur as well.) The whole spectacle is at once comical and nauseating.
And it indeed looks as though huge swaths of the world’s art and literature, from Pindar to Botticelli to Shakespeare to Joyce to Updike, will soon fall to the axe of the lewdness police. Let’s say that a college English professor, in a unit on American Transcendentalism, assigns the Whitman poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” and reads the poem aloud to his students, including the following passage:
This is the female form, A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction, I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed, Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable, Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.
What if just one woman student were to wilt in distress at the sound of “quivering jelly of love” and then report the professor for imposing “lewd” and disturbing language on his students? Would he be hauled before the Ethics Committee? Stripped of tenure? Forced to resign? You find this preposterous? Then consider the following report from The Atlantic on the alarming trend of bowdlerizing the great canon of Western literature because of potentially offensive erotic content:
Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress.... A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses.... Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.
Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless.... Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
And this virus of censorious American PC puritanism has leapt across the Atlantic to inhibit even the teaching of Shakespeare—yes, Shakespeare—at British universities, as reported just last month in the The Independent:
Academics have criticised “trigger warnings” after Cambridge University students were warned about “potentially distressing topics” in plays by Shakespeare. English literature undergraduates were apparently cautioned that a lecture focusing on Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors would include “discussions of sexual violence” and “sexual assault.” According to The Telegraph, the trigger warnings were posted in the English Faculty’s “Notes on Lectures” document which is circulated to students at the university. Academics have expressed concern that colleges trying to protect young adults from certain issues may render them incapable of dealing with real life when they graduate. Supporters of trigger warnings say they serve to help students who may be upset if a text reminds them of a personal traumatic experience.
However, critics such as Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, say allowing students to avoid learning about traumatic episodes of history and literature is “fundamentally dishonest.” Beard said previously: “We have to encourage students to be able to face that, even when they find they’re awkward and difficult for all kinds of good reasons.” David Crilly, artistic director at The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, said: “If a student of English Literature doesn’t know that Titus Andronicus contains scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on the course.”
But voices of sanity such as Beard’s and Crilly’s may be fighting a noble but lost cause against the PC cultural vigilantes, clamoring for the blood of the next prominent stumbler into errant sexual expression, in the lecture hall or office or rehearsal hall or bar. But if we may be allowed to descend from the High Courts of Sexual Inquisition to the land of the living—that is, the merely fallible, sex-tormented mortals who actually make up the human race—who hasn’t lived through anguished or comical moments, either as predator or prey or both at once, in the throes of the temporary madness of desire? And did such impulsive leaps of lust or passion strike anyone as a cause for ritual mass tongue-lashing and tongue-clucking and compulsive daily confessionals and public media crucifixions in the BW era, except perhaps among the most severe of anti-sex feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who considered every heterosexual act of intercourse to be a form of rape? Did anyone but reactionary blue-noses think about suppressing or avoiding the works of Henry Miller? Or D. H Lawrence? Or even Al Goldstein? Yet now even Shakespeare finds himself on the PC Index. Among the sexual-politics contingents of early second-wave feminists, there were, to be sure, literary eviscerations and cultural firestorms, but nothing like the current pell-mell instant media arraignment for crimes against humanity warranting public investigations, tribunals, denunciations and career death sentences. It all smacks of the hellfire zeal of a religious persecution, a jarring devolution of establishment liberals into old-fashioned American sexual head hunters and cultural bluenoses in the tradition of their forebears in Salem and the fundamentalist South.
Betraying a fundamentally elitist impulse to manage and control, the PC inquisitors instinctively recoil from the unruly tempests of human sexuality—the source of desire, the driving torrent of all passion and pleasure, the wellspring of life itself—that at times deafens and blinds and exalts all of us. With the soul of an accountant and the temperament of the professional manager, the PC inquisitors seeks to confine the Dionysian chaos of Eros within the strictures of a bureaucratic handbook of procedure and etiquette, as though a sexual impulse or encounter were a banking transaction or a court proceeding. Thus do the neoliberal elites conduct this front in their incessant war on nature, including the unruly source of nature itself: behold the dismaying spectacle of these joyless, bloodless mortals doing futile battle with the god Eros. The vigilantes cannot win this battle, of course, but they can inflict needless damage on reputations, careers, on our entire cultural heritage in enforcing their groupthink compendium of trigger warnings, speech codes, and rules of order.
Something surpassingly strange is at work here—a wrong-headed authoritarian ire over the spasmodic misfires of the human comedy combined with some primal meltdown of a besieged and increasingly desperate ruling class and its longstanding winking sexual hypocrisies. It is a moral panic that is, ironically, immoral at its core: repressive and diversionary, an identity-politics orgy of misdirected moral energies that breeds a chilling conformity of word and deed and, in so doing, cripples the critical faculties and independence of spirit needed to challenge the status quo the PC monitors profess to abhor. In reality, their speech and conduct codes foster a spirit of regimentation rather than rebellion, thereby shoring up the power of the repressive elites that are leading the human race to social, economic, and ecological disaster.
So this is not just a moral panic—but a bizarre inversion of values in which Bill Clinton can murder 500,000 Iraqi children, throw millions of poor women and their children off welfare, and instigate the global rule of transnational corporations with NAFTA, but he is not impeached or stigmatized for any of those atrocities but rather for a workplace blowjob; in which Hillary Clinton can lead the charge for the destruction of Libya, reducing that country to primeval rubble, and is not only not fired or ostracized but is rewarded with the Democrats’ presidential nomination and lauded by corporate feminists as a champion of “inclusiveness”; in which Barack Obama pushed fraudulent health-care reform that leaves a barbaric 27 million people with zero coverage and millions more with crippling premiums and deductibles that render their “coverage” all but unusable, thus sentencing tens of thousands of people to death every year because they cannot afford timely medical care, and dropped 26,171 pounds of bombs in 2016 alone, and yet he is not only not reviled and abominated as a con artist but is worshipped as an icon of enlightened governance; in which the entire ruling elite and its associates in the corporate media are chronically underplaying—indeed, scarcely mentioning—the gravity of the climate change crisis, which would merely spell the end of the human species within a hundred years, yet no copycat 24/7 umbrage or five-alarm indignation on the part of anyone in those elite circles or their acolytes over this unprecedented planetary emergency.
Hence the long-buried, freshly unearthed ego bruises of the privileged identity-politics crowd eclipse mass murder and ecocide on the outrage meters of this country’s opinion shapers. The same solemn cohort—mostly white and middle-class, many of them ardent McResistance DNC partisans (or, in the case of Leean Tweeden, Franken’s tongue-kiss accuser, a movement conservative who twice voted for George W. Bush)—is so easily roused to near-apoplexy about a naughty lunge of the hand or tongue yet discreetly ignores or openly cheers on unparalleled crimes against humanity: endless debilitating wars against nameless enemies abroad, the toxic mercenary corruption and annihilation of democracy, staggering political/social inequality (the top one percent of the world’s population now owns half of the world’s wealth), and ecocide everywhere—committed and abetted with impunity by the PC brigades’ culture heroes like the Clintons and Obama and their cohorts in the media and the corporate/political elites.
So yes—prosecute the rapists and pedophiles and let them suffer in jail. But you will excuse me if I stand aside from the stampede of outrage about Al Franken’s wayward tongue or even Donald Trump’s juvenile frat-house boasts while the world teeters on the brink. The scale of values of this country’s liberal elites, and the issues that fuel and exhaust their capacity for outrage, border on moral dementia. Their vaunted “values” lead us not to virtue and to spiritual renewal, but to the nauseating sanctimony of the custodians of a charnel house—to the abyss.As most fighters age, they become less active with their strikes, opting for efficiency and accuracy over aggression. Half a lifetime of wars will take the energy and raw passion out of any man, and turn him into a slower, more fragile version of himself.
Any normal man, that is.
Robbie Lawler is an anomaly. In MMA, they don't come more experienced than the man called "Ruthless." After nearly 14 years Lawler has racked up a record of 35 fights. In those contests, Lawler has taken more than his fair share of punishment, particularly during his listless years as a middleweight outside the UFC. And yet, as if to underline the sheer weirdness of his sudden return to title contention, Lawler has actually upped his output over time, throwing a greater number and variety of strikes every fight than ever before.
DECEPTIVE VOLUME
Lawler has never been shy about throwing his hands. One of the most gifted punchers in MMA history, Lawler's early UFC days were defined by one thing: this guy could knock you, and he desperately wanted to. Dangerous though he was, however, Lawler's approach lacked a certain artfulness. The young Lawler was so confident in his power that he threw with reckless abandon, rarely setting up his strikes or leaving himself in position to follow with more should the first one or two fail to get the job done.
Over time, Robbie has developed a more complete combination punching game, throwing more strikes with more thought behind each.
It's the style of punching that makes Lawler such an interesting study, however. While most veteran fighters find themselves throwing less as they grow older, Lawler has found a way to throw more punches despite losing some of his youthful vigor. The secret to his newfound success as a volume striker is the amount of power he puts into every strike--or rather, the lack thereof.
The key to Lawler's activity level is his pawing jab, a punch which requires almost no real energy to throw, and which leaves him in position to throw any number of other, more powerful shots. In a way, Lawler's pawing jab creates false volume, giving his opponent the impression of activity while allowing Lawler to conserve his energy for the punches that matter.
Before looking at some of Robbie's work, let's examine the pawing jab as employed by one of the best boxers of all time, "The Body Snatcher" Mike McCallum.
This is McCallum pouncing on the stunned Julian Jackson after knocking him down. Note how McCallum constantly sticks his left hand in Jackson's face, but only really sits down on every third punch or so. This is the basic idea behind the pawing jab, a tool that can turn even a slow, methodical fighter into a volume striker. The beauty of the punch is that it requires absolutely no commitment to throw, making it the perfect set-up punch, and a tool with many, many uses.
Let's see one of the ways that Lawler uses it.
(Click to enlarge)
GIF
1. Lawler checks Hendricks' jab with his left hand and shoots a pawing jab of his own into Hendricks' waiting palm.
2. As Hendricks shoots out another jab, Lawler intercepts him with a stiff right to the mouth.
3. And pulls back to avoid a left uppercut from Hendricks.
4. Another paw, this one turning into a right hook at the end, bats Hendricks on the side of the head.
5. |
Here's a look at the old and the new. Just click the <> buttons to switch between them. Then offer your opinion in the box at the bottom of this post. Hide caption The old Yahoo look. Previous Next Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Hide caption The new Yahoo look. Previous Next screen grab 1 of 2 i View slideshow
Compare Yahoo's new logo, introduced Thursday, to what was there before.
According to CEO Marissa Mayer, "we knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo — whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud."
On her Tumblr page, Mayer goes on at length about how:
-- "We didn't want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don't exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.
-- "We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes — conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.
-- "Serifs were a big part of our old logo. It felt wrong to give them up altogether so we went for a sans serif font with'scallops' on the ends of the letters.
-- "Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO's.
-- "We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark."
The exclamation point also dances a bit on loading and reloading.
PCWorld thinks the logo is "a little bit sleeker" than its predecessor. Also, while "not a dramatic departure, it represents Yahoo's latest effort to add some shine to a brand that has lost its luster."
The new design came after "30 days of typographic teases," as the San Jose Mercury News notes, and set off the "expected opinion storm in social media. As is often the case, the haters moved the fastest."
We are not art experts by any stretch of the imagination. So we'll throw out a question to give the Two-Way crowd a chance to critique Yahoo's change.The Bacon & Cheese Stuffed Double Pizza Burger
Wow, D-Hall really went above and beyond with his tacos and Kid Cudi post. Of course I couldn’t be bested, so I got to work finding an even better recipe / musical accompaniment to go along with it. I quickly decided that his taco’s were super fancy and very gourmet (they even look awesome). The only way I was going to beat him in this culinary battle was to take this in the other direction. Enter the Bacon & Cheese Stuffed Double Pizza Burger.
This is the height of gluttony folks. I remember wincing at the idea of putting fried chicken and waffles together a couple of years back (butter and syrup on fried chicken, all sitting on a giant fluffy waffle….), only to be appalled by KFC’s offering of the Double Down a few months later. Then came the Craz-E Burger, a bacon cheeseburger sandwiched by two glazed donuts from Krispy Kreme, adding up to a grand total of 1,500 calories!
And now, I’ve seemingly come across the height of this excessive food craze with the Bacon & Cheese Stuffed Double Pizza Burger. Two personal sized cheese stuffed, pepperoni and sausage topped frozen pizza’s, two large burgers, and lots of cheese and bacon make up this behemoth.
Ingredients:
2 DiGiorno Cheese Stuffed Crust Sausage and Pepperoni Topped Pizzas
2 lbs of Bacon (2 packages)
5 lbs Ground Beef
2 Eggs
1 White Onion
1 Garlic Bulb
1 Bag of Shredded Cheddar
Sliced Pepper Jack & Cheddar Cheese
Salt & Pepper
Instructions:
Fry up a pound of the bacon, chop it up and place aside. Chop onion and slice the garlic and mix in a bowl with the ground beef and 2 eggs. Separate beef into two equal patties then sprinkle the bag of shredded cheese and chopped bacon onto one patty and place the other beef patty on top making a cheese and bacon stuffed burger. Put this in the oven and bake at 400 degrees until browned and cooked all the way through. On the stove top assemble the rest of the bacon in the form of a dream catcher and fry. Apply the bacon dream catcher to top of cooked burger. Put pizzas in the oven and follow directions for cooking. Assemble burger, sliced cheese, bacon dream catcher, and cover with pizza “buns.” Fini.
To accompany you along this journey to the ends of the meat eating world, I’ve put together a few metal tracks.
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Gum Takes Tooth – Tannkjøtt
To start you off, and help you assemble this beast I’ve selected Gum Takes Tooth and their song “Tannkjøtt,” which means bloody gums or something to that effect. It’s upbeat for a metal song, and will have you hot stepping while you prepare the gastronomic onslaught.
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Trap Them – Day Forty: Dead Fathers Wading In the Bodygrounds
I couldn’t think of a better track to get you jumping right into eating this thing than Trap Them, and their song “Day Forty: Dead Fathers Wading In the Bodygrounds.” I don’t even know if “Bodygrounds” is a word, but I feel like this song gives the you an image of wading knee deep in meaty shot up dead bodies. sort of what eating this burger will be like. And it has a nice heavy slow persistently downbeat pace that you can eat yourself to death with.
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Slipknot – (sic)
What better song to finish you off and act as the soundtrack to what will become the aftermath of your intestines then Slipknots “(sic)?” I believe the chorus is “you can’t kill me because I’m already deep inside you…” that’s right, this burger is going to kill you from the inside out. Heavy fucking shit!
Props to the man who invented this monstrosotiy, Stefan from Central Jersey (of course).German chemists have shown that it’s possible to turn off aromaticity with a blast from a laser beam. Tuning the frequency of the laser excites electrons from the ground state to a non-aromatic state of alternating single and double bonds.
Inga Ulusoy and Mathias Nest at the Technical University Munich, performed the work as part of a larger project in Nest’s lab. ’This is the first step in a broader project to control the reactivity of molecules in general,’ Nest explains. ’The question we ask ourselves is, "Can we use a laser pulse to control the reactivity of a system?" and one of the easiest things for us to try [to control] is aromaticity, because we are theoreticians... so we decided to start with something small.’
’The idea is so simple that one can be angry that one didn’t have it oneself,’ says J?rn Manz, who works on laser control of reactions at the Free University of Berlin. He describes the work as a new twist in the field of laser control and ’a little ingenious’.
As every student of chemistry learns, benzene is a highly stable compound with six equal bond lengths and delocalised pi electrons in rings above and below the plane of the molecule. However, there are several different definitions of aromaticity. Ulusoy and Nest decided to work with the definition of benzene as having six-fold electronic symmetry.
The pair identified non-aromatic states of benzene that do not satisfy this definition - one with different electron density on alternate atoms, and one with different electron density on alternate bonds. They then calculated the path and energy required to get to these states.
The non-aromatic states are actually a superposition of the ground state and the first or second singlet state, but a direct transition to either of the two excited states is forbidden by symmetry, so instead an alternative path had to be found via several other excited states. Ulusoy then put a trial laser pulse into her calculations and iteratively optimised the properties of the pulse to excite half of the ground state to one of the intermediate levels, and from the there to the final state.
One of these new states should look very familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of chemistry. ’The state that we created corresponds to the cyclohexatriene molecule, where we have alternating bond orders of one and two,’ says Nest. ’That was our practical definition of a non-aromatic state.’ However, the molecule is not quite a true cyclohexatriene - the electron density moves so fast that the atoms can’t keep up and the bond lengths are still all equal, much like Kekul?’s resonance structures of benzene.
As a first step, Nest admits he is a long way off his final aim of firing laser pulses at compounds so that new reactions can be controlled and performed. However, Manz says he thinks this work should inspire further work in this area.
Laura HowesWhen designing any emergency response plan, it is important to first identify the most realistic threat you are likely to face. Imaginations will always exceed budgets, so identifying and mounting a defense against the threat you are most likely to face will help manage your fear and your finances in equal measure.
I’m a fan of The Walking Dead as much as anyone, but the thought of zombie coming in through my windows on a some random Tuesday afternoon hell-bent on eating me alive, brings me about as much anxiety as the thought of a grizzly bear scaling a downtown apartment building intent on doing the same. It’s just not going to happen.
The Realistic Scenario
Why are we talking about Bunkers in the first place?
Anyone who’s walked through an airport in the last ten years, has heard, “Threat Level: Orange” which is a non-invasive way for Homeland Security to say, “Yes – there is a reasonable expectation for a violent terrorist threat to breach our borders.”
However, this next attack will very likely be a 9/11 style attack. Which is to say, a singular or coordinated attack all happening at once – not unlike the hours between 8am and 11am on September 11th. The intent of a terrorist threat is meant promote fear and panic rather than to engage in a continuous and prolonged campaign of direct action.
We as a nation, are also under continuous attack by the [Chinese] shadow warfare cyber tactics probing and potentially infecting our financial institutions, our water supply, and our transportation systems, in what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned as a “Cyber Pearl Harbor.”
Natural disasters also seem more frequent. Hurricane Katrina and Super Storm Sandy brought to the forefront of national attention just how devastating and time consuming these atrocities can be to endure.
Regardless of the crisis you may face, what all of these scenarios have in common is the challenge to your safety and security after the event has occurred. When the dust has settled, the winds have died, and the waters calmed, you must survive until “the return to normal,” and my hope is this helps you find the best way to do so.
For agreement in discussion, I am employing the term “bunker” in the same fashion I would employ “safe-haven” – a defendable place where you and your family can spend evenings in conditional safety and reasonable comfort.
Preparedness is Paramount
Preparing for what comes next, will prepare you for what comes before. Your mind and your body are finely tuned with each other, and stressors on the mind will have physiological affects, much as stressors on the body have psychological affects.
I was in a car accident recently, t-boned while driving down Venice Blvd in Los Angeles.
There was nothing I could have done to prevent the accident. There was no warning, and I had no opportunity to avoid, evade or escape the collision. Yet, I was in complete control over what came next, because I knew I had done everything up to that moment to prepare for this one.
My seatbelt was on having safeguarded my life, and my insurance was paid having safe guarded my livelihood. Had either of those two preparations not been previously handled, I would most definitely not have been in a physical or psychological condition to deal with the aftermath with rational logic and effectiveness. Additional stressors were not a factor, because I had taken the necessary measures to prepare for this very likely and realistic scenario.
What should I do first?
You are right here…right now. Stop reading this article for a second and look around. One second from now, your world and your life will change forever. Are you ready?
Safety First: Protect yourself and get to a safe and sustainable location. You will know your home and your neighborhood the best, so get there as quickly and as safely as you can.
Contact anyone and everyone while/if you still can. Let trusted people (friends and family) know where you are, where you are going, you’re physical condition as well as anything you may need. If you haven’t already done so, initiate your family emergency plan so that everyone knows where to go and what to do.
Take inventory: Who is with you and what you have on hand? If you don’t have what you need, decide immediately how important it is to have vs. the risk of retrieval. This will obviously be a situational-dependent statement, but as a rule: anything less than the life of a loved one, and you should prepare yourself to be without.
Triage: Is anyone hurt or injured? Require immediate medical attention? What do you need to do to ensure the health, welfare and safety of those in your charge tonight? Are you safe where you are? Can you safely move to a better location? You will need to determine the most important tasks often as priorities may shift at any given moment. (Always be thinking: Safety, Food, & Shelter)
Delegate: If you are of good enough fortune to be with others, utilize them to their full advantage. There is strength in numbers. Do Not try to do everything yourself.
If anything can be done 70% as well as you, delegate that tasking to another. They’ll learn as they go, and getting something done is better than getting nothing done.
Where you live will determine what you need
Most of us surviving a crisis situation will be restricted to the
immediate vicinity of our homes with little to no power or communication.
Where you live will determine the necessity of what is needed for your specific situation. If you live in an urban environment, where daily deliveries to markets and groceries are required, then your focus should be on food storage more so than if you live in a more rural environment where you could feasibly live off the land in a hunter/gather capacity.
Dependence on machine-generated climate control is another factor to consider. Understanding the susceptible changes to the natural climate of your location should be factored when deciding where to bunker down.
What is a reasonable expectation of duration?
4 nights / 5 days of on-hand rations is a good rule of thumb. Emergency services are generally able to provide basic assistance within three days. However, having value-added goods on hand (Cigarettes and Alcohol) will afford you the ability to barter and exchange for necessities later on should the crisis continue indefinitely.
Who can I trust?
You already know the answer to this. If you’re thinking, “I think so,” then the answer is no. If you can unequivocally say, “Yes,” than the answer is yes. One may never know where loyalty is born, but the beginning of a crisis isn’t when you want to find out. Alliances start now. Community counts. Find like-minded friends and neighbors who live in close-proximity and start discussing the roles and functions of those who can provide varying and essential skills and services.
For example, if your neighbor has a generator, and you have a giant freezer full of food in your garage, talk to each other now and work out a system to combine resources should the time come. If any of your neighbors are Doctors, RN’s or Police, invite them over for dinner.
What should I have on-hand?
As I stated before, your own needs will be conditional upon your situation. What’s listed here is by no means the must have’s, but rather the should have’s for basic home defense and survival. I have listed them here in order of priority according to my own personal experience and practice.
1. Enough food, water and prescription medication to last you five days. Assume your water won’t be running or will be deemed unsafe. Buy one case of water for everyone in your family and stash it under the bed, in the basement or in the closet. (Somewhere out of sight and out of mind so you won’t use this cache as your go-to supply for car trips)
Water is the one thing you’ll always wish you had in abundance. Some of it you’ll drink, some of it you’ll need to boil, some of it you’ll use to bath. You really can’t have enough.
Your food on-hand should be shelf-stable and require no addition preparation. It’s likely the power will be out and if you’re living in an apartment or similar enclosed location, building a fire won’t always be possible. High calorie, high protein and complex carb meals will be the best. Watch some old-school cowboy movies for inspiration. Stock up on some cans of beans and beef stew, Beef Jerky and Trail Mix. Look into “Paleo Kits” too. Extreme athletes and Cross Fit enthusiast swear by them. I recommend you purchase at least one to see if you like them. On a budget, it’s much cheaper to modify and make your own. Local purchase the ingredients you like and vacuum seal individual single-servings. PaleoKit as shown: Cost $7
2. Have some extra bags of ice in the freezer, king-cubes will last you longer than the icemaker variety. Ice will help keep your refrigerator and freezer functional for a day or two after the power goes out. Fill up a few tuba-ware containers filled with water and freeze overnight. Keep as many frozen bricks in your freezer as you can. Ice does more than chill your drinks, there are medical uses (Blister Burn, splinter removal, oral numbness to treat tooth pain, and soft tissue injury to name a few, so having some on hand will prove beneficial to your cause.
3. A “go-bag” is -in layman terms– the bag you grab when it’s time to “Go,” as in right now -when the time required to plan, prep and pack will mitigate your chance of survival. The premise is such that your go-bag is always packed, ready and waiting with the essentials you will need to survive for two nights and three days in the outdoor terrain of your approximate location and in current local climate. No creature comforts; just the necessities to survive, contained in a packaged weight, affording you the ability to remain mobile. Keep in mind; your packing list may change throughout the year dependent upon the time of year, the season, your location, your medical requirements and your physical ability. You should be well versed in terms of your bag’s content, knowledgeable of item location, and organized for ease of use.
Everyone who is physically able to carry a pack should have one. Your own individual packing list may vary based on personal preference and necessity, but
the contents of the one below serves as an excellent tutorial on what constitutes essentials. If you only do one thing to prepare beyond your in-home food and water storage, this is it. This is what you need. Everyone should have one. Build or buy one today. Many pre-customized options are available on-line. As shown on Amazon.com Cost: $310
4. A fully stocked First-Aid kit is a priority requirement for any emergency action plan. One should always strive to have as much medical and trauma training, resources and equipment on hand as possible. Medical equipment can be cost prohibitive, but medical knowledge can be as cheap as a YouTube search. Being First Aid and CPR certified (or at least capable) could literally save a life one day, and could increase your own survival rate exponentially.
Staff infection is both silent and deadly, and if you find yourself unable to acquire professional medical attention or prescription medication, it is critical you possess, at the very least, the medical know-how and resources to clean, disinfect and treat a cut, scrape, or sprain.
This standard First Aid kit is commonly found in commercial venues, but doubles equally well in the home. Cost: $25
5. Despite all of the technological advances of the past century, the best home defense option available to you is still a mid to full sized dog – especially one with specific [Sentry] training tailored to your needs. In addition to being naturally defensive of their owner, and territorial of their property, a dog can offer a companionship in an otherwise lonesome scenario. (Think; I am Legend vs Castaway) If you already have a dog (even an untrained small dog), you’re already ahead of the game. The yelp of a small pup directed toward an unwelcome visitor may be all that’s required to bring undo attention to clandestine activities and thwart their evil intentions.
6. In every home there should be an identified “Safe Room,” a last line of defense where you and your loved ones can safely barricade yourselves until help can arrive. There is literally no limit to the amount of money one can spend on the construction such a sanctuary.
For the rest of us, we have door wedges. These specific door wedges were designed by EMS units to keep the heavy industrial doors propped open during their rescue operations. As good as they are at propping doors open, they are even better at wedging doors closed. Jam one of these under a closed door and there is no way an intruder is pushing the door open. Added security if you wedge one between the door and the frame too. (Just make sure you’re on the side of the door that can see the hinges)
For a few dollars more, some door wedges also come with an alarm feature, but if you can sleep through an intruder trying to kick down the door, I’m not sure the alarm of a AA Battery will stir you from your slumber. Cost: $8.00
7. Today, all of our communication devices require a charge. Assuming an EMP was not the cause of the crisis you’re currently facing, your mobile devices will be critical to helping you negotiate your way to a better day. (Read: One Second After by William Fortschen) While a few commercial venues with back-up generators may be able to facilitate the needs of the few, they most certainly will not be able to cater to the needs of the many. So skip the Starbucks iPhone-charging line and invest in this universal solar-charging unit. Yes, there are cheaper versions available on the market place, but this one has been in my go-bag for the last two years and has never once let me down. Cost: $120
8. Take the time to go through all of the contents your go-bag has available, and identify anything inside you think you may need to use in your home. Purchase in duplicate to what’s in the bag, but do your best to NOT use what’s already provided. If you don’t already have the basics of a lights-out scenario in your home, then you should most certainly acquire the necessary provisions of matches, candles, flashlights, and batteries. Other items of mention may also include a multi-tool, a home improvement tool kit, survival literature, pocket-knives, pre-packaged meals such as MRE’s, or water purification tablets.
9. Employ aspects of deterrence works, in hopes of promoting transference. The pros of a home security system far outweigh any cons. The innovation available on today’s modern marketplace can match almost any imagination, and yet there are endless options available to work within the confines of even the tightest budget.
A good security system will alert, notify, and confirm the something/someone out of the ordinary with enough lead time for you to respond accordingly. More importantly, a positive security posture promotes one very important fact to the causal observer: You take your security seriously. At any given time, our friends, neighbors, and general passers-by are evaluating our actions, behaviors, and even our daily routines.
And we do this to others. We know which stores are safer than others, which stores we visit take their security more seriously than others, which office buildings are safer, which parking garages are more closely monitored. We even intrinsically know which streets are safe at night, and which streets we go out of our way to avoid. All of this observational knowledge is subconsciously remembered and categorized, and plays and important aspect in split-second decision making scenarios regarding our own safety and security.
In times of crisis, necessity sometimes lends itself to immoral action. Social predators, looters, and criminals of opportunity will always reveal themselves when social order is in chaos. Like lions stalking a herd of gazelle, they will evaluate the masses to identify the easy prey vs. those whom pose a challenge, a target drawn on the weakest and most vulnerable first.
However, criminals often act with childhood methodology in that hard work isn’t warranted unless there’s a guaranteed reward for their effort, otherwise only the least bit of effort shall be asserted. So, forget for a moment, that in this crisis scenario you face, there is no power and your system doesn’t work. The camera dome above your door or next and next to your window, says something succinct about your home, “Another target will be easier.”
10. Despite the fact that movies and television will have you convinced otherwise, a weapon will not be required or necessary for your survival in nearly every conceivable crisis you will realistically face. However, as a former soldier I would be lying to you if I told you I didn’t have a weapon as part of my own emergency action plan. If you decide to include a weapon in your inventory, please familiarize, and train yourself to the fullest extent possible, and employ safety, rational thought and sound moral guidance in all aspects of it’s use.
With all aspects considered, my final recommendation is the Mossberg 500 JIC. Mossberg revealed their understanding of emergency preparedness to heart when naming their Model 500 “JIC,” which stands for “Just In Case.” A shotgun such as this serves many masters. It not only acts as a psychological deterrent to the Social Predator when they hear the unmistakable chuh-chik of the slide chambering a round, and being honest, you don’t exactly have to be surgical when firing it either.
This weapon is equally effective at dropping the bad guy, or the flock of ducks flying overhead for dinner. This weapon is lightweight, easy to use, and gets the job done. Just in case you really find yourself in need (or want) of a versatile and dependable weapon, having this on-hand will serve you well. Cost: $479
Everyday a school day…
Your individual list of needs, wants and desires may be completely different than mine, but what’s most important is that you’re forward thinking to a scenario you can help frame and manage before you find yourself whiplashed by the harsh reality of whatever unfortunate predicament life prescribes.
One advantage of advance preparation is that you afford yourself the extra time needed to get yourself ready both mentally and physically for whatever tomorrow may bring. Preparation requires forethought and action, and if you’ve read this far, you have already improved your odds for a successful outcome. Real life is different from little league tee-ball. No participation trophies here. Big Boy rules are in effect. Expect the worst, and hope for the best. Know that problems will arise, and when life breaks bad it often finds you when you are least expecting, and most ill prepared.
Remember that survivors and winners have something in common; they both visualize victory, even when hope seems forsaken, and the odds are stacked against you. Champion Poker Player, Jack Strauss embodies this philosophy with one of his key quotes after winning the World Series of Poker, “I had a chip, and a chair, so I knew I had a chance.”
Hard work and sacrifice must be accepted as your reality. In the end, your commendation for action will not come in the form of applause or congratulations, and certainly not a trophy, but rather in knowing that you and your loved ones will sleep in peace some future night because of your preparation today.
As I’m signing off, an email alert pops up with the subject line, “Zombie Kit.” I smile a little, and then stop. Like the Mossberg, maybe I should include this too. You know, Just in Case. Cost: $349
Bookmark this site: http://www.ready.gov/
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AdvertisementsYessenia, 21, spent a year and a half in prison in Mexico City.
She wasn't confined to a building with cells, a yard and guards.
But rather to a street in a bustling blue-collar neighbourhood called La Merced, with her pimp/boyfriend, his family and a network of street vendors and other spies watching her every move.
She worked as a prostitute on the same corner where her pimp/boyfriend's mother, who claimed to have witch-like powers, sold clothing.
Yessenia was terrified.
"I don't know a lot about Santeria, but I know that she can use it to do a lot of things," she says. "She could provoke an accident or kill someone with these types of things."
There is a popular myth that human trafficking begins with a kidnapping and involves physical abuse and confinement.
But experts say that's rare, and the problem is actually much more complicated.
"The myth that the victims are chained in some dark dungeon needs to be broken because it's not the case," says My Lo Cook, strategic initiatives director for Mexico at the Polaris Project, a U.S.-based organization combating human trafficking.
"There are many other methods of control."
Human trafficking, as defined by the United Nations, actually includes any use of deception or coercion — not just physical — to control and exploit an individual.
And in the sex trade in La Merced, that control and exploitation can be a family business in which every member has a role.
Family business
Cook says the men in charge often spend time courting the recruits, who relocate because of love and the promise of a better life.
Boys are raised to covet the large houses and fancy sports cars of their fathers and uncles, and are taught the ins and outs of the family business from as young as eight or nine years old.
And mothers, many former trafficking victims themselves, help normalize the behaviour for new recruits.
Yessenia says she started doing sex work in Acapulco when she was 17.
After police brought her to Mexico City for her own protection following a raid, she reached out to a friend who connected her with someone who could get her out of custody.
The man pretended to be Yessenia's uncle to secure her release. Soon after, they fell in love and he eventually became her pimp, she says.
"In the beginning, it was very different. I liked how he treated me," she says. "We lived together. He was my boyfriend."
But Yessenia says he began exerting more control and demanded more money from her. She soon realized he wasn't who she thought he was.
"I felt imprisoned. I could only go from the house to the street and the street to the house."
Erika, a sex worker who didn't want to give her last name, stands for a picture in La Merced. More than 20 million people live in the Mexico City metropolitan area. (Jonathan Levinson)
Cook says the complex web of relationships makes identifying and combating trafficking difficult.
The Mexican government identified 1,814 trafficking victims in 2015, the last year for which data is available. Of those, 784 were for commercial sex. Federal and state officials initiated 665 investigations but only saw 86 convictions.
But that data is incomplete, as many state and federal agencies do not collect or report complete information.
Network of control
According to outreach worker Letty Cruz, the women and girls selling sex in La Merced — by some accounts, the largest red-light district in Latin America — are almost exclusively Mexican and predominantly from Guerrero and Veracruz, among the country's poorest and most violent states.
Prostitutes dot the landscape at all hours of the day and night. Women and girls stand in doorways and storefronts or under umbrellas to protect themselves from the midday sun. They range in age from young teenagers to women in their 70s.
So, many of these people selling things work for the pimp and they just watch over the girls. - Letty Cruz, outreach worker in La Merced
Standing in her small office space overlooking a pedestrian street crowded with vendors, Cruz, co-founder of a neighbourhood outreach organization called Dunami, explains how the local sex trade works.
"That building on the corner is a hotel," she says. "And the next one is a building where one pimp's entire family lives. So, many of these people selling things work for the pimp and they just watch over the girls."
On any given day, you can find Cruz and her colleagues walking around the neighbourhood handing out condoms and talking to the women. Their goal is to establish a relationship with them and, should any of them decide to leave their pimp, offer assistance.
Halcones and madrotas
Out on the street, even brief exchanges can be dangerous. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Cruz and her colleague, Gracia Luevano, were out distributing condoms to sex workers.
During every interaction, the watchful gaze of halcones (literally meaning falcons, people whose job is to be the eyes and ears on the streets) was palpable. Street vendors, police, and neighbourhood teens loitering on the corner all serve as halcones, Cruz says. But so do some of the more experienced women, known as madrotas, who also play a kind of managerial role.
While Luevano was talking to one girl, an agitated man standing a few feet away was listening to their conversation.
He creeped closer until finally, scared of what he might do, Luevano had to leave. The man approached the girl, came in close, and could be seen reprimanding her as he went through her purse.
From left to right, Fanny Sugia, Betsy Alfaro, Gracia Luevano and Jazz Sanchez prepare condoms to hand out to sex workers in La Merced. (Jonathan Levinson)
Such interactions are scary but they also help Cruz and Luevano to identify key players in the neighbourhood.
"We need to gain the girls' trust," Cruz says. "If they see us constantly, they start to realize, 'Oh, they're interested in me.'
"I have their numbers and then they start sending messages like, 'How are you?' or 'I don't feel OK, can we talk?' Until finally they share their story with us."
Last month, Yessenia was 900 pesos short on her weekly payments to her husband. Scared, she decided she had to escape La Merced. She sent a text message to the one person she trusted to help, Letty Cruz.
Yessenia managed to relocate safely to another part of the country and land a stable job.
"I feel peaceful, happy," she says. "I'm free."
But back in La Merced, Cruz and Luevano say they've met three new girls selling sex on the streets.
All three are underage.Warning: This image is a curse. By glancing at this sigil you invited it into your prefrontal cortex where it will remain, working, until such time as its work is done.
Capitol Hill artist Eliza Gauger is creating psychic weaponry. And it is spreading beyond Pike/Pine’s utility poles.
“Some people, it makes them uncomfortable,” she tells CHS of her sigils and glyphs, curses and blessings. “I don’t like to make people uncomfortable unless they’re a threat to us.”
“It’s supposed to be threatening.”
Gauger created the Hex of Obsolescence to protect trans kids. She has focused her work on protecting what she calls dangerous ideas from “those who refuse to mind their own fucking business.” The hex leapt from her creations at problemglyphs.org where the artist has been responding to the pains, sorrows, and occasional surprising celebrations of anonymous followers of her work.
“I can’t trust people. This includes new people who want to be my friends, old friends, and lovers,” one person wrote to Gauger. Her response: Trust
Your Shell Grows with You: “I’m terrified of confronting authority and standing up for myself. I feel intense shame and guilt asking authority figures for help when I need it, because I always have this lingering feeling that my wants and needs are an inconvenience to other people and I should just not say anything at all, because other people are more deserving of their attention than I am. This anxiety makes functioning as an adult daunting, to say the least.” The Cartographer: “every relationship i have had before has been emotionally toxic and mutually destructive if not outright abusive. i am currently tentatively dating someone who is good people and cares for me and my mental shit, but every time we try to work through issues my first reaction is to get scared and reach for the examples of my past partners in how to navigate life/love. and i’m worried i don’t know how to handle healthiness anymore.”
She wants the works to be widely available for use and reuse. “Problem Glyphs has always had that public access nature,” she said. Each of the sigils is done in response to problems that people send to me online and there are over 200 of them now. People have put them on the walls of their houses |
, in what it described as an "incredible frustration for everyone".
Topics: community-and-society, police, crime, local-government, west-melbourne-3003, melbourne-3000, vic
First postedTokyo Electric Power Co. is refusing to reimburse the Environment Ministry for more than ¥30 billion that was spent to decontaminate land hit by radioactive fallout from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the ministry said Tuesday.
Under the special decontamination law adopted in August 2011, the state is responsible for leading and initially financing the decontamination effort, but it can ask Tepco, responsible for the Fukushima crisis, to pay the bill later.
Tepco has paid ¥6.7 billion so far, while the Environment Ministry has sought ¥40.4 billion.
The ministry said Tepco is unwilling to pay for work not directly involving decontamination. For instance, the bill includes costs related to public relations and research and development.
The ¥6.7 billion Tepco has paid covers direct decontamination work such as washing road surfaces and removing tainted soil.
According to a document presented by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to senior ruling party officials this month, Tepco is insisting that shouldering the cost for decontamination as damages will be “duplicate payments” because it is already compensating for land and buildings.
Tepco “has said it will continue to think over whether it will reimburse the government, so we understand that Tepco has not finalized its decision to completely refuse to pay it back,” said Satoshi Watanabe of the Environment Ministry’s cleanup team, hinting Tepco may be sued. “This situation is totally unacceptable.”
The government has budgeted about ¥1.3 trillion for decontamination, of which about ¥470 billion has been used.
Facing trillions of yen in compensation payments for the Fukushima debacle and soaring fuel costs for thermal power to replace nuclear, Tepco may not even have the means to cover the decontamination bill.
Meanwhile, METI is considering exempting Tepco from paying most of the cleanup costs.
The government has not reached a consensus on the move, which could trigger a public backlash because it would mean further taxpayer help.
METI officials believe it would be difficult to win public approval for releasing Tepco from all of the decontamination costs, but it is considering limiting the bill to the ¥470 billion that has already been used, the sources said.
Finance Minister Taro Aso indicated Tuesday that his ministry may give the green light to using government money to clean contaminated areas around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear complex.
“I wonder if we can put all the blame on Tepco, given that (nuclear policy) has been framed by the government,” Aso said.
Information from Kyodo addedImage copyright PA
Wales rugby great Gareth Edwards has been knighted by the Duke of Cambridge in recognition of a glittering sporting career and services to charity.
Sir Gareth attended a ceremony at Windsor Castle on Thursday, after being named in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June.
The 68-year-old former scrum half won 53 caps for Wales from 1967 to 1978.
He also won 10 caps for the British Lions' winning series in New Zealand and South Africa.
At 20 he became Wales's youngest captain, and during his era the Welsh side dominated the Five Nations Championship
Image copyright Getty Images
Originally from Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen in the Swansea Valley, Edwards spent his playing career with Cardiff RFC.
In 1974 Edwards was named BBC Wales Sports Personality of the year.
After his retirement in 1978, he became Captain on the popular sports quiz, Question of Sport.
He now works as a pundit for both the BBC and S4C.
He is married to his childhood sweetheart Maureen and they have two sons, Owen and Rhys.Earlier this month, we got a nod from the Dallas Morning News for our recent digitization and ongoing preservation of “Hate Mail,” a 1992 documentary on racism produced by Mark Birnbaum and Bart Weiss that has been unavailable to the wider public for most of its life.
The documentary gets its name from the spiteful missive sent to Bob Ray Sanders, a black talk radio host on an otherwise predominantly white radio station in Dallas, TX. Birnbaum and Weiss interviewed Sanders and other black community leaders in Dallas about their experiences with racism, as well as members of the Ku Klux Klan, including then-Grand Cyclops Butch Mayfield.
To celebrate the online re-release of their film, Birnbaum and Weiss sat down to discuss the genesis for the program and how they ended up interviewing members of the KKK.
Almost 25 years later, much of the documentary is still deeply relevant to our ongoing discussions about race and racism in America. You can watch that discussion, plus the full 30 minute documentary, below:Search Gallery Sparklers And Fireflys mastermayhem 3 Advertisement Advertisement Springtime Sunset mastermayhem 5 Radiant Suncatcher mastermayhem 3 Golden Hour Ride mastermayhem 2 The Approaching Fog mastermayhem 3 The Golden Traingle mastermayhem 3 The Past On Rails mastermayhem 7 Multiple Paths Of Yesteryear mastermayhem 3 A Brilliant Display Of Spring mastermayhem 1 Down The Spiral mastermayhem 0 Autumn's Remnant Casts A Cold Shadow mastermayhem 1 Allegheny Ice Flow mastermayhem 2 Mangled Ladder At The End Of The Pier mastermayhem 2 Pittsburgh Circa 2014 mastermayhem 1 My Fuzzy Officemate mastermayhem 1 The Calm Allegheny At Sunset mastermayhem 2 The Tiniest Rose mastermayhem 0 Ilex Surveys His New World mastermayhem 2 A Standout In Winter Clothes mastermayhem 2 Give Me A Call Sometime mastermayhem 0 Grain And Green mastermayhem 2 The Bridge And The Glowing City mastermayhem 0 Between Seven And Nine mastermayhem 2 In The Shadow Of The Thoroughfare mastermayhem 3Andrew Carey
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A HOMELESS Limerick man who said he would only deal with armed detectives told uniformed Gardaí that he would do a “Conor McGregor” on them as he “strongly resisted arrest”.
Appealing the severity of a nine month prison sentence imposed for breaching a barring order and obstructing a peace officer, Shane Rainbow (25) with an address at McGarry House in Limerick, had to be “incapacitated with pepper spray” by Gardaí during an incident at a house on the northside of the city last year.
Gardaí arrived to an incident at the Limerick housing estate on February 11 when Mr Rainbow was said to be intoxicated and extremely aggressive.
He told uniformed Gardaí that he would only dealt with detectives, before threatening to “do a Conor McGregor on ye”, State solicitor Michael Murray told to the court.
Released on bail after his arrest and charge, Mr Rainbow subsequently failed to turn up for court dates before eventually being arrested and convicted last September when he was imprisoned for nine months.
Appealing the severity of the sentence, defence counsel Aaron Desmond BL said his client was homeless at the time and “simply had nowhere else to go”.
“He found himself at the wrong address and he was not in the correct state of mind”.
He had serious drug addiction issues but had since made positive steps to address his addictions and settle his life.
However this was rejected by State solicitor Michael Murray who said that “whether he’s incarcerated or free, Mr Rainbow chooses to abuse drugs”.
Judge Tom O’Donnell said he would adjourn the case for three months to see if Mr Rainbow “could get a hold of his chaotic and unpredictable lifestyle”.
“He has to remember that, no matter who or what he says he will do, the nine-month prison sentence is out there still”, he added.
Shane Rainbow was ordered to engage with the Probation Services for the next three months and Judge O’Donnell gave the State liberty to reenter the matter at any stage.Knock. Knock. Knock-knock. Knock.
“The sky is about to sleep, Anna!” I giggle softly, closing my journal carefully and locking it away in a drawer. I refrain myself from stretching, despite being tired, just in case is it not Anna waiting for me on the other side of the door.
As I suspected, she is standing right outside my door, flashing me a grin. She is already wearing her nightgown, and seems absolutely ready to go to bed. She wraps one arm around mine and leads me down the hall, waving at amused servants that bow to us as we walk towards our quarters.
“I take it you don't want to build a snowman, tonight?” I ask, nuzzling the top of her head. She shakes her head with a smile. “That's very unusual of you.”
“I'm not a child anymore.” Puffing out her chest, she pouts an expression of confidence.
“But, Gerdaaaaa~” I mark each word with an excessively childish tone. “There's still chocolate on that shelf! Elsa, give me some, you're the Queeeeeen~” I roll my eyes, satisfied by the hyperbolic Anna impersonation, and dodge an annoyed elbow to the boob.
“Zip it.” She giggles. “I'm not opposed to you giving me some, though.” Her eyebrows waggle suggestively.
“I'm sorry, I must've ran out.”
Her nudge hits the spot, this time.
Whilst I wince from the blow, Anna checks each side of the hall for spectators, and we crawl together into my room. Well, our room; except nobody knows we share it. As soon as the reassuring sound of a locked door is heard, Anna wraps her arms around my neck and stands on tiptoes to peck my lips.
“I do need something from you, though.” Her tone is sheepish, and she kisses my jaw a few times, as if to persuade me.
“Anna, you haven't even told me what you want and you're already trying to seduce me into it.” I stroke her back tenderly, kissing the top of her head.
She fakes authority. “I am cold.”
I'm not convinced. “You are always cold.”
“But this time it's different.” I raise an eyebrow at the suspicious glint in her eye.
“Anna, what are you plotting?” I peck her nose. “Why is it different?”
“Becaaaaaause” She pauses dramatically before pulling me and dropping me in bed. “I've got you. And you are going to cuddle with me aaaaall night.”
I roll my eyes and grab her hands with fake excitement. “Oh, Sis, that's brillliant! Except the fact that I'd freeze you.” My tone drops and I let her hands go.
“Stinker.” She lets herself fall beside me and lays sideways. Shaking my head, I start to strip myself bare of my dress and put on a nightgown. Anna observes me without a word, even though I hear a small squeal when I expose my back to her; the sensation of tickling her senses with my presence makes me shudder lightly. Coughing myself softly into composure, I crawl under the covers and kiss Anna's forehead.
“You won't freeze me...”
I sigh. “Well, but you know my skin is a little colder than yours. It's my power.” Ignoring my statement, she comes close and wraps her arms around me, resting her head in the hollow of my neck.
“It's not for long.” Her whispers are tickling my collarbones. “When I'm around, you always warm up a lot. I'm sure we'll be fine.”
“I do?”
“Yes!” She blinks, surprised. “You hadn't noticed?”
“Well...” I hold her closer. “I usually pay more attention to you than to myself when you're around.”
“Pfffft!” She grins and pecks my lips. “Okay, I believe you. I sort of can't take my mind off you, either.” Her head lays against my chest again. “See? You're already warmer.”
I can't argue with her. I feel warm and comfortable, and Anna's figure fits perfectly in my arms. We're cuddling so close that our legs start to tangle, trying to fit in like one big cuddle piece. Pardon me, “puzzle” piece.
“I guess you were right.” My tone softens and I look at her, losing myself in a teal sea of bliss.
“You're staring.”
“You're cute.”
“You're cuter. Hah! It was grammatically correct, this time!”
“Was it?”
She shooshes me by pressing her lips on mine. “No teasing.”
“No fun.”
“Shhhhhh, only cuddles now.”
“Only cuddles.” I agreed.WOW! Bernie Supporter at IA Hillary Rally Starts TRASHING HILLARY – Security Drags Him Off Stage (VIDEO)
WOW!
So this happened today…
A Bernie supporter started trashing Hillary Clinton and her Wall Street connections at a rally today in Ames, Iowa.
The Crowd STARTED CHEERING!
Then security dragged him off the stage!
Bernie Sanders' rally for @HillaryClinton in Iowa got off to an awkward start when student speaker attacks Hillary https://t.co/3LijxUV5yE — Martin Rosenow (@mdrosenow) November 5, 2016
The Iowa State Daily had more on the disruptor:
Kaleb Vanfosson, president of the Students for Bernie group at Iowa State and a sophomore in political science, gave a protest speech at the event. Vanfosson was scheduled to give a speech about Sanders and Clinton supporters uniting, but instead gave a speech about “how terrible Hillary is.” In the speech, Vanfosson said while Donald Trump, a “part-time reality star and full-time bigot,” doesn’t care about student loan debt, neither does Clinton. “She is so trapped in the world of the elite,” Vanfosson said. “She has completely lost grip of what it’s like to be an average person.” Vanfosson said the only thing Clinton cares about is the billionaires that fund her election. The student added there was no point in voting for the “lesser of two evils.”
Bernie Sanders' rally for @HillaryClinton in Iowa got off to an awkward start when student speaker attacks Hillary https://t.co/3LijxUV5yE — Martin Rosenow (@mdrosenow) November 5, 2016This is the first of the every-four-weeks MemShrink reports that I’m now doing. The 21 bugs fixed in the past four weeks include 11 leak fixes, which is great, but I won’t bother describing them individually. Especially when I have several other particularly impressive fixes to describe…
Image Handling
Back in March I described how Timothy Nikkel had greatly improved Firefox’s handling of image-heavy pages. Unfortunately, the fix had to be disabled in Firefox 22 and Firefox 23 because it caused jerky scrolling on pages with lots of small images, such as Pinterest.
Happily, Timothy has now fixed those problems, and so his previous change has been re-enabled in Firefox 24. This takes a big chunk out of the #1 item on the MemShrink big ticket items list. Fantastic news!
Lazy Bytecode Generation
Brian Hackett finished implementing lazy bytecode generation. This change means that JavaScript functions don’t have bytecode generated for them until they run. Because lots of websites use libraries like jQuery, in practice a lot of JS functions are never run, and we’ve found this can reduce Firefox’s memory consumption by 5% or more on common workloads! That’s a huge, general improvement.
Furthermore, it significantly reduces the number of things that are allocated on the GC heap (i.e. scripts, strings, objects and shapes that are created when bytecode for a function is generated). This reduces pressure on the GC which makes it less likely we’ll have bad GC behaviour (e.g. pauses, or too much memory consumption) in cases where the GC heuristics aren’t optimal.
The completion of this finished off item #5 on the old Memshrink big ticket items list. Great stuff. This will be in Firefox 24.
Add-on Memory Reporting
Nils Maier implemented add-on memory reporting in about:memory. Here’s some example output from my current session.
├───33,345,136 B (05.08%) -- add-ons │ ├──18,818,336 B (02.87%) ++ {d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d} │ ├──11,830,424 B (01.80%) ++ {59c81df5-4b7a-477b-912d-4e0fdf64e5f2} │ └───2,696,376 B (00.41%) ++ treestyletab@piro.sakura.ne.jp/js-non-window/zones/zone(0x7fbd7bf53800)
It’s obvious that Tree Style Tabs is taking up 2.7 MB. What about the other two entries? It’s not immediately obvious, but if I look in about:support at the “extensions” section I can see that they are AdBlock Plus and ChatZilla.
If you’re wondering why those add-ons are reported as hex strings, it’s due to a combination of the packaging of each individual add-on, and the fact that the memory reporting code is C++ and the add-on identification code is JS and there aren’t yet good APIs to communicate between the two. (Yes, it’s not ideal and should be improved, but it’s a good start.) Also, not all add-on memory is reported, just that in JS compartments; old-style XUL add-ons in particular can have their memory consumption under-reported.
Despite the shortcomings, this is a big deal. Users have been asking for this information for years, and we’ve finally got it. (Admittedly, the fact that we’ve tamed add-on leaks makes it less important than it used to be, but it’s still cool.) This will also be in Firefox 24.
b2g
Gregor Wagner has landed a nice collection of patches to help the Twitter and Notes+ apps on B2G.
While on the topic of B2G, in today’s MemShrink meeting we discussed the ongoing problem of slow memory leaks in the main B2G process. Such leaks can cause the phone to crash or become flaky after its been running for hours or days or weeks, and they’re really painful to reproduce and diagnose. Our partners are finding these leaks when doing multi-hour stress tests as part of their QA processes. In contrast, Mozilla doesn’t really have any such testing, and as a result we are reacting, flat-footed, to external reports, rather than catching them early ourselves. This is a big problem because users will rightly expect to have their phones run for weeks (or even months) without rebooting.
Those of us present at the meeting weren’t quite sure how we can improve our QA situation to look for these leaks. I’d be interested to hear any suggestions. Thanks!Posted on: April 28, 2014
[Photo] Mark Rosen/Wikimedia Commons
We all know the Myth. We've heard it told and retold hundreds of times, in "motivational" speeches exhorting audiences to "climb your personal Everest," in press releases announcing the latest person to summit for the latest reason, in corporate metaphors hailing the qualities required to overcome whatever obstacles stand in the way of "success" on the world's highest peak.
As climbers and as readers of mountain literature, we're also familiar with attempts to communicate the realities behind the Everest Myth. We've seen decades of accounts about the crowds of clients on the normal routes and about the extensive reliance on the ropes fixed, the camps placed, the oxygen bottles carried and the loads hauled by local workers. Some of us have argued in print and online that this form of "totally supported" ascent is not "climbing," that genuine mountaineering involves more direct contact with the features of the mountain, and that the "spirit of alpinism" is about respect for the natural world, not its dominion. In 2008 the French alpinist Patrick Wagnon summed up this view in an impassioned editorial for Montagnes Magazine:
"I'm not seeking, here, to advocate an elitist discourse...but rather a return to humility, in which it's up to the climber to adapt himself to choosing an objective within his abilities, and not to the mountain to be rendered more accessible."
Over the years, like the editors of so many other publications around the world, and like numerous members of the climbing community, Alpinist contributors have periodically spoken out against the current problems with high-altitude tourism on Everest. And each season, as the death toll rises, the Myth only seems to grow more powerful. The climbing writer Peter Beal argues on his blog, "There is no question that Everest is a spectacle now, feeding on its own image, becoming a bigger version of itself."
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Then on April 18 of this year, sixteen Sherpa, Tamang, Gurung and Nepali high-altitude staff died in a single ice avalanche in Everest's Khumbu Icefall. All references to individual summit dreams take on a hollow sound before the images of children's faces contorted in grief; before the knowledge that their parents died trying to earn the money to support them and to send them to school.
Before yet another Everest season arrives next year, I believe the consequences of the Myth must be examined again, this time with an even stronger emphasis on the dangers for those whose labor helps sustain it. To look behind the layers of this mythology is not merely a matter of pointing out differences in mountaineering styles or of arguing about philosophies and motivations. In inspirational books and speeches, many clients have obscured the immense infrastructure of labor that makes their exploits possible. And to the degree that Sherpas and other local guides have become invisible in such stories, their concerns, their risks and the value of their lives have become invisible as well.
When Sherpas appear in Western narratives, their role is far too often described in terms redolent with imperial nostalgia. In a recent blog post (republished on Alpinist.com), Jemima Diki Sherpa evokes the "six-odd decades of mountaineering mythbuilding" that have led some Westerners to imagine themselves "as conquering heroes, assisted by a legion of Sherpa faithful ready—and cheerful—to lay down sweat and lives for arduous, but ultimately noble and glorious, personal successes." On the One Mountain Thousand Summits Facebook page, the climbing writer Freddie Wilkinson alludes to "a fog of Orientalism" that has lingered over representations of Sherpas in the media, a gauzy set of projected fantasies about the exotic and the Other.
Meher H. Mehta, an elder member of the Himalayan Club recalled in a 2012 email to Alpinist: "The division of 'them and us' was very much an attitude of the colonials [during the early twentieth century].... There was always the case of demarcation of the common and preferred. It was in that context that the Sherpa found entry into the mountaineering hierarchy." Even today, depictions of Sherpas as almost-mythical, self-sacrificing beings present them, implicitly or explicitly, as subservient to the desires and expectations of Western visitors. The suffering, fears and hopes of individual Sherpas can be easily ignored in paeans to "the Sherpa people" that extol their "geographic destiny"—as if all Sherpas were preordained to spend their lives hauling heavy equipment for foreigners, cheerfully and faithfully, amid the ever-present dangers of avalanches, icefall and thin air. Such writing praises them, essentially, for 'knowing their place.'
In Buried in the Sky (2012), Amanda Padoan and Peter Zuckerman described the widespread appropriation of the Sherpa culture and name: "The word [Sherpa] is often applied commercially to anything that helps people get around. Haul your terrier in the Sherpa Dog Carrier. Brace your belly with a Baby Sherpa Maternity Belt. Stow your bibs and burp cloths in the award-winning Alpha Sherpa diaper bag. 'It's no mystery how this pack got its name,' reads the promotional website for the Evo-Sport Sherpa Rucksack. 'The Sherpa is built to carry all your gear, and you won't feel a thing.'" The blog Reclaiming Sherpa keeps a list of companies that use "Sherpa" as a brand, and that thus help conflate an ethnicity and a group of human beings with "goods and services." Beneath the surface of some international Everest accounts, there's a similar kind of dehumanization, an assumption that suffering can be passed on to hired "personal Sherpas," who are somehow "built" to bear and endure.
A certain romanticism lies at the heart of many Western mountaineering traditions, one that has taken multiple and shifting forms: the image of the heroic individual who tests himself against the elements or who seeks to lose himself in union with nature; the valuing of transcendent moments that seem to exist outside of civilization and time. That same tendency, however, can spill over into less seemly habits of thought. As the anthropologist Sherry Ortner explains, the echoes of an older, essentializing language resound in some modern Everest tales, portraying Sherpas as if they were an inextricable part of a romanticized natural landscape, as "happy," "unmodern" and "innocent." During the early days of Himalayan mountaineering, this kind of rhetoric promoted the attractions of hiring Sherpas. But it also frequently denied them the right to make their own decisions about personal safety, depicting the Sherpas as "childlike" and insisting that Western expedition leaders 'knew best'—even when they ordered Sherpas to carry loads in dangerous snow conditions (Life and Death on Mt. Everest, 1999).
Filled with ghostly remnants of this language, the Everest Myth veils the complexities of mountain workers' lives, the scarcity of better employment that drives most local expedition staff to such hazardous jobs; the increased professional qualifications and experience of some modern Sherpa guides; the dreams of many to escape mountaineering into careers that offer less physical risk, more autonomy and more choices; the stories of Sherpas who have, in fact, succeeded in non-climbing careers in Nepal and in other parts of world; the varied cultures among the members of different ethnic groups who perform the same labor as Sherpa high-altitude staff and who are often referred to by the same name; the growing frustration of many expedition workers with the inequities of the current system; the political tensions within the country after years of struggles between Maoists and the government; the broader economic struggles that have pushed many Nepalis to seek other dangerous jobs abroad, including the hundreds of migrant workers who have died in the past few years on construction sites in Qatar.
In a 2013 article, "The Disposable Man," Outside Senior Editor Grayson Schaffer wrote about Everest in much-needed, de-mythologized terms: "A Sherpa working above Base Camp on Everest is nearly 10 times more likely to die than a commercial fisherman—the profession the Center for Disease Control and Prevention rates as the most dangerous nonmilitary job in the US—and more then three and a half times as likely to perish than an infantryman during the first four years of the Iraq war. As a dice roll for someone paying to reach the summit, the dangers of climbing can perhaps be rationalized. But as a workplace safety statistic, 1.2 percent mortality is outrageous. There's no other service industry in the world that so frequently kills and maims its workers for the benefits of paying clients."
In a Guardian report this year, the British journalist Ed Douglas portrayed Everest's labor conditions with a similar industrial language: "As factory floors go, it's hard to imagine anywhere more dangerous. And that is what the [Khumbu] Icefall is: a place of work for the Sherpas and other high-altitude workers. It is hard to imagine anything in nature more capricious or beyond human control, yet Sherpas ferrying supplies to the upper slopes must pass through this labyrinth up to 30 times during the season. They are playing Russian roulette for a living." To look at Everest high-altitude tourism, thus, for what it has become—a multimillion-dollar business—allows for a more serious investigation of labor relations, working conditions and inequality. It encourages a demand for better life insurance for local expedition workers. It raises questions about differences in pay between some indigenous and Western guides who have similar levels of experience.
There are other shifts in talking about Everest that may remove additional layers of the Myth. During the 1963 American Everest Expedition, the writer James Ramsey Ullman described Sherpa staff carrying loads from Advance Base Camp: "The real job, during this phase of the climb, was being done by the Sherpas up on the Lhotse Face, and there was a glumly recurrent, though scarcely realistic, vision of their going on all the way to the top of the mountain while the sahibs cooled heels and behinds in the Western Cwm. THIRTEEN SHERPAS REACH SUMMIT OF EVEREST; AMERICANS GREET THEM ON DESCENT WITH CHEERS AND HOT TEA would be a fine message to send out to Kathmandu and the world" (Americans on Everest, 1964).
Now, when similar announcements would be accurate (albeit, perhaps, without the offer of American-brewed hot tea), we rarely see such headlines amid the media sources that report on commercial ascents. What if instead of announcing that a client "climbed Everest," those newspapers and websites, instead, named the particular groups of local guides who prepared the route to the summit and then assisted their clients to the top? What if the term "Everest climber" were given to the people who climbed the features of the mountain directly, rather than awarded to those who ascended its pre-fixed ropes? More honest accounts might result in a clearer vision of what takes place on Everest—the beginnings, perhaps, of real discussions about effective and lasting solutions.
There has been an inherent violence to the Everest Myth: violence to the natural environment in the waste that pollutes this over-crowded mountain; to individual identities in the stereotypes that persist; to truth, and most of all, to human lives. At the same time, the Myth can give the general public the false impression that the current methods of commercial expeditions are the only way, erasing the diverse history of mountaineering styles that preceded them. When last year's Everest fight stopped Ueli Steck, Simone Moro and Jonathan Griffith's attempt, few people seemed to remember that others had previously climbed Everest without using fixed ropes on the Lhotse Face—or that Reinhold Messner, Erhard Loretan and Jean Troillet had proven, decades ago, that ascents could be made without high-altitude support staff.
Many have argued that Everest tourism is necessary for local economies. A few guiding companies have striven admirably to give back to communities, with a variety of programs. But after the disasters of the past few seasons, it's time to ask: If this industry must continue in the future, can it be reorganized into new forms that might result in less suffering, discord and grief? In the aftermath of this year's Khumbu Icefall accident, Sherpas guides and other local expedition workers are already taking action. They have demanded that the Nepali government pay more support to the families of the dead, cover medical treatment for the injured and increase the amount of life and rescue insurance for future seasons. They have asked for 30 percent of peak fees to go toward establishing a "mountain relief fund." And they have argued for the authority of local guides to cancel a climbing season, without a financial penalty—the right to make their own decisions, at last, about when the mountain's conditions are placing them in unacceptable risk.
More and more local guides are now speaking and writing about their experiences, taking control of their own representations in the international media. New stories, told by Sherpas from a wide variety of careers and backgrounds will increasingly tear rifts in the once-dominant narrative of the Myth. In the Nepali Times, Tashi Sherpa, a gear company owner, declares: "We cannot predict nature's tantrums and in that we have common ground, for we do not blame anybody for the shifting of the mountain or the movement of rocks; that is the risk inherent in venture. What we cannot accept is the furtive manipulation and complicit acceptance [by others] to make more for ourselves and pay less to those that risk their lives on our behalf."
The old paradigm of foreign visitors dictating the plots of Everest climbing narratives is ending. Instead of merely purchasing a fading illusion of heroism, could more clients (as some already do) contribute more directly to the welfare of local communities? Could the choice of guided peaks be better matched to the abilities of clients, allowing a lighter style and more natural experience for the whole team—and less exposure to objective hazards for the workers? Perhaps, Freddie Wilkinson suggests, if commercial teams could shift their focus toward other, more appropriate destinations in the Himalaya, "such a change would still bring employment and opportunity to the Sherpa community; it would avoid the ludicrous notion of using helicopters to ferry people and equipment above the [Khumbu] icefall; it would potentially spread the economic prosperity that expeditions offer to more valleys and regions of Nepal while also diluting the human impact; it would create a more respectful, and ultimately sustainable model for commercial climbing in the Himalaya. The reason, of course, why nobody has seriously talked about doing this is that the Myth is too strong. People...will always be drawn to the superlative, and there are few goals more easily defined, than reaching the highest point on planet Earth."
But it's important to remember that the well being of local workers is not just an issue for the Everest guiding industry. Most independent alpine-style climbers rely on low-altitude porters to carry loads to base camps, employees who remain even more invisible in international narratives than Sherpa high-altitude staff (See Campbell MacDiarmid's article in Alpinist 42). Nick Mason asked in the 2008 Alpine Journal: "Is it radical to suggest that instead of an equipment or clothing company sponsoring yet another climber they sponsor the construction of porter shelters where they are so desperately needed in Nepal?"
By helping to overturn the false romanticism associated with the Everest Myth, we might all find unexpected ways to break seemingly ironclad conventions, to promote greater levels of both creativity and responsibility for Himalayan climbing. For the Myth, of course, can also trap some "Westerners" within its stereotypes, reinforcing the outdated imperial notions of "us and them"; blurring cultural, national and personal diversity among foreign clients and guides; reiterating patterns of expected roles that they, too, may find limiting and disturbing. In its emphasis on success and personal fulfillment, the Myth can eclipse more important values associated with alpinism, such as solidarity, self-reliance, humility and respect for mountain environments. A return to the "spirit of alpinism" on Everest might encourage something far more meaningful than any summit: a "brotherhood of the rope" that acknowledges not only the connections between climbers, but also the human bonds between every person who dwells and travels beneath Chomolungma—the original name for this still sacred peak.
[With additional reporting by Gwen Cameron.—Ed.]
Sources: Freddie Wilkinson, Janice Sacherer, Meher H. Mehta, Gwen Cameron, Americans on Everest, Buried in the Sky, Life and Death on Mt. Everest, Tigers of the Snow, Montagnes Magazine, Outside, The Alpine Journal, mountainsandwater.com, alpinist.com, whathasgood.com, reclaimingsherpa.wordpress.com, outsideonline.com, theguardian.com, thehimalayantimes.com
Alpinist, our small editorial staff works hard to create in-depth stories that are thoughtfully edited, thoroughly fact-checked and beautifully designed. Please consider supporting our efforts by Here at, our small editorial staff works hard to create in-depth stories that are thoughtfully edited, thoroughly fact-checked and beautifully designed. Please consider supporting our efforts by subscribing
advertisementBuy Photo Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou (right) and Gov. Scott Walker shake hands during the Foxconn announcement. (Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)Buy Photo
MADISON - The head of the Taiwanese company that plans to bring thousands of jobs to Wisconsin five years ago compared his workers to animals and had the director of a zoo give his executives management tips.
"(Foxconn parent company) Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache," Foxconn CEO Terry Gou was quoted saying in 2012 at a company party held at the Taipei Zoo.
Foxconn last week unveiled plans to build a $10 billion, 20-million-square-foot complex in Wisconsin that would employ 3,000 people initially and up to 13,000 ultimately. The plan for the flat-panel television screen factory is contingent on lawmakers giving the company $3 billion in incentives and relaxing environmental regulations.
RELATED: Official to lawmakers: Foxconn's Wisconsin payroll could reach $800 million annually
RELATED: How Wisconsin sought to win Foxconn
FULL COVERAGE: Foxconn updates
Soon after making his comments five years ago, Gou had Chin Shih-chien, the director of the zoo, participate in Foxconn parent company’s annual review and spoke to his executives about how to manage animals based on their temperaments, according to Want China Times, a Taiwan-based news outlet that has since ceased publication.
"I am managing over one million animals every day and it's such a headache. But our zoo chief knows that he can put tigers and lions together, but not tigers and chickens together. So I want to learn from him," Gou said at the company party at the zoo, according to a translation of his comments shown on FTV, a cable news station in Taiwan.
In response to news reports, Foxconn at the time released a statement that said Gou did not mean to speak negatively about his employees but understood his comments could be misinterpreted.
“In an effort to encourage his management team to learn from all aspects of life, Mr. Gou did say that, since all humans are members of the animal kingdom, it might be possible to learn from Mr. Chin’s experience as his team looks for lessons that can be applied to business," according to the statement posted on the technology website TechCrunch.com.
“Mr. Gou’s comments were directed at all humans and not at any specific group.”
Foxconn has taken criticism for working conditions at its vast Chinese factories where iPhones are |
the games were older titles, such as Necromancer and Blue Max (both originally published by Synapse, not Atari), ported to cartridge format.
Production timeline Edit
Production timeline dates retrieved from Atari 8-Bit Computers F.A.Q.,[66] and Chronology of Personal Computers.[67]
End of support and legacy Edit
The aging 8-bit line found a market in parts of Europe during the late 1980s and a few current arcade titles such as Gauntlet and Arkanoid were ported for it. Datasoft was one of the last significant North American companies to develop Atari 8-bit software, continuing to put out new games for them until the company closed its doors in 1988.[citation needed]
In 1992, Atari Corp. officially dropped all remaining support for the 8-bit family.[6]
In 2006 Atari consultant and historian Curt Vendel, who designed the Atari Flashback for Atari, Inc. in 2004,[68] claimed that Atari released the 8-bit chipset into the public domain.[69] There is agreement in the community that Atari authorized the distribution of the Atari 800's ROM with the Xformer 2.5 emulator, which makes the ROM legally available today as freeware.[70][71]News comes to us this week that the famous HAARP antenna array is to be brought back into service for experiments by the University of Alaska. Built in the 1990s for the US Air Force’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array is a 40-acre site containing a phased array of 180 HF antennas and their associated high power transmitters. Its purpose it to conduct research on charged particles in the upper atmosphere, but that hasn’t stopped an array of bizarre conspiracy theories being built around its existence.
The Air Force gave up the site to the university a few years ago, and it is their work that is about to recommence. They will be looking at the effects of charged particles on satellite-to-ground communications, as well as over-the-horizon communications and visible observations of the resulting airglow. If you live in Alaska you may be able to see the experiments in your skies, but residents elsewhere should be able to follow them with an HF radio. It’s even reported that they are seeking reports from SWLs (Short Wave Listeners). Frequencies and times will be announced on the @UAFGI Twitter account. Perhaps canny radio amateurs will join in the fun, after all it’s not often that the exact time and place of an aurora is known in advance.
Tinfoil hat wearers will no doubt have many entertaining things to say about this event, but for the rest of us it’s an opportunity for a grandstand seat on some cutting-edge atmospheric research. We’ve reported in the past on another piece of upper atmosphere research, a plan to seed it with plasma from cubesats, and for those of you that follow our Retrotechtacular series we’ve also featured a vintage look at over-the-horizon radar.
HAARP antenna array picture: Michael Kleiman, US Air Force [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.Briana O'Connor powders her makeup during the clowning class at The College of St. Rose in Albany. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Briana O'Connor powders her makeup during the clowning class at The College of St. Rose in Albany. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Image 1 of / 35 Caption Close Photos: Where class clowns really fit in 1 / 35 Back to Gallery
Clowning around might be a key to easing pressure.
"It's a great stress reliever," said Ann Neilson, who for years has taught Introduction to Clowning, a physical education course, at The College of Saint Rose in Albany.
Neilson has a background in gymnastics and acrobatics, which she says is what drew her to clowning. "People don't take it as the serious art that it is," she said. After taking a class at Hudson Valley Community College, she was inspired to offer one at Saint Rose.
The mission of the physical education department at Saint Rose is to encourage lifetime wellness and fitness, and Neilson believes that clowning helps achieve that goal.
Neilson's class covers topics such as clown history, etiquette, stunts, makeup, balloon making, miming and juggling. The one-credit course usually has an enrollment of 10 to 20 students.
Her students often incorporate clowning into interests such as art, music, photography and teaching and many have been clowns at birthday parties and hospitals, she said.
— Michelle MuneraUsing a lizard, a snaky robot and computer simulations, researchers have captured the secrets of swimming through sand.
Physicists filmed the movements of sandfish lizards and snake-like robots as they burrowed through sand, then boiled their motion down into a numerical theory. The theory ultimately led to a computer model, described in a Feb. 23 study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, that can emulate the fluid-like physics of sand and objects that can swim through it.
“They’ve taken advantage of biodiversity to answer questions in physics and inspire new engineering designs,” said biomaterials scientist Kellar Autumn of Lewis & Clark College, who wasn’t involved in the study.
The research, led by physicist Daniel Goldman of Georgia Tech, builds on his team’s previous work. By 2009, Goldman and his colleagues had discovered the sandfish lizard’s sand-swimming motion and designed a snake-like robot to emulate it. In the new study, Goldman’s team used the experiments to create a highly predictive model.
The work may lead to many applications, from landmine detection and earthquake monitoring to sub-surface discoveries on other worlds.
“We’ve never had such a detailed, quantitative, accurate model of an organism moving through an environment that isn’t water or air,” Goldman said. “You can make devices that can sort of wiggle into or through granular materials. We’re already talking to NASA about it.”
Goldman’s team first explored sand-swimming motion by studying sandfish lizards, also known as Scincus scincus. The reptiles are native to North-African deserts and can quickly burrow into sand to escape predators and scorching heat.
The team found sine-wave-like movement allows the lizard, and their robot, to push forward in sand, but creating computer models for the experiments proved problematic. Simulating all of the tiny sand grains required a lot of money to purchase time on powerful computers. So, the team performed the same experiments using 3-millimeter-wide glass beads instead of sand.
“We wanted something easy to simulate that had some predictive power. We got lucky, because it turned out [the lizard and robot] swim beautifully in the same way through larger glass beads,” Goldman said.
When the researchers compared data from all three systems — the lizard, the robot and the simulation — the forces matched within 8 percent of one another.
“That means we can use this model to generate hypotheses, for example, about what is going on internally in the lizard that allows it to swim,” Goldman said. “We can go in and get the physiology of organism and use it to do something useful.”
Only a handful of laboratories research sand-swimming physics, said Stephan Koehler of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who wasn’t involved in Goldman’s work. Despite the low number, Koehler thinks the implications of such work could lead to world-changing technology.
“As with a lot of basic research, no one sees it seriously until a killer application puts the science on steroids,” Koehler said. “The Wright brother’s work was seen as something of an oddity 108 years ago, and they initially had a difficult time selling their product. But now look where we are.”
Peko Hosoi, a mechanical engineer and roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said work like Goldman’s is crucial for robot innovation.
“You don’t want to blindly copy what animals can do. That doesn’t get you very far,” said Hosoi, who also wasn’t involved in the study. “You need to know the fundamental mechanics behind them to inspire truly useful designs.”
Goldman ultimately hopes to plug models like his team’s into future robots and give them some brains.
“Not just Watson-type machines that can answer Jeopardy questions,” he said. “Ones that can smartly interact with the physical world.”
Video: The sandfish lizard swims through sand by turning itself into a sine wave. Researchers recreate the effect with a robot in glass beads and a computer model. (Ryan D. Maladen, Yang Ding, Paul B. Umbanhowar, Adam Kamor, Daniel I. Goldman, Georgia Tech, 2011)
Image: The high-speed X-ray camera setup used to track the motion of lizards and robots able to swim through sand. (Goldman Lab)
See Also:Maybe you feel the need to poke fun at the soaring and inspirational music attached to this Euro Truck Simulator 2: Scandinavia launch trailer. Well, know this, Mr. Strawman Cynic, I did two honest-to-god fist-pumps during the course of its one-and-a-half minute running time. Complex road networks? Oh yes, I'll have a bit of that.
The Scandinavia expansion is out this week, and adds 27 new cities across Sweden, Norway and Denmark. There's new industry, new cargo and new companies, too. It all sounds like a rather fine package, all attached to a game that remains one of the most compelling road sims of recent years.
Scandinavia is due out on Thursday, May 7, and will cost €18. To prepare, developer SCS yesterday released the game's 1.17 patch, bringing improvements to weather and lighting systems, as well as engine performance, stability and AI behaviour.Multiplex chain operator expects to add at least 23 in the current financial year to take the total to 500 in the same fiscal.
"Our target is to reach 1,000 quickly. The shorter target is to get to 500 in this financial year and then look at going to 1,000 screens," Cinemas Chief Operating Officer Gautam Dutta told PTI here.
currently operates 477 screens across 44 cities in the country.
It has four brands across different price points - PVR Talkies, PVR Cinemas, PVR Premium and newly launched PVR Icon.
Dutta said the new screens will largely be in PVR Cinemas and PVR Premium.
The company has a capex of Rs 200 crore this fiscal, which includes Rs 135-140 crore for new projects and the remaining for renovation and the cost of each new screen is around Rs 2-2.5 crore.
It recently launched the PVR Icon brand, which is an ultra-premium category, at one of its multiplexes at a suburban mall here with an investment of Rs 25 crore, Dutta said, adding that they will be launching PVR Icon in Bengaluru and Pune in the next fiscal, taking the total to three properties under the newly-created brand.
The company would be spending Rs 60-70 lakh on marketing for the new brand PVR Icon.
PVR enjoys an occupancy rate of 35-37%, with a reported footfall of 66 million.
Online sales contribute around 35-36% of the total ticket earnings.
Food and beverages contribute 25% of the revenues, while advertising accounts for 12% of theMission San Jose Elementary School hasn’t just won a third National USCF K-6 Championship in just seven years. They’ve become a scholastic chess dynasty! And if ever a dynasty needs an icon, Head Coach Joe Lonsdale can fill that role quite capably for the MSJE Chess Team.
Perhaps you haven’t heard of Joe Lonsdale yet but he is worthy of being compared with such great coaches as Mike Krzyzewski, Gregg Popovich, or Phil Jackson. Coach Joe, who originally established the MSJE Chess Team for his sons back in 1990, has done much more than teach chess. He has created a model for running a successful scholastic chess program that is constantly being copied but never quite duplicated. Coach Joe’s approach to teaching chess isn’t rocket science. His coaching staff takes the time to thoroughly analyze every child’s game every Monday night as well as at all major chess events. Many coaches do something similar but lack the consistency and commitment to keep it up all year let alone for twenty-five years.
Every great coach needs more than his/her own skill and dedication to win national championships. It is, of course, the players who actually win the titles through competition. And MSJE had quite the talented bunch of kids playing in the Elementary Championship Section.
The battle at the chess boards for these kids was difficult and in the end they received top honors by the slimmest of margins over I.S. 318 from New York. Sixth grader David Pan lead the charge by finishing tied for fifth place overall with an impressive 5.5/7. Super talented fourth grader Annapoorni Meiyappan finished only a half point behind David with 5/7. Next was the fourth grader Rishith Susarla with 4.5 and fifth grader Kavya Sasikumar with 4.
For now, it is once again time to celebrate a National Championship in Fremont, California. The victors can revel in their success. Soon after the party finishes, the kids will be coming to the Fremont Summer Chess Camp at, where else except for their own school’s gymnasium to hone their chess skills. Since only one of MSJE’s top scorers is graduating this year, you can bet they will be a strong favorite to repeat next year.
MSJE Coaches Joe Lonsdale and Chris Torres will be teaching at the Fremont Summer Chess Camp in Northern California. For more information on the Torres Chess and Music Academy and to register your child for the summer camp, please visit: http://www.chessandmusic.com
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Tags: 2015 USCF National champions, Annapoornia Meiyappan chess, chess, Chris Torres, David Pan chess, Fremont Chess, Fremont summer camp, Joe Lonsdale, Kavya Sasikumar chess, Mission San Jose Elementary School, MSJE chess, National Chess Championship, Rishith Susarla chess, Uscf nationalsJust in case you were beginning to think rich people were deeply misunderstood and that they feel the pain of those who are less fortunate, here's the world's wealthiest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, with some helpful advice.
"If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain," she said in a magazine piece. "Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."
Yeah, let them eat cake.
Rinehart made her money the old-fashioned way: She inherited it. Her family iron ore prospecting fortune of $30.1 billion makes her Australia's wealthiest person and the richest woman on the planet.
"There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire," she said by way of encouragement.
"Become one of those people who work hard, invest and build, and at the same time create employment and opportunities for others."Two federal investigations have concluded that Arizona is violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by shortchanging thousands of students whose first language is not English.
Unless remedied, the violations could lead to a loss of federal funding for education in Arizona.
Probe claims of bias against teachers
One of the complaints alleges that the Arizona Department of Education has reclassified "many thousands" of children as proficient in English even though tests indicate they aren't. The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice concluded this deprives students of services they need to succeed.
The federal agencies found that Arizona violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination by government agencies that receive federal funding. A loss of federal funding is a penalty for a violation of Title VI.
The federal officials proposed an agreement calling for Arizona to come up with a more effective way to test and reclassify students who need special instruction in English. The reclassifications come after students take tests to demonstrate English proficiency. The Arizona English Language Learner Assessment, or AZELLA, and the scoring of it "deem students proficient in English even when they are not proficient in each language domain," investigators found.
Once students are deemed proficient in English, educators "exit them from all ELL services," which violates their right to equal educational access.
Under the proposal, a temporary plan for English language learners would go into effect during the first semester of 2011-12 and a permanent plan during the second semester.
In the second complaint, the federal departments found that the state eliminated two questions from its home-language survey in 2009. The result was that students who are eligible for English-language services "are not being served because they are not being identified," investigators determined.
The findings come as federal agencies have launched a probe into whether Arizona's Education Department has discriminated against teachers who are not native English speakers.
Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction, said Thursday that the state Department of Education is working with federal investigators on the home-language survey.
"We're not going to change it back, but we're negotiating with them," he said. "We won't change it back, but we might make changes that will satisfy their needs and our needs."
Horne also said he is working with federal officials to evaluate the test Arizona educators used to classify ELL students as proficient in English.
Arizona buys the test from one of three companies that devise them, he said. He said the state is trying "to see what, if anything, needs to be done to satisfy what they need without compromising our principles."
Mary Lou Mobley, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Enforcement Office in Denver, which issued the findings, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Molly Edwards, spokeswoman for the Arizona Attorney General's Office, which represents the state Education Department, declined to comment on any penalties the state could face.
Horne said the recent federal findings are part of ongoing attacks against Arizona ever since it passed Senate Bill 1070, a tough anti-illegal-immigration law.
"I do think this is a lot of nonsense we're dealing with over 1070" and a report by U.N. human-rights experts condemning the law, Horne said.
"This is why I'm running for attorney general, because we need someone to fight against these things," he said.
Meanwhile, Horne's office is defending itself against a long-running federal court case involving Arizona's approach to teaching English-language learners.
Tim Hogan, executive director for the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, said the federal government's recent findings against Arizona regarding policies for ELL students bolsters his argument that the state isn't treating all students fairly as required by the Equal Educational Opportunities Act and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The home-language survey and the reclassification of ELL students have "artificially reduced the number of kids the state is counting as English-language learners," Hogan said.
The department's test also "allows students to move on even though they are not proficient in English," he added.Master Hayden’s Butterbeer Latte Recipe:
So, it’s all explained in the recipe card graphic, but I have a few special notes to add.
Firstly, I invented this beverage in an effort to include all the flavours and textures I know Butterbeer to include and how I imagine it: creamy, frothy, butterscotch, shortbread. Let me explain how. Obviously butterscotch is covered by a caramel made from butter and brown sugar (not to be confused with raw sugar). The excess fat from the butter and combined with milk makes it creamy. The vanilla is commonly used in baked goods, thereby reminding one of cakes and biscuits, and a dash of cinnamon adds warmth of flavour. When the milk is boiled it creates froth that rises to the top - make sure it doesn’t boil over. Oh, when it’s done, the fat in the butter will obviously rise to the top so not to worry when an attractive yellow film forms.
To my taste this is damn near perfect butterbeer. If it could be carbonated then I would say it is perfection.
[Want more of Hayden Cooks?]MAI CITIŢI ŞI:
Blat cu fonduri UE pe moşia lui Dragnea
Vezi aici averea PSD-istului Dragnea, luat în vizor de UE: în 2009 avea 10 terenuri, 7 clădiri şi un hotel
PROIECTE ÎN IMPAS Vezi câte milioane de euro de la UE poate pierde Bucureştiul din cauza blatului PSD-istului Dragnea
Ziarul „Adevărul de Seară" a dezvăluit săptămâna trecută ingineriile financiare cu bani publici, marca Liviu Dragnea, care ar putea să ne coste 743 de milioane de euro, reprezentând fonduri europene. Mai exact, secretarul general al PSD a semnat, în 2009, în calitate de preşedinte al Consiliului Judeţean Teleorman, contracte de 40 de milioane de euro cu o firmă de asfaltări din Teleorman, pe care el ar controla-o din umbră. Un audit al Comisiei Europene, ale cărui rezultate nu au fost date încă publicităţii, ar fi scos la iveală faptul că două contracte semnate de Dragnea cu Tel Drum fac obiectul unui conflict de interese. Printre acţionarii acestei firme se numără, printre alţii, şi Lucian Liviu Dobrescu şi Sorin Mugurel Gheorghiaş.
Dragnea: „nu-i ştiu pe acţionarii de acum"
În replică, Liviu Dragnea a declarat că nu are nicio legătură cu această firmă, ba mai mult, a spus că nici nu-i cunoaşte pe actualii acţionari. „Îl ştiu pe Marian Fişcuci, care a deţinut Tel Drum, pentru că este tot din Teleorman. Nu‑i ştiu pe acţionarii de acum. Să ştiţi că foarte multe alte firme au contracte cu Consiliul Judeţean Teleorman, nu doar Tel Drum", a declarat Liviu Dragnea. El a mai spus că această asociere este doar o armă folosită de duşmanii politici: „Legenda aceasta legată de mine şi de Tel Drum a apărut în 2004, în perioadă electorală. Toate instituţiile au verificat: nu sunt acţionar şi nu am legătură cu această firmă". Declaraţia lui Dragnea a fost contrazisă, imediat, de un cititor al site-ului bucuresti.adevarul.ro.
„Domnul Dragnea îi cunoaşte foarte bine pe acţionari. Dobrescu Liviu (nu Lucian) zis «Şobolanul» şi Gheorghiaş Mugurel au fost colegi de facultate. Dragnea a intrat în 1981 la facultate şi a rămas repetent în anul patru. Ceilalţi doi au intrat în 1983, dar erau prieteni şi colegi de trupă, cântau în trupa EGO. «Şobolanul» şi «Mugurel» erau chitarişti, iar «Livache» Dragnea toboşar. Îsi ţineau sculele la oficiul de la et. 4 din căminul P14. De ce minţi că nu-i cunoşti? Mai interesaţi-vă, băieţi, că aveţi multe de aflat despre el", ne-a scris un cititor care s-a semnat Blue.
Reporterii „Adevărul de Seară" au intrat imediat pe fir şi au verificat, la Politehnica Bucureşti, dacă într-adevăr Dragnea, Dobrescu şi Gheorghiaş au fost colegi. Un cadru didactic a confirmat informaţia, răsfoind arhivele Politehnicii, şi ne-a precizat că Dobrescu şi Gheorghiaş au fost colegi de grupă la Facultatea de Transporturi - secţia autovehicule rutiere a Institutului Politehnic Bucureşti, între 1982 şi 1987, iar Dragnea a urmat aceleaşi cursuri, dar în generaţia cu un an mai mare.
Mugurel a recunoscut relaţia
Pus în faţa acestor mărturii, Mugurel Gheorghiaş, unul dintre cei care deţin acţiuni la Tel Drum, a povestit pentru „Adevărul de Seară" că a avut o relaţie specială pe timpul facultăţii cu Dragnea. „Da, am fost colegi la Facultatea de Transporturi, am cântat cu el într-o trupă. Ce-i rău în asta? Nu aveam prea multe opţiuni pentru a ne distra. Nu pot spune că am ţinut legătura cu el. Acum îl ştiu aşa, na, cum îl ştiu şi pe preşedintele Băsescu, de la televizor", a spus omul de afaceri, care deşi are acţiuni la Tel Drum, locuieşte şi are afaceri în judeţul Buzău. Acesta susţine că, „din lipsă de timp", nu este la curent cu acuzaţiile care i se aduc prietenului său şi firmei pe care el o controlează, şi refuză să fie informat despre ele.
„Trupă" cu tradiţie
Lui Gheorghiaş şi lui Dragnea nu le-a rămas la inimă acea perioadă boemă, şi s-au concentrat pe afaceri, însă pe Dobrescu îl pasionează în continuare amintirile rock. Drept dovadă că îşi spune acum „Dj Liviu", cântă la chitară şi face schimb de instrumente pe internet cu iubitorii de muzică rock. Compania "suveică" Tel Drum a fost în portofoliul Consiliului Judeţean Teleorman până în 2001, atunci când Liviu Dragnea a ajuns preşedinte al Consiliului Judeţean, iar firma a fost privatizată la un preţ mult subevaluat. Însă, printr-un simulacru de proces de vânzare, a ajuns în proprietatea lui Marian Fişcuci, un alt prieten din copilărie de-ai lui Dragnea, şi cei doi colegi de facultate despre care susţine că nu ştia că sunt acţionari ai firmei Tel Drum.
Liviu Dragnea nu este străin de accesarea fondurilor europene. În 2008 a fost pus sub învinuire de procurorii DNA într-un dosar privind accesarea ilegală de fonduri. Ancheta a vizat modul în care Consiliul Judeţean Teleorman, la cârma căruia se afla, a întocmit documentaţia în vederea accesării unui proiect în valoare de 4,5 milioane de euro pentru realizarea unui punct de trecere a frontierei peste Dunăre. Procurorii au decis atunci însă neînceperea urmăririi penale, pentru ca la scurt timp să fie numit ministru de Interne.
Dragnea nu mai comentează
Nici Liviu Dobrescu, celălalt acţionar al Tel Drum, nu a negat că a fost coleg de facultate cu Liviu Dragnea: „ Aşa, şi?! Dacă aş fi fost, care ar fi problema?!". Vădit deranjat de întrebarea reporterului „Adevărul de Seară", Liviu Dobrescu a refuzat să facă vreun comentariu despre Tel Drum sau despre legătura din studenţie cu actualul preşedinte al CJ Teleorman: „Deci, nu vreau să discut pe tema asta! Prea multă bălăcăreală pe subiectul asta. Nu vreau să discut sub nicio formă", a declarat Dobrescu. Dincolo de acţiunile deţinute la Tel Drum, Dobrescu are şi o firmă în Brăila specializată în servicii IT. Contactat telefonic de reporterii „Adevărul de Seară", Liviu Dragnea a declarat că nu vrea să mai comenteze în niciun fel informaţiile care apar în ziarul nostru.
''Da, am fost colegi la Facultatea de Transporturi, am cântat cu el într-o trupă. Ce-i rău în asta?''
Mugurel Gheorghiaş acţionar Tel Drum
Formaţia rock EGO
Liviu Dobrescu şi Sorin Gheorghiaş, asociaţi ai Tel Drum, au fost colegi de grupă la Facultatea de Transporturi de la Politehnică între 1982 şi 1987. Liviu Dragnea a urmat aceleaşi cursuri, dar în generaţia cu un an mai mare. Cei trei au pus şi bazele unei formaţii, în studenţie. Liviu Dobrescu (foto) nu a negat faptul că a fost coleg de facultate cu Liviu Dragnea.
Dacă apreciezi acest articol, te așteptăm să intri în comunitatea de cititori de pe pagina noastră de Facebook, printr-un Like mai jos:Monday, we emailed 25,000 Marilyn Manson fans a video of their house in support of his new single, “ WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE.” The campaign itself is still working it’s way through the fanbase but here’s a few snap reactions.
I’ve always been a fan of personalizing content and making campaigns feel intimate. When I heard the title of the track, I knew exactly what we were going to do but getting there required a lot of smart technology and one heroic 2012 MacBook Pro.
Read on to find out how we developed this experience.
Data
We were fortunate to have a bit of past purchaser data from our online store but the bulk of this data was pulled from a simple contest page. Contestants were required to give their email address and share their location in order to earn a chance to win tickets to see Manson live at a show near them. The HTML5 Geolocation API provides both a convenient way for a user to share their location and a highly accurate (latitude and longitude) representation of where they are.
Satellite Photo
Both Google and Mapbox have static Map APIs which allow you to get an image of any location simply by providing a set of coordinates. I went with Mapbox because their service is awesome, beautifully written, and well documented. We also used it on the contest page to create a dot density plotting of all contestants.
Now before you go downloading 25,000 photos to turn into videos, you’re going to need an additional commercial license with Mapbox for your use case. If you have any questions regarding this subject, Paul Goodman at Mapbox is your man. Once you’re legally allowed to do this, write a simple node script to pull images. You’ll want to do this in chunks so you don’t hit the API limit on calls.
var users = require('./users.json');
var token = process.env.MAPBOX_TOKEN;
function url(lon, lat) {
return "https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/mapbox/satellite-v9/static/" + lon + "," + lat + ",17,0.00,0.00/960x960?attribution=false&logo=false&access_token=" + token
}
var i = 0;
function downloadPhoto() {
var user = users[i];
var photo = fs.createWriteStream('photos/' + user.id + ".jpg");
var request = https.get(url(user.lng, user.lat), function(res) {
res.pipe(photo);
if (i < users.length) {
downloadPhoto();
i++;
}
}
}
downloadPhoto();
Once all of the images are downloaded, I ran an Image Magick task to convert them all to grayscale.
mogrify -type Grayscale photos/*
In addition to Paul Goodman, I have to thank Paul Veugen from Mapbox who came to my rescue on Twitter in the final moments of the campaign while having fried tomatoes for dinner with his family. If the curiosity and kindness of their team is any indication, this company is bound for success. 🙌🏻
Automated Video
I would have to say this project wouldn’t have come about in the first place if I had not found Austin based DataClay. I’ve been curious about automating video creation for years and apparently these guys had developed a plugin for After Effects that could dynamically generate videos based on a huge range of variables. I actually emailed them long before this project and they sorted me out with a free trial which blew my mind. The YouTube tutorials alone are inspiring. Then as fate would have it, our Marilyn Manson campaign materialized.
DataClay is also a well documented piece of software so I won’t go into the grindy details of how it works. You should definitely check out their support and screencasts. In general, it’s a plugin you install on After Effects which allows you to feed in a data feed of dynamic information. In my case, all I really wanted to do was swap out a satellite photo and make sure the exported file name had the user’s id written into it.
My After Effects composition consisted of three layers:
A 15 second clip from the track, trimmed so it would loop A satellite photo placeholder which rotates 360deg A transparent overlay image which included album info, crosshairs, attribution, and copyrights
Once DataClay was setup and pointed to both my data and directory full of photos, I was able to preview how each photo fit into the composition and began replicating thousands 😮 of videos into the Adobe Media Encoder.
Shout out to my 2012 MacBook Pro who took on the task of rendering all of these videos over a period of several days. I actually ran my AC as cold as it would go and sort of positioned the laptop in a clear path of the air so it wouldn’t catch fire. In the end, we were able to render about 3–4k videos a day. TBD on my AC bill.
Special thanks to Arie Stavchansky from DataClay for fielding all my questions. He even did the math of how long it would take to render my videos when I was freaking out over email. I’ve already used DataClay again on a Foo Fighters campaign and look forward to the next use case.
Once the videos were rendered, I commandeered my girlfriend’s computer to upload them to an S3 in preparation for sending.
Mailing
So we’ve got 25,000 unique videos files averaging about 6MB each and email addresses for each… how the hell are we going to mail all of these things in a fraction of the time it took to render them. Well unlike the rendering process, which was connected to a single (albeit now legendary MacBook) computer, we’re able to do email sending using the infinite capabilities of the web. I chose to use the lethal combination of Sidekiq and Postmark.
Sidekiq makes background processing simple and efficient. How do I know that? They said so on their website. Their system allows us to write a “worker” who initiates a “job” for each individual email send. These jobs are then added to a Redis backed queue system which, in my case, await Heroku worker dynos. At the peak of our send, I was running three performance dynos generating 120 threads. That’s the equivalent of 120 computers doing our evil bidding of sending emails. It took less than 3 hours to get all of these out.
The worker itself was a wrapper for the excellent Postmark application email delivery service. Unlike the bulk mailing systems of MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, Postmark has built a system for transactional email, like activation emails and password resets. I always considered our email send to be a slow confirmation email for entering the contest rather than a bulk marketing email. I was surprised to find Postmark had also added email templates which previously were such a hassle to handle in simple applications.
In the end, here’s all it took to download each video file and attach it to a templated email for sending.
client = Postmark::ApiClient.new(ENV["POSTMARK_TOKEN"])
At the moment, we’re well over 50% open rate for those 25,000 emails with only 5 spam complaints.🤞 I couldn’t imagine what someone is thinking if they received this on accident. 😅
Thanks to the Postmark support team (shoutout to Marek) for helping coordinate a successful campaign. I love these guys and also use their product on Unlock and Artwork.
Team Effort
This is now my 4th campaign with Loma Vista Recordings. The other three? Cut Copy. Little Dragon. And Local Natives. It’s safe to say that these guys empower creative thought and trust the plans of a mad scientist. Thanks to Adam Farrell, Rian Rochford, and team for fueling this concept. Additional thanks to Concord Music Group, and Caroline.
Last but |
land Stanwick on a Tewaaraton watch list, but this Blue Jay has the skill to back up his impressive family legacy. In 2011, Stanwick's older brother, Steele, won the award after leading his Virginia Cavaliers to a national championship.
Although Wells may not be the most lethal shooter, he's rarely kept off the stat sheet thanks to his exceptional work as an assist artist. If he follows in his older brother's footsteps, he'll have younger brother Shack, a freshman at Hopkins, keeping him company along the way.
9. Joey Sankey, North Carolina (Sr., A)
2014 Stats: 33 goals, 24 assists (15 games)
It has been 24 years since North Carolina's last national championship. If the Tar Heels want to end this embarrassing streak before it reaches a quarter-century, someone must step up.
Sankey is a plausible candidate to do so. It's tough to stick with the 5'5", 160-pound jitterbug around the net, as Sankey is one of few athletes to figure out how to use his small stature to his advantage. Marking up this 2014 USILA third-team All-American with a big, strong defender will do a team no good if that defender doesn't also have lightning-quick footwork.
10. Goran Murray, Maryland (Sr., D)
2014 Stats: 11 caused turnovers, 17 ground balls (16 games)
A defensive player has never won the Tewaaraton, but one is frequently named among the finalists for the award. This year, there's a good chance it's Maryland's Murray.
Despite a somewhat lanky build (6'0", 175 lbs), the Pennsylvania product is one of the nation's most dominant defenders due to his fantastic fundamentals and devastating stickwork. A full-time starter for the Terrapins since his freshman year, Murray was an easy first-team selection for the 2014 USILA All-America team. Look for him to repeat—and possibly top—his performance in 2015.
Other Players To Watch: Randy Staats, Syracuse (Sr., A/M); Jesse King, Ohio State (Sr., M); Nikko Pontrello, Loyola (Sr., A); Jimmy Bitter, North Carolina (Sr., A); Kevin Massa, Bryant (Sr., FO); John Glesener, Army (Sr., A); Sergio Perkovic, Notre Dame (Jr., M); Mike Pellegrino, Johns Hopkins (Sr., LSM); Gunnar Waldt, Bryant (Jr., G); Brandon Mullins, Syracuse (Jr., D)
Follow Kevin on Twitter here: @KevinBoilardDespite the more generally optimistic tone that has characterized DC’s Rebirth titles, Superman has not had an easy year. He’s been attacked by some of his greatest enemies, had to deal with a brashly empowered Lex Luthor, seen his secret identity duplicated, almost had his son wiped from existence, and even had to deal with a mysterious new force from beyond this world.
That new force, Dr. Oz, has been plotting and scheming for the past year. He’s ripped heroes such as Tim Drake from the world and has taken a particularly keen interest in the Man of Steel. Next month, DC will reveal what Dr. Oz has been building to in an Action Comics event called “The Oz Effect,” but his motivations begin to become a little clearer in this Wednesday’s Action Comics #985. Check out Comics Beat’s exclusive preview of the issue after the jump.
Writer: Rob Williams Artist: Guillem March Colorist: Hi-Fi Letterer: Rob Leigh “EVE OF DESTRUCTION” part one! Superman finds himself side by side with Lex Luthor once more, but is his former foe truly committed to being a hero, or is it just a ruse to gain the Man of Steel’s trust? As world events point to something dark on the horizon, the mysterious Mr. Oz makes his final move against the Man of Tomorrow.
Alex is the Managing Editor of the Comics Beat. He is also a freelance comics editor with previous credits at Papercutz. He is your go-to fella for creator interviews, conversations about comic book structure, and general DC Comics nerding. Currently geeking out over movies, too.
Like this: Like Loading...The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) is a scientific research institution at Colorado State University (CSU) that operates under a cooperative agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). Atmospheric research at CIRA focuses on augmenting operational meteorology with advanced techniques in satellite observations and retrievals, numerical modeling and computational techniques, and data analysis, visualization, and storage. Along with NOAA, CIRA also partners with the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Park Service (NPS), and the Department of Defense (DoD).
It is one of 16 NOAA Cooperative Institutes (CIs).[1]
Specific research themes at CIRA include:
Satellite algorithm development, training and education
Regional to global scale modeling systems
Data assimilation
Climate-weather processes
Data distribution
Societal and economic impacts of weather and climate
Education and public outreach on climate systems
The CIRA campus is located on the Foothills Campus of Colorado State University, in Fort Collins.
References [ edit ]
^ "Cooperative Institutes". NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.
Coordinates:Chandigarh: In a first major administrative reshuffle by the newly formed BJP government in Haryana, 26 senior IAS officers were transferred including those considered close to previous chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
26 senior IAS officers of the rank of Additional Chief Secretaries and Principal Secretaries were transferred last night with immediate effect, an official spokesman said here today.
Among those transferred included Hooda's "close" officers who were at the helm of affairs for about a decade.
They are former principal secretary to chief minister, SS Dhillon, former principal secretary town and country planning department, Urban Estates, Forests and Wildlife, TC Gupta and former additional principal secretary to chief minister, KK Khandelwal.
While Dhillon becomes new Additional Chief Secretary (ACS) Tourism, Archeology and Museums, Gupta goes as Principal Secretary School Education.
Khandelwal has been transferred as Additional Chief Secretary Sports and Youth Affairs.
PK Mahapatra has been posted as ACS home while PK Das becomes principal secretary finance and planning.
P Raghavandra Rao has been posted as ACS town and country planning and housing, Devender Singh becomes new principal secretary industries and commerce and electronics and information technology.
Rajan Kumar Gupta has been posted as ACS power and renewable energy while RR Jowel goes as principal secretary irrigation.
Roshan Lal has been posted as ACS excise and taxation and mines and geology whereas Navraj Sandhu becomes ACS development and panchayat.
While Hardeep Kumar has been transferred as ACS public works and architecture, S S Prasad goes as ACS food and supplies and industrial training.
RP Chander has been posted as ACS medical education and research and women and child development while S K Gulati goes as ACS social justice and empowerment.
Ram Niwas has been shifted as ACS Health while Dhanpat Singh becomes ACS agriculture.
Vijai Vardhan will be ACS higher education and Shashi Bala Gulati will be principal secretary labour and employment.
Alok Nigam will be principal secretary public health engineering and corporation.
Dheera Khandelwal has been posted as principal secretary technical education while Amit Jha becomes principal secretary forests.
SN Roy has been posted as principal secretary urban local bodies while Avtar Singh becomes principal secretary transport and civil aviation.Ghost in the Shell is part of a cult subgenre whose lineage stretches back to the 1920s – and whose visions have never seemed so prescient
Code streams across a computer screen; hackers bark at each other in techno-jargon and hammer at keyboards; the real world seamlessly shifts into the virtual, and back again. This is the sort of scene that is instantly recognisable as a cyberpunk film, the subgenre of sci-fi that meshes together technology and counterculture – of which Ghost in the Shell, the live-action remake of the Japanese anime classic, is the latest high-profile example.
It is little surprise that cyberpunk has proved irresistible for many film-makers over the decades since the term was coined, by the author Bruce Bethke, in the early 1980s. With its visions of postapocalyptic futures, advanced technologies and virtual realms, they get to pack their films with visual effects to sweeten the (red) pill, while wrestling with weighty existential themes.
Ghost in the Shell review – Scarlett Johansson remake lacks mystery Read more
Yet, for all its enduring popularity – which owes so much to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner – cyberpunk has often proved a tough nut to crack on the big screen. Even the author William Gibson, a founding father of the genre on the page, struggled to bring its dystopian charms to the cinema. Gibson’s first significant foray into film came in 1995 with Johnny Mnemonic – an adaptation of his short story about a data courier with a chip implanted in his head – and was an confused and poorly received flop, even if it did feature psychic dolphins. Gibson described the film as “two animals in one skin … constantly pulling in multiple directions”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maverick … the 1982 film Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros
He had identified a problem that would plague many cyberpunk films thereafter. A decade before Johnny Mnemonic was released, Gibson had written Neuromancer, a genre-defining novel that thrust readers into a noirish dystopia. Neuromancer, published in 1984, came at a time of change. Computers were yet to become ubiquitous, and a strange subculture of phreaks and hackers was brewing. Slowly, governments were realising that the kids tinkering in their bedrooms with soldering irons and motherboards could be capable of disrupting the status quo. Technology was becoming threatening, and even political. In short, great material for screenplays.
However, the resulting films over the last two decades have varied in quality, to say the least. The biggest hit at the box office has been the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy – for which a controversial reboot is being planned. Then there are curios, like Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (based on another Gibson novel), which starred Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento. There’s Wim Wenders’ postapocalyptic odyssey Until the End of the World (five hours, if you manage to see out the director’s cut), and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, a critically divisive film that explored the impact of virtual reality. More recently, we’ve had Carleton Ranney’s lo-fi slow-burner Jackrabbit and David Cronenberg’s unsettling short, The Nest. Cyberpunk has come to the small screen, too: Mr Robot is a modern incarnation, as was the TV show Orphan Black.
In truth, cyberpunk themes existed in film long before the phrase did. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis envisaged wealthy elites, oppressed masses and a unnerving fusion of woman and machine – all themes explored in the remake of Ghost in the Shell. That lineage can be traced through to Blade Runner, based on Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was set in a smog-filled futuristic LA, dominated by the Tyrell Corporation, where Harrison Ford’s retired cop hunts “replicant” cyborgs while musing on humanity’s metaphysical quandaries.
Whatever happened to cyberpunk? Read more
A turning point for cyberpunk in film came from an in 1988, with Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s landmark anime Akira. A fusion of rebellious youth culture and groundbreaking animation, its story of teenage biker gangs in a postapocalyptic Tokyo became an international cult hit. The film paved the way for a wave of animations for adults that peaked in 1998 with Ghost in the Shell. That film’s arresting visuals, existential questions and a pared back, cat-and-mouse narrative was unlike anything audiences had seen before.
Crucial to cyberpunk is a countercultural take on social issues, albeit often viewed though a Hollywood lens. As Iain Softley, the director of the tongue-in-cheek 1995 thriller Hackers, says: “As far a cyber culture is concerned, it is this mixture of technological culture with underground movements. That appeals to younger audiences and that is also the appeal for film-makers.”
Hackers, he says, “was never about the technology. It was about the popular culture that it generated.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angelina Jolie and Johnny-Lee Miller in Hackers. Photograph: Allstar/United Artists
But how do film-makers ensure that the genre remains cutting edge? The remake of Ghost in the Shell, directed by Rupert Sanders, will be the first big-budget outing for cyberpunk since the Matrix films. Guillaume Rocheron, who worked on the film as a visual effects supervisor, says that while the original animation was a key source, the makers “took a lot of inspiration from glitch art, various art installations inspired the architecture”.
Rocheron explains that the film’s “solograms” (“Solid volumetric projections of people and advertisements you see in our city shots”) required them to develop a new camera system. This is a common feature of cyberpunk films: the pioneering of visual effects technologies to create new worlds, such as the “bullet-time” technique that was developed for The Matrix.
In today’s increasingly technology-driven world – where our work depends on connectivity, our leisure on social networks, our economy on digital information – cyberpunk remains more pertinent than ever. News headlines are dominated by email hacks, the growing clout of mega-corporations, and rapid developments in AI and virtual reality. Cyberpunk remains a genre that pushes the boundaries, opening audience’s eyes to the intersection of technology and humanity and the blurring lines between artificial and organic intelligence. The questions about what makes something real – and who exactly is in control – are left to us to work out.The developer of DNA fingerprinting and profiling has said the government is wrong in retaining profiles of innocent people.
Geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys told MPs that he was "astonished, perplexed and deeply worried" about the existing management policy of the National DNA Database.
He was providing evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee in a session on the database on 3 February 2010. Currently, everybody arrested in England and Wales has to provide a DNA sample, and the government has been heavily criticised for retaining profiles of people not charged or found innocent. The European Court of Human Rights ruled against the policy of indefinite retention in late 2008.
In response to a question from committee chair Keith Vaz MP on whether he stood by his criticism of the Home Office's revised proposals of retaining the DNA of anyone who is arrested for six years, Jeffreys replied: "Yes I do indeed, even six years is a unique situation. We are the only country in the world that keeps DNA for that length of time. New Zealand is the closest I can find. No other country is doing this."
When asked by Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake what additional controls should be added to the current system, he said innocent people should be taken off the database. He added that he would "object profoundly" if his own DNA was put onto the system.
"DNA is intimately different to fingerprinting, it carries incredibly intimate information about who you are, where you're from and your family," said Jeffreys. He made reference to a recorded suicide due to an innocent person's shame at being on the database and pointed out that the likelihood of a false match "was not zero".
The geneticist said England and Wales should follow Scotland's lead, where police only retain the DNA profiles of innocent people under specific circumstances, with those accused of sexual assaults having their profiles held for a maximum of five years.
Plans by the United Arab Emirates to introduce a mandatory database for the whole population should be watched closely by the UK "to see if it does impact on criminal protection", said Jeffreys.
This article was originally published at Kable.A recent series of events seem to indicate that the Moroccan government has enlisted the services of a prominent foreign policy lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to help defend Morocco’s occupation in Western Sahara. While both Israel and Morocco have long been engaged in internationally recognized occupations, it now appears that they are working together to undermine the work of the congressional commission responsible for working to uphold the United States’ purported commitment to human rights.
In April of this year, Rep. Frank Wolf and Rep. Jim McGovern, the Co-Chairs of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, sent a letter to Secretary of State Kerry regarding human rights violations in the Moroccan occupied Western Sahara. The letter expressed support for an expanded human rights monitoring and reporting mandate for the U.N. Mission of the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). The letter also called on the ‘U.S. to encourage Morocco to immediately halt the harassment, intimidation, and arbitrary arrest and detention of pro-Independence Sahrawi; to call for the release of Sahrawi prisoners imprisoned for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression and associations […].’ Sahrawis, like many Palestinians, live under an internationally recognized occupation and have long been deprived of basic rights. Although the occupations differ in many ways, both Palestinians and Sahrawis are subject to systematic discrimination, perpetual displacement, and routine human rights abuses.
According to a story in the Moroccan news outlet Lakome, days after Representative Frank Wolf and Representative Jim McGovern sent the letter to Secretary Kerry, a delegation that included high level Moroccan security and intelligence officials came to Washington to meet with AIPAC. Officials from AIPAC and the Moroccan government would not comment about the content of their meetings, but experts on the issue have little doubt as to the subject of their conversations, especially given the timing. Stephen Zunes, a widely regarded expert on the issue, told me by e-mail that news of the meeting between AIPAC and Moroccan government officials shortly after the Lantos Human Rights Commission inquiry was, “not at all surprising. Mainstream and right-wing Zionist groups have been supportive of the Moroccans for quite some time.”
Although there is a history of close ties between the Moroccan government and Israel, their joint effort in Washington to undermine the work of the Lantos Human Right Commission seems to be a new development. The recent meeting between Moroccan and AIPAC officials appears to be part of this broader lobbying campaign undertaken by the Moroccan government to improve its image and shape a narrative that the Moroccan people chose “reform over revolution” during their version of the Arab Spring. As Samia Errazouki detailed in an investigative report, the group leading the effort is called the Moroccan American Center for Policy, which spent over $1.4 million lobbying in the first half of 2012 according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) disclosures. In her piece, Errazouki describes the Moroccan government’s lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill to put a spin on the situation faced by both Moroccans living under a non-democratic government and Sahrawis living under occupation in Western Sahara.
According to FARA records, the Moroccan American Center for Policy also met with Jennifer Rubin, a neo-conservative blogger who often shills for Israel in her Washington Post blog called ‘Right Turn.’ While Rubin continued to toe AIPAC’s line on Israel/Palestine in the Post, Errazouki points out that her writing became notorious for “speaking highly of the regime’s reforms […].” For example, in July of last year Rubin wrote an unabashed hagiography of Morocco’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Youssef Amrani. After giving Morocco glowing reviews on everything from constitutional reforms to human rights, she tacitly endorsed the “strategic partnership” proposed by the Ambassador.
The 2012 State Department report on human rights tells a much different story. Rather than “devolving power to local authorities” as Rubin claimed, the State Department found that the constitutional reforms “clearly safeguarded the essential powers of the king as the supreme arbiter among political forces.” The State Department’s annual report also cited “torture and other abuses by the security forces, political prisoners and detainees, infringement of freedom of speech and the press, lack of freedom of assembly, restrictions on the right to practice one’s religion, lack of independence of the judiciary, discrimination against women and girls, and trafficking in persons[…].” Hardly the democratic utopia Rubin describes to readers, and the only criticism she offers in the piece is directed toward the Moroccan government’s enemies.
Despite the well funded effort by the Moroccan government to secure support on Capitol Hill and within the mainstream media, the Lantos Human Rights Commission still issued a letter condemning human rights abuses in Western Sahara and calling for an expanded mandate for MINURSO, a measure strongly opposed by Morocco. Having already hired some of the best lobby shops in Washington with mixed results, the Moroccan government has apparently turned to AIPAC, widely known as the most effective lobby on foreign policy issues. Considering AIPAC’s record of successfully defending Israel’s 46 year occupation of Palestinian territories and securing over $30 billion in U.S. military aid regardless of the budgetary pressures, Moroccan officials were likely looking for a dependable strategy to mollify Members of Congress who have been critical of Morocco’s ongoing occupation of Western Sahara.
While attempts by AIPAC to undermine Palestinian human rights on Capitol Hill are routine, relatively uncontroversial, and normally successful, AIPAC’s apparent decision to advise other repressive governments on how to torpedo human rights inquiries arising from the Lantos Human Rights Commission may frustrate some Members of Congress. In what could be a harbinger of the divergence of U.S. and Israeli interests on everything from human rights to national security, Israel recently acted to protect the Bank of China from a U.S. led terrorism financing case in order to secure a trade visit by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to China.
As some nations look enviously at the impunity Israel enjoys in spite of its own flagrant violations of human rights, they may take Morocco’s lead and bypass traditional lobbying firms in favor of groups like AIPAC. Given Israel’s own foreign policy prerogatives, one can only hope that the work of the Lantos Human Rights Commission is not perpetually undermined by the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington and the so-called U.S. ally it represents.Conservative MP tipped to succeed Theresa May says he is against same-sex marriage and abortion in all circumstances
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative grassroots’ favoured candidate to succeed Theresa May, has said he is against same-sex marriage and opposes abortion even in cases of rape.
The Tory Eurosceptic MP, whose growing profile has seen him tipped for a ministerial role in the prime minister’s next reshuffle, said he was a practising Catholic and opposed abortion in all circumstances.
Asked by ITV’s Good Morning Britain whether he was in favour of same-sex marriage, the Old Etonian said: “I’m a Catholic, I take the teaching of the Catholic church seriously. Marriage is a sacrament and the view of what marriage is is taken by the church, not parliament.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s pose is fake. The contempt is real | Polly Toynbee Read more
“I support the teaching of the Catholic church. The marriage issue is the important thing, this is not how people arrange their lives.”
Rees-Mogg, who is a father of six, said he was “completely opposed to abortion” and said he believed life began at the point of conception. “With same-sex marriage, that is something that people are doing for themselves. With abortion, that is what people are doing to the unborn child,” he said.
Asked whether he would be against terminations in all circumstances including rape, he replied: “Afraid so.”
Rees-Mogg, who recently topped a ConservativeHome poll of Conservative party members as their favoured next prime minister, called speculations about a run for the leadership “all good silly season stuff. It was fun in August when there wasn’t much news about.”
The MP said he would not be a candidate if there was a leadership election. He added: “I fully support Mrs May; I want her to remain leader of the Tory party.”
But he declined to categorically rule out a bid in the future, saying: “I am a backbench MP. In the history of the prime ministership [it] has never gone to a backbench MP. It would be a vanity for me to be thinking about the leadership.”
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) said Rees-Mogg’s “extreme” views were “wildly at odds” with public opinion. It highlighted the decriminalisation this year of abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, and MPs’ support for extending abortion access for women resident in Northern Ireland.
Katherine O’Brien, head of policy research at Bpas, said: “We are a pro-choice country, we have a pro-choice parliament. Rees-Mogg’s stance on abortion is quite simply extreme, and extremely out of touch.
“Every politician is entitled to hold their own opinion on abortion. But what matters is whether they would let their own personal convictions stand in the way of women’s ability to act on their own.”
A spokesman for the Prime Minister made clear that she does not agree with him, but stressed that abortion was an issue for individual MPs’ conscience.
“It’s a long-standing principle that abortion is for Parliament and for individual MPs and is a matter of conscience for them,” said the spokesman. “The Prime Minister doesn’t happen to agree, but it is a matter of conscience.”
This week, Rees-Mogg found himself at the centre of two warring bids by activists to control the centre-right’s newly launched youth movement, Activate, whose haphazard launch week appeared to be an attempt to recreate the success of Labour grassroots group Momentum.
The group’s Twitter feed posted a series of tweets expressing support for Rees-Mogg to challenge May for the leadership, while its Facebook group posted a message saying the Twitter feed was no longer under its control and the group remained fully supportive of the prime minister.Felix Magath could be the first dictator who needs a revolution. As he eases himself in at Craven Cottage as Fulham's third manager of the season, stories of his uncompromising approach are aplenty. Sending players on energy-sapping runs through the Bavarian wilderness and allegedly hiding their water bottles, handing out mammoth fines for missed headers and back passes, the tales are myriad. Magath simply smiled and said: "I am a nice guy, very nice … no one died."
Some solace then for Fulham's players, who were called in for extra training last weekend after the German's surprise appointment on Friday. They can expect more of the same between now and May, with Magath given just 12 games to salvage a dire season that has left Fulham rooted to the bottom of the Premier League and four points from safety.
His task begins in earnest on Saturday away against West Bromwich Albion, a side struggling in 17th place. Yet the three-times Bundesliga winner first held talks about taking over two weeks ago, before the matches against Manchester United and Liverpool, René Meulensteen's last in charge.
Fulham insist that Meulensteen was not a dead man walking, saying they still harboured hopes of a turnaround during those two games – a 2-2 draw at Old Trafford and a 3-2 home defeat – which coincidentally provided some of the club's best performances in recent months. Magath's four-hour meeting in London 9 days ago with the owner, Shahid Khan, and chief executive, Alistair Mackintosh, suggests a plan C was already in motion.
Either way, Khan and Mackintosh have opted for one final throw of the dice in a desperate bid to avoid relegation. In doing so, they have turned to a man with a fierce reputation.
"Why I should change my training? I am the most successful coach of Germany," said Magath. "Until now everyone has lived [through] my training. No one died. Ask Raúl about my work. Ask the good players and you will get the right answers. I am a nice guy.
"The most important thing for me is to begin to work as fast as we can. I called them into work on Sunday to give us time to get to know each other. The players have to know me and they have to try to understand what I want.
"We have to work, to stay together and fight against relegation. That is all [we have to do] in the next few weeks. I have worked with some clubs who were on the bottom and I was never relegated. I am sure we will avoid relegation.
"I don't care about the past and I have no influence in the past. I have seen where we are in the table and I have to see where it can be improved. I don't care about other managers, I have my way of playing."
Magath has a fine coaching record in the Bundesliga, with successful periods at Bayern, Wolfsburg and Schalke. He has targeted six victories from the remaining fixtures if Fulham are to remain in the top flight, and will probably not care if he ruffles a few feathers along the way.
The former striker Jan Aage Fjortoft, who played under Magath at Eintracht Frankfurt, recounts tales of colleagues collapsing on training runs, while the Bayern president, Uli Hoeness, recently said: "I would never want to treat human beings like he does."
Magath has already acted swiftly in severing the club's ties with its previous coaching staff. Meulensteen, Alan Curbishley and Ray Wilkins have departed and, while he did not speak with Meulensteen directly, he did have a conversation with Curbishley, the former technical director.
"For Fulham to avoid relegation it [their departures] was a must," Magath said. "If you give the players a sign that [they are] starting from the beginning then you have also to send somebody away. I think it's best for Fulham."
On his meeting with Khan, Magath added: "He's a very impressive person and I'm sure that he is the right man for Fulham. He's not satisfied. He told me he has given the managers all they want from the beginning of the season. He was totally surprised he [the club] was in last place."
Waving his arms, gesticulating and inadvertently knocking over microphones, Magath claimed that he hoped to sprinkle some Bundesliga magic on the Premier League's bottom side. If he can steer Fulham clear of the drop zone it would arguably rank alongside some of his best achievements during an impressive 20-year managerial career.
He said: "I hope I can show you that being a little bit German, it's not so bad for the players."
Methods aside, the first German manager in Premier League history is sure to make an impression.NBA Photos/Getty Images
Arron Afflalo is right where he wants to be: New York, wearing a Knicks jersey with his own name on the back. But which Afflalo will New York get? The sturdy, two-way role player from his early years in Denver, the slightly wobbly performer of the past few seasons, or the best Afflalo yet?
That remains to be seen, but what's clear is the Knicks and Affalo need each other. They're well-matched from a basketball standpoint, but it's more than that—they also believe in each other.
'Too Great'
“Arron Afflalo is a pro, one of the hardest working guys in the league,” Knicks head coach Derek Fisher said, relayed by a release on the team's official site. “Also, a physical guy that can guard multiple players.”
If you think that's nice, see what Afflalo had to say about the Knickerbockers.
“A franchise like the Knicks, people can say what they want, they’re not going to be down for long.’’ Afflalo told Marc Berman of the New York Post. “The city’s too great. The fanbase is too great. The opportunities are too great that over time, you’ll have a great culture, great players trickling in slowly but surely. This is a city that deserves to be at its best.”
In these bleak times, that kind of sunny optimism must warm even the coldest Knicks fan's heart.
Since they're not a likely championship contender in 2015-16 and couldn't afford to throw max contracts around like so many other teams this July, the Knicks hoped to attract a special kind of player—someone who genuinely wanted to be in New York and was wiling to be part of the system and play nice with Carmelo Anthony.
They've certainly discovered all that in Afflalo, who played with Melo between 2009 and 2011 on the Denver Nuggets. He gave Alex Kennedy of Basketball Insiders a list of reasons for choosing to sign with the Knicks over other teams:
It was just the fan base, the environment, the chance to play with Carmelo [Anthony] again, the chance to play with other great players, the mutual interest from the coaching staff and [front office], and the culture they’re trying to build. I just thought it was a good fit for me.
The Road Here
It could be a great fit. The Knicks need a reliable shooting guard to support Carmelo Anthony, defensive toughness, especially at the perimeter, and more veteran leadership. Afflalo can provide all those things. But will he?
He's got the skills—they just haven't been quite as locked-in recently as he's been shipped from town to town. During his initial three seasons with the Nuggets, Afflalo was an energetic force on the defensive end, and he was shooting 47.8 percent from the field and 41.8 from three-point range, piling up tidy, not enormous, stacks of points.
Yet when he moved to the Orlando Magic, his three-ball game started to slip. He got it back in 2013-14, when he was excellent on offense—18 points per game, 45.9 FG percent, 42 percent from three-point range—but he was lazy on defense. Shooters scored better on him at every inch of the court. The Magic missed the playoffs both seasons.
Afflalo began last season back in Denver, but he was shifted to the Portland Trail Blazers in February, where he was a stand-in for the injured Wes Matthews. He tightened up the D but didn't have the same touch, averaging 42.4 percent from the field, 35.4 percent from behind the arc.
Then again, that's still more efficient than most of the Knicks.
Afflalo is the sort of player who will adjust his game depending on what his team needs of him. Playing along Damian Lillard and LaMarcus Aldridge, he didn't have to be a featured scorer, but in New York, he probably will have to step into that role.
And why not? He can light it up and drop 30 in a night, drilling step-back jumpers like it's the easiest thing in the world. With the Knicks, he may have a chance to show off more, even while being second to Melo.
Afflalo has a great opportunity to win the approval of those New York fans with his energy. The effort he makes to go for rebounds, the pressure defense and his general hard-working spirit are the kinds of qualities Madison Square Garden crowds cheer for.
Afflalo's agent, Sam Goldfeder, told the New York Post, per Berman,
This is the happiest I’ve seen [Afflalo] as a professional. It’s like he was drafted again. This is where he wanted to be and feels the stars aligned for him. It’s the first time he got to choose, and that was meaningful to him. The electricity he found in the Garden was like no other place, and he wanted that environment. He’s looking to have the best season of his career.
If Afflalo's energetic style of play helps the Knicks string together some more Ws this season, he'll be rewarded with that irresistible Madison Square Garden electricity that drew him here—and maybe a contract extension.
All stats from NBA.com/stats.Author's Note: It's felt good to get this out of my head, where it has taken up residence and been very loud for the last year. I hope all of you have enjoyed it, because it was very fun to write! Hopefully it's been entertaining and stirred a few emotions as you've read it, because that's what it's all about. Time to bring things home.
Disclaimer: I do not own Frozen or any of the Disney characters held within. All of them are being used under Fair Use, and I have not and will not make any profit from this story.
An Elsanna Fairy Tale
Chapter 3: Prestige
by Jo K.
What am I fighting for
If I win I lose my life
I need you more and more
To break my will tonight
Only love can set us free
Only love can bear the truth
Only love can bring us peace
Only love can save me and you
-Sophie B. Hawkins, "Only Love"
—O—
The snow had picked back up again as Dani walked the streets of Arendelle, trying to follow Tove's directions to the small corner market despite most of the street signs being covered with snow and ice.
Trying to walk through the narrow paths that had been carved through the nearly six feet of snow that had fallen over the last ten days made her feel like a rat meandering through a maze, following its senses while searching for some elusive goal that remained stubbornly out of sight until the very end. The fact that most of Arendelle continued to go about its business despite the ridiculous volume of snow dumped on the country was still perplexing to Dani.
By now it seemed like almost everyone she saw wore either Elsa's single blonde braid or Anna's twin coppery braids, either as a wig or as part of a hat of some sort. Ball caps, toboggans, ski caps, fisherman hats, berets, it seemed as though practically any headwear imaginable could be found accessorized with the trademark hair of the goddesses of love—at least in Arendelle.
Spotting the small market at last, Dani smiled, stepping to the side to allow a young couple pushing a stroller to pass in front of her. As the young family moved past her, chatting about something, she saw the baby in the stroller was asleep, bundled securely against the cold with only the tiny face peeking out beneath the thick coat and blanket. The mother and father, both brunettes, had on toboggans, black for the husband, pastel blue for the wife, with Anna's reddish braids dangling down the man's back and Elsa's thick platinum braid laid carefully across the woman's left shoulder.
The sight no longer was surprising to Dani, not any more, though it continued to make |
and he makes several good point – as follows:
By Paul Craig Roberts – Don’t Count On Trump Being Inaugurated
The Ruling Establishment Does Not Intend For Trump To Become President.
The latest “explosive” fake news is that “multiple US officials with direct knowledge” told CNN that they have “classified documents” that Russia has compromising documents on Trump that would allow them to blackmail the US President. The documents consist of memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative “whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible.”
According to antiwar.com “the dossier claimed several figures in the Trump campaign were in league with the Russian government during the campaign, and that Russia had been conspiring with them to groom Trump as an ally for ‘at least five years.’ It also claims exchanges of information between Trump and the Kremlin for ‘at least eight years,’... The dossier names former Trump adviser Carter Page, his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, as well as incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as having personally and repeatedly met with Kremlin officials on anti-Clinton leaks.”
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is the former Director of the Defense Intellience Agency. If such a high level US intelligence official is repeatedly meeting with Kremlim officials and the CIA has to learn about it from memos written by an unidentified former British intelligent agent, the CIA is totally incompetent.
The dossier claims that in Russian hands are videos of “wild sex parties” staged by Trump on his numerous trips to Moscow. And it gets wilder.
The New York Times also ran with the story but did state that there was at the present time no confirmation for the story.
Consider these three questions:
How would a former British intelligence operative get such extraordinary documents from Russian intelligence? If he had such documents, why would he hand them over instead of selling them to Trump for a major fortune? Why would such a crazy story be on CNN and in the New York Times unless the ruling establishment intends to use it to block Trump from the presidency?
What this elevation in wild charges tells me is that the CIA’s effort to sell Trump on the Russisn hacking did not succeed, and the CIA has escalated its attack on the president-elect.
Here are the URLs to the CNN, NYTimes, and antiwar.com reports:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-russia/index.html
http://news.antiwar.com/2017/01/10/leaked-dossier-claims-russia-has-blackmail-videos-on-trump/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-intelligence.html?emc=edit_na_20170110&nlid=31655120&ref=cta&_r=0That's because the self-styled global policemen have encouraged Israel’s lawbreaking by consistently ignoring its transgressions, writes Jonathan Cook
The 24-hour visit by German chancellor Angela Merkel to Israel this week came as relations between the two countries hit rock bottom. According to a report in Der Spiegel magazine last week, Ms Merkel and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been drawn into shouting matches when discussing by phone the faltering peace process.
Despite their smiles to the cameras during the visit, tension behind the scenes has been heightened by a diplomatic bust-up earlier this month when Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament and himself German, gave a speech to the Israeli parliament.
In unprecedented scenes, a group of Israeli legislators heckled Mr Schulz, calling him a “liar”, and then staged a walkout, led by the economics minister Naftali Bennett. Rather than apologising, Mr Netanyahu intervened to lambast Mr Schulz for being misinformed.
Mr Schulz, who, like Ms Merkel, is considered a close friend of Israel, used his speech vehemently to oppose growing calls in Europe for a boycott of Israel. So how did he trigger such opprobrium?
Mr Schulz’s main offence was posing a question: was it true, as he had heard in meetings in the West Bank, that Israelis have access to four times more water than Palestinians? He further upset legislators by gently suggesting that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was preventing economic growth there.
Neither statement should have been in the least controversial. Figures from independent bodies such as the World Bank show Israel, which dominates the local water supplies, allocates per capita about 4.4 times more water to its population than to Palestinians.
Equally, it would be hard to imagine that years of denying goods and materials to Gaza, and blocking exports, have not ravaged its economy. The unemployment rate, for example, has increased 6 per cent, to 38.5 per cent, following Israel’s recent decision to prevent the transfer of construction materials to Gaza’s private sector.
But Israelis rarely hear such facts from their politicians or the media. And few are willing to listen when a rare voice like Mr Schulz’s intervenes. Israelis have grown content to live in a large bubble of denial.
Mr Netantahu and his ministers are making every effort to reinforce that bubble, just as they have tried to shield Israelis from the fact that they live in the Middle East, not Europe, by building walls on every side – both physical and bureaucratic – to exclude Palestinians, Arab neighbours, foreign workers and asylum seekers.
Inside Israel, the government is seeking to silence the few critical voices left. The intimidation was starkly on display last week as the supreme court considered the constitutionality of the recent “boycott law”, which threatens to bankrupt anyone calling for a boycott of either Israel or the settlements.
Tellingly, a lawyer for the government defended its position by arguing that Israel could not afford freedom of expression of the kind enjoyed by countries like the US.
Illustrating the point, uproar greeted the news last month that a civics teacher had responded negatively when asked by pupils whether he thought Israel’s army the most moral in the world. A campaign to sack him has been led by government ministers and his principal, who stated: “There are sacred cows I won’t allow to be slaughtered.”
Similarly, last week it emerged that a Palestinian from East Jerusalem had been interrogated by police for incitement after noting on Facebook that his city was “under occupation”.
Outside Israel, Mr Netanyahu is indulging in more familiar tactics to browbeat critics. Tapping European sensitivities, he accused those who support a boycott of being “classical anti-semites in modern garb”. He justified the allegation, as he has before, on the grounds that Israel is being singled out.
It looks that way to Israelis only because they have singularly insulated themselves from reality.
Western critics focus on Israel because, unlike countries such as North Korea or Iran, Israel has managed to avoid any penalties despite riding roughshod over international norms for decades.
Iran, which is only suspected of secretly developing nuclear weapons, has been enduring years of savage sanctions. Israel, which has hidden its large stockpile of nuclear warheads from international scrutiny since the late 1960s, has enjoyed endless diplomatic cover.
Contrary to Mr Netanyahu’s claim, lots of countries have been singled out by the United States and Europe for sanctions – whether diplomatic, financial or, in the case of Iraq, Libya and Syria, military.
But the antipathy towards Israel has deeper roots still. Israel has not only evaded accountability, it has been handsomely rewarded by the US and Europe for flouting international conventions in its treatment of the Palestinians.
The self-styled global policemen have inadvertently encouraged Israel’s lawbreaking by consistently ignoring its transgressions and continuing with massive aid handouts and preferential trade deals.
Far from judging Israel unfairly, Mr Schulz, Ms Merkel and most other western leaders regularly indulge in special pleading on its behalf. They know about Israel’s ugly occupation but shy away from exercising their powers to help end it.
The reason why popular criticism of Israel is currently galvanising around the boycott movement – what Mr Netanyahu grandly calls “delegitimisation” – is that it offers a way for ordinary Americans and Europeans to distance themselves from their governments’ own complicity in Israel’s crimes.
If Mr Netanyahu has refused to listen to his external critics, western governments have been no less at fault in growing impervious to the groundswell of sentiment at home that expects Israel to be forced to take account of international law.
Both Ms Merkel’s diplomatic niceties and her shouting matches have proven themselves utterly ineffective. It is time for her and her western colleagues to stop talking and to start taking action against Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist based in NazarethA week ago, in a far-off corner of the Internet, a little website called NASAspaceflight.com published a story about a futuristic propulsion drive that produces thrust without propellant. Amazing! said the rest of the Internet. A drive that can run without heavy propellant opens up travel to the farthest reaches of space. Not only that, but the NASA-based group testing the drive had detected a slight spatial distortion around it—a warp, in other words. As in "warp speed" and "warp drive." Not only could humans get to deep space unencumbered by fuel, but they could even travel faster than the speed of light!
Does that sound too good to be true? Excellent. This isn’t the first time that this theoretical drive—tested by a small lab called Eagleworks, based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center—has surfaced. Every time it comes up, it gets the space nerds frothing about the possibility of interstellar travel. And every time, physicists have to settle everyone down.
This time is like those times.
Last year, the Eagleworks lab—headed up by Harold “Sonny” White—said at a conference on propulsion technologies that they had measured thrust from an electromagnetic propulsion drive. The basic idea behind an EM drive, which is based on a design from a British engineer named Roger Shawyer, is that it can produce thrust by bouncing microwaves around in a cone-shaped metal cavity.
That would be awesome, of course, except it violates one of the fundamental tenets of physics: conservation of momentum. Saying that a drive can produce thrust without propellant going out the backside is kind of like saying that you can drive your car just by sitting in the driver's seat and pushing on the dashboard.
Now, the last time this idea popped up it made a bunch of noise, which eventually settled down because of some pretty (ahem) obvious flaws in Eagleworks’ experiments. The physicists hadn’t run the tests in a vacuum—essential for measuring a subtle thrust signal. And while they had tested the drive under multiple conditions, one of them was intentionally set up wrong. That setup produced the same thrust signatures as the other conditions, suggesting that the signals the physicists were seeing were all artifacts.
This time around, Eagleworks researchers said they had addressed one of those problems. “We have now confirmed that there is a thrust signature in a hard vacuum,” wrote Eagleworks member Paul March in a forum. It was that post—all the way back in February—that led to most of last week's hullabaloo.
Let’s be clear, though: Just because this time the group conducted its experiments in a hard vacuum doesn’t mean that an interstellar warp drive is soon to come. Marc Millis, who headed up the now-defunct Breakthrough Propulsion Physics lab at NASA’s Glenn Research Center—which, like Eagleworks, was dedicated to finding science-fiction-sounding ways to move a spaceship—says there are plenty of other interactions between the drive and the test chamber that could account for the results. “Even if it was done in a hard vacuum,” Millis says, “you have to take into account the distance between the drive and the chamber wall, whether those walls were conductive, and the geometry of the system.”
On top of that, there’s no way to be sure that the tests were run in a hard vacuum—because the only source of information is a post on an Internet forum. Not a peer-reviewed published result, not even a one-off conference proceeding. Let's not do science like that, OK?
You've just read nine paragraphs of credulity, which is frankly more than the work deserves. The reason the Eagleworks lab presents results in unrefereed conference proceedings and Internet posts, according to Eric Davis, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, is that no peer-reviewed journals will publish their papers. Even arXiv, the open-access pre-print server physicists default to, has reportedly turned away Eagleworks results.
Why the cold shoulder? Either flawed results or flawed theory. Eagleworks' results so far are very close to the threshold of detection—which is to say, barely perceptible by their machinery. That makes it more likely that their findings are a result of instrument error, and their thrust measurements don't scale up with microwave input as you might expect. Plus, the physics and math behind each of their claims is either flawed or just...nonexistent.
For example: How might the EM Drive get around that pesky conservation-of-momentum problem? Eagle works says the microwave field generated in the drive’s cavity could be pushing against quantum vacuum virtual plasma. “The problem is there’s no such thing,” says Davis. Millis, for his part, doesn’t even pay attention to White’s work out of Eagleworks: “If it’s not impartial, I don’t read it.”
So who are these guys? Despite the fact that the group works out of Johnson, under the auspices of NASA, Eagleworks still only runs on $50,000 a year in funding. “That’s not enough to conduct a high-quality experimental research program,” says Davis. “They’d need $1.5 million, $2 million for five, six, seven years.”
Research into breakthrough propulsion physics—even when it had its own lab at Glenn, under Millis—has never been particularly well-funded. So “the way that this really happens is people dabble in addition to their day job,” says Millis. According to him, Eagleworks started with White working on concepts in his free time, not officially supported or sanctioned by NASA, and then eventually got a little money to run his lab out of Johnson. But the NASA banner doesn't legitimize the work—if anything, NASA seems to want to keep the project under the radar. The press office at Johnson Space Center denied requests for interviews with March and White.
Davis and Millis both admit that they're on the fringe. They're scientists who strongly believe in the potential for warp drives and interstellar travel. So maybe it's a little funny to hear them essentially say that other would-be warpsmiths are crackpots. But White and his colleagues exist on the fringe of the fringe. “We’re all open-minded people,” says Davis. “We’re all in the business of finding the breakthrough. But we have a standard of rigor, based on incremental research and development—not big leaps in logic.”
When someone builds a warp drive that violates conservation of momentum, you'll read about it here, accompanied by a big old mea culpa. But until then, don't believe the hyperspace.Dear Mr and Mrs Curnow,
Please accept my warmest congratulations on your recent marriage. I can only imagine the joy you both are feeling right now, knowing that you have made such a significant and universally recognised commitment to the person you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with. If things remain as they currently are in the United Kingdom, I will only ever be able to imagine that feeling. You see, I am a lesbian and am therefore not legally permitted to marry the person I choose to spend my life with. I presume you must be very busy at the moment, enjoying the honeymoon period of your married life, but I hope you are willing to take few minutes to try and understand why I find it very upsetting, confusing and frustrating that you both were allowed to marry the person you chose, but I cannot.
I’m really just a regular person; I have family and friends who I love, a good job that I really enjoy and a nice, comfortable home. Sound familiar? I hope so, because I have a wonderful life and appreciate every single day how lucky I am. I have a brother who is two years older than me. When we were little we fought like cat and dog but, at the same time, we would defend one another with our lives if anyone else tried to hurt the other.
Growing up, our parents always treated us equally; no favouritism, no stereotypes, just love. Since I could walk, all I ever wanted was to have a ball at my feet. My brother was quieter than me but in time developed confidence as he started to write and perform music. We were always encouraged to follow our dreams and passions and were told that nothing was beyond our capabilities if we gave it our all.
Our parents also imparted in us a keen sense of justice; of right and wrong. When asked what she wanted for our futures, our mum would simply answer that she hoped we would both be “happy, healthy and well-adjusted.” Now that we are a bit older and hopefully a bit wiser, my brother is my best friend. And, in somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, we are both all of those things our mother wished. Yet in the eyes of the law we are not equal.
My brother and I have always been quite similar; we both love music, we both like Chinese food and we are both attracted to women. The fact that he is male means that, when the time comes, he can marry the woman of his dreams. The fact that I am female means that I cannot. As someone who was brought up by a family who surrounded me with the values of love, justice and equality, that really hurts. I cannot wait for the day to come when my brother marries the woman he decides to spend the rest of his life with and am sure that he would equally love to see me marry the person I choose; but at the current time, only one of us has that right.
I understand that you recently delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street that held the signatures of 500,000 people, on behalf of The Coalition for Marriage who believe that marriage should remain as only existing between one man and one woman. I watched with great sadness as a beautiful bride and handsome groom, who have recently embarked on the journey of married life together, chose to spend what is surely one of the happiest times of their lives delivering a petition that is ultimately designed to deny that right and that happiness to others.
I have read and listened to many arguments from those opposing equal marriage and, please believe me when I say, I respect each and every one of their opinions. With the same respect, however, I wholeheartedly and passionately disagree.
Dr Don Horrocks from The Coalition for Marriage has aired many opinions regarding same-sex marriage over the years; some of which reference polygamy and horses (but that’s another letter for another day). The issues I want to raise are with regard to the comments made by Dr Horrocks inThe Coalition of Marriage’s video posted on their YouTube account which shows you both delivering that petition to Downing Street.
In this video, Dr Horrocks said that same-sex marriage will alter the meaning of marriage. It is my belief that the meaning of marriage and what it represents will not change. The only thing that will change is that more people will be able to enter into it. With marriage being such an important institution in this country, as is being argued by The Coalition for Marriage, surely more people entering into it will only strengthen it rather than weaken it; another argument he put forward.
The other view Dr Horrocks expressed that I would like to address is that legalising same-sex marriage would result in marriage and family becoming a historical memory. Again, much to my frustration, this opinion was expressed without any justification or context.
“a social unit consisting of parents and their children, considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not.” I’m sure you will agree that a single-parent and their child or children is no less a family than one with both a mother and a father (or two parents of the same sex for that matter). It is estimated that there are around 2 million single parents living in the UK; the majority of whom I am sure are raising children who are happy and thriving. Families in the UK come in many colours, shapes and sizes. One definition of family isI’m sure you will agree that a single-parent and their child or children is no less a family than one with both a mother and a father (or two parents of the same sex for that matter). It is estimated that there are around 2 million single parents living in the UK; the majority of whom I am sure are raising children who are happy and thriving.
For me, a family is a group of people, usually but not always related by blood, who give each other a sense of belonging, safety and love. The funny thing about arguing that same-sex couples will damage the lives of the children they raise is that never once has a same-sex couple conceived a child by accident. Every single gay and lesbian couple who decided to have a child together must plan for it, often in great detail; whether this is a lesbian couple who need to find a sperm donor, a gay couple who must find a surrogate mother or either of these looking to go through the lengthy and often difficult process of adoption. Every single child brought into the home of a gay or lesbian couple is wanted.
I understand that your unwillingness to support same-sex marriage may stem from your opinion that the concept is in conflict with your personal religious beliefs. I respect everyone’s right to uphold any religious views they wish, however, I cannot respect that those views should be allowed to prevent others of different or no faith to be united in marriage.
The Government’s equal marriage consultation explicitly states that, if passed in law, same-sex marriage would have to be conducted in a civil setting with no religious content. It has been argued by religious leaders that this would be open to challenge on a human rights basis, however, it is my personal view that once the equal-marriage legislation is passed, whether that is sooner or later, the best possible scenario for all would be that those faith groups who support equal marriage should be permitted to conduct ceremonies, whilst those who oppose it should have their rights to do so upheld in law.
I have heard it argued that since same-sex couples are able to enter into Civil Partnerships that there is no need to allow them to marry. There is no doubt that when Civil Partnerships were introduced in the UK in 2004 they signified a massive leap forward towards equality for LGBT people. However, I and many others feel that these are almost a second-class option. The fact that we can have legal entitlements as a couple is wonderful, but in the eyes of society it is not equal - it is not a marriage.
Imagine taking your partner to a party and being unable to truly introduce them as your husband or wife. “This is my Civil Partner” doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it? It sounds almost clinical and it certainly is not equal. Mrs Curnow, I presume from your visit to Downing Street that you are interested in politics; do you think that when most women over 30 won the right to vote in the UK in 1918 that they should just have smiled, said “thank you” and accepted it? Or do you think they were right to continue to fight for equality until 1928 when all women finally gained the same voting rights as men? This could not have been achieved without their male allies and LGBT people cannot achieve true equality without the support of our straight allies.
As a newly married couple, I presume that you will be considering starting a family one day. Please take a moment to think how you would feel if your child told you that they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Believe me when I tell you that, despite having the most supportive family I could wish for, that was the single most difficult conversation of my life. Would you love your child any less? Would you want them to have equal rights to their straight brother or sister?
I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this letter and I urge you to think seriously about why you felt so strongly about denying same-sex couples the right to marry that you deemed it appropriate to dress up in wedding attire and hand-deliver that petition to 10 Downing Street earlier this week. I would love to know your thoughts on why you believe your own right to marry the person you love is greater and any more legitimate than mine.
“if you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” Whilst we appear to be travelling on different paths in our lives, I wholeheartedly hope that one day I too will be legally entitled to embark upon the same journey of married life that you both have just begun, with the person I choose. In the meantime, I wish you both all the best in your married life together. I am sure you will experience your share of ups and downs, but I think this quotation I recently read sums it up:Whilst we appear to be travelling on different paths in our lives, I wholeheartedly hope that one day I too will be legally entitled to embark upon the same journey of married life that you both have just begun, with the person I choose.
Yours Sincerely,
Note: The original news report of the Curnow's visit to Downing street can be found
Update:
Julie PriceThe original news report of the Curnow's visit to Downing street can be found HERE THIS article in The Telegraph documents the many disgruntled messages the couple have since received.Peter Tchaikovsky - Composer
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky is remembered today as the greatest Russian composer ever. He wrote music which stands very clearly in the European tradition, but has a distinctly Russian flavour. He was a master of melody, setting glorious melodies against distinctively Russian rhythms in a way that probably nobody else has ever done.
There is no definitive spelling for Tchaikovsky's name in the Roman alphabet that we use, since Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet. He is sometimes referred to as Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky.
Biography
Born on 7 May, 1840 in Votkinsk, Russia, (about 500 miles east of Moscow) to an upper-class family, Tchaikovsky was a highly-strung child. Although musically gifted, he was not encouraged by his family. When he was eight, the family moved to Moscow and then to St Petersburg. His mother died of cholera when he was 14 and this affected him deeply. He studied law and got a reasonably good job in the civil service but didn't like it. When he was 22, he left the civil service and entered the Conservatory of Music in St Petersburg as a student, teaching music privately to pay for his studies. At 26, he was offered a job in the Moscow Conservatory as a professor. The (meagre) salary from this enabled him to devote his spare time to composing.
Tchaikovsky's subsequent career consisted of the production of huge amounts of quality music interspersed with nervous breakdowns. He was an extremely emotional person and suffered from numerous neuroses. For example, he was convinced that if he conducted an orchestra, his head would fall off. On the rare occasions when he had to conduct, he held his chin with his left hand throughout the performance. In later years he seems to have got over this particular phobia. Tchaikovsky was also a secret homosexual. At the time in Russia, this was considered a terrible crime and if found out, he would be stripped of all his possessions and deported to a Siberian labour camp.
In 1876 he was approached by Antonina Milyukova, a former fellow student, who was quite clearly mentally unbalanced. She said that she loved him and would commit suicide if he did not marry her. Strangely, Tchaikovsky agreed, and the two were married. Perhaps Tchaikovsky thought he could 'cure' himself of his homosexuality or perhaps he wanted the respectability of a wife as a front. But the relationship was doomed from the start; he found her constant demands for sex repulsive. They were separated within nine weeks.
Also in 1876, Tchaikovsky entered into a strange relationship with a woman which brought an element of stability to his life. He was approached in writing by Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow who wished to sponsor his musical talent. He accepted and proceeded for the next 14 years to converse in writing with Madame von Meck. He poured out his heart to her in letters, often sending one a day. She appears to have been equally forthcoming in her letters. He was even entertained in her country mansion, when she was absent from it. But the two never met in person, on her insistence. She provided money to keep him going during his composing, enabling him to resign from his teaching job and devote himself fully to composing. Eventually, in 1890, she decided to break off the relationship abruptly, never speaking to him again. It is not clear why and Tchaikovsky never forgave her. By this time, however, Tchaikovsky had made his name as a composer and could support himself.
Tchaikovsky died in 1893 at the age of 53. His death is reported in two entirely different versions. The official story published at the time of his death was that he drank some untreated water during a cholera outbreak, rapidly contracted the disease and died. This account is often given in histories of the composer. But it does not quite ring true. At the wake, Tchaikovsky's body was on display and many of his friends wept over the corpse. If he had really died of cholera, his body would have been kept in quarantine.
The other version of Tchaikovsky's death is that his homosexuality was discovered, with the threat of it being revealed to the authorities. Rather than face utter disgrace and ruin, Tchaikovsky committed suicide. As suicide was viewed as a sin, the alternate explanation might have been constructed to allow him a proper burial.
The Music
Tchaikovsky's music is very well known. He had arguably the greatest gift for writing melodies of any composer ever. He was also a master of orchestration, developing his melodies to the full. His most famous works are probably his ballets and his first piano concerto. The rest of this entry gives a sample of his best known works.
The Ballets
Tchaikovsky's ballets are now considered the centre-piece and mainstay of Russian Ballet.
The Nutcracker
This tells the story of a girl who is given a nutcracker in the shape of a soldier for a Christmas present. She falls asleep and when she awakes (or is she really dreaming?) the nutcracker and all her other toys have come alive.
The ballet features a sequence of short dances by various characters ('Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy', 'Dance of the Two Flutes', etc) which are often played separately as The Nutcracker Suite. Everybody will be familiar with at least some of these. Disney featured the whole of this suite in the animated film Fantasia in 1938.
Swan Lake
Initially a failure, this ballet is now a favourite. It tells the tale of Princess Odette, who has been turned into a swan by an evil magician. She returns to human form for a few hours at midnight each night. Prince Siegfried sees her and falls in love, vowing to free her. But by the machinations of Odile, daughter of the evil magician, he ends up engaged to the wrong woman. Realising everything has gone terribly wrong, the two lovers mourn by a lake. They are drowned when, with an enormous wave, the lake takes them into itself.
Sleeping Beauty
The fairy tale story of the beautiful princess who pricks her finger on an enchanted spindle and falls asleep, to be woken by the kiss of the handsome prince. Much of the music of the ballet was used as incidental music in Disney's animated version of the story.
The Symphonies
Tchaikovsky wrote seven symphonies, bizarrely numbered 1, 2, 3, Manfred, 4, 5 and 6. The best of these are the last three.
The 4th Symphony
Opening with a wonderful fanfare on brass, which is said to represent Fate, this work is dramatic and moving from start to finish.
The 5th Symphony
This symphony is one of his most morose, starting with a mournful deep theme played on clarinets. The symphony progresses but stays close to this theme throughout, ending with a triumphant version of it in a major key. This is a great favourite with the concert-going public.
The 6th Symphony - 'Pathé tique'
This symphony is a wonderful piece, full of emotions. The four movements are said by some to represent passion, love, disappointment and death. Whether these were exactly what Tchaikovsky intended or not, they are appropriate to the emotional intensity of the music. Tchaikovsky himself rightly considered this his finest work.
Other Well-known Music
Eugene Onegin
Tchaikovsky wrote ten operas; this is the most famous of them. Based on the dramatic poem of the same name by Pushkin, it tells of a shy young woman, Tatiana, who falls in love with a man, Eugene Onegin. He rejects her love. Many years later, when she is happily married to a prince, Onegin realises his mistake and declares his love for her, but it is too late.
Piano Concerto No. 1
The First Piano Concerto is the most famous piano piece by Tchaikovsky. He dedicated it to the pianist Nicolai Rubinstein, but Rubinstein labelled it 'worthless and unplayable'. The composer rededicated it to Hans von Bü low, who then gave the first performance of the work. It was an instant success.
Violin Concerto
This is considered standard fare for the great virtuoso players, along with the concertos of Brahms and Beethoven.
Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture
An early piece, this has one of the most glorious melodies ever.
1812 Overture
This piece was written to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon when he attempted to attack Moscow and was forced to retreat. The music contains frequent quotes from the French and old Russian national anthems, ending with the Russian music triumphant and accompanied by a cavalcade of real cannons. This is a definite show-stopper.The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- the agency tasked with keeping U.S. guns from being smuggled to Mexico -- has come under fire for allegedly allowing firearms to cross the border into Mexico.
Last Friday, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to the ATF stating that his office had "received numerous allegations that the ATF sanctioned the sale of hundreds of assault weapons to suspected straw purchasers, who then allegedly transported these weapons throughout the Southwest border area and into Mexico."
Grassley asked for ATF officials to meet with his staff to discuss the matter, noting that "there are serious concerns that the ATF may have become careless, if not negligent, in implementing the Gunrunner strategy." Gunrunner is the name of the ATF operation to keep guns from entering Mexico.
On Monday, a concerned Grassley sent a follow-up letter, writing that while ATF had not yet responded to his request for a meeting, one of the whistleblowers that Grassley's office had been dealing with -- a current ATF employee -- was "allegedly accused... of misconduct" by his boss for talking with Senate staffers.
Note: See letters here and here. The letters initially surfaced on the website of gun rights blogger David Codrea. Sen. Grassley's Press Secretary Beth Levine confirmed to FoxNews.com that the letters were genuine.
ATF spokeswoman Janice Kemp referred questions from FoxNews.com to spokesmen Drew Wade and Scot Thomasson, who did not respond to calls or e-mails from FoxNews.com on Tuesday morning.
But a former ATF agent told FoxNews.com on condition of anonymity that ATF Headquarters allowed guns to cross the border, for the reason that ATF wanted to glean more intelligence about who would come to possess the guns and what regions of the country they would end up in.
Additionally, Dick Deguerin, attorney for a Texas gun store named "Carter Country," told Fox26 Houston that the ATF asked the store to sell the guns to even those they thought were going to smuggle them to Mexico -- so that ATF could track where the guns went.
"They were told to go through with sales of three or more assault rifles at the same time... They went through with the sales because the ATF told them to go through with the sales," Deguerin said, adding that the store reported all suspicious sales to the ATF.
Federal investigators are known to use such techniques in drug trafficking investigations.
"Controlled delivery is an investigative technique that allows specific consignments of illegal drugs or other controlled substances to pass through the territory of one or more states with the objective of identifying not only the street dealers, but the individuals controlling the drug trade network," a State Department website notes.
However, the ATF has not admitted to using that technique for gun trafficking investigations. While ATF did not respond to requests for comment from FoxNews.com, Mexican newspaper El Diario El Paso reported last week that ATF spokesman Scot Thomasson told them, "we do not permit the exit of arms to Mexico."
Grassley's first letter to the ATF hinted at the potential problems with allowing firearms to cross borders, writing that two of the weapons that the ATF allegedly sanctioned to be sold to straw purchasers were sold to Mexican gangs and "were then allegedly used in a firefight on December 14, 2010, against Customs and Border Protection agents, killing CBP Agent Brian Terry."
Gun rights bloggers have speculated that the reason for allowing the guns into Mexico was to pad statistics on the number of guns crossing the border -- the suspicion being that a higher number would make the ATF's mission in preventing the guns from crossing seem all the more urgent.
The former ATF agent who spoke with FoxNews.com said that he had no reason to think that padding the statistics was a motivation.
FoxNews.com previously reported that an often-quoted statistic that 90 percent of guns used in Mexico crimes came from the U.S. was, in fact, a myth. Only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have actually been traced to the U.S.
None of the claims about the ATF allowing guns to cross the border have been conclusively proved. But Sen. Grassley has called for the ATF to be more transparent to allow the truth to come out.
"This is exactly the wrong sort of reaction for the ATF," Grassley's second letter reads.
"Rather than focusing on retaliating against whistleblowers, the ATF's sole focus should be on finding and disclosing the truth as soon as possible."Offense
The next wave of Oregon football has landed. A promising group of 2017 signees have made their way to Eugene.Best of all, as has been the case for several years now, EVERYONE successfully enrolled at Oregon. There were a couple 'close calls' in this class, but ultimately everyone got it done.The 2017 class already has several signees on campus. That list includes quarterback Braxton Burmeister, receiver Darrian McNeal, defensive back Thomas Graham, safety Billy Gibson, defensive tackle |
change drives substrate-binding and -release steps of the cycle (Fig. 6D). When the conformational change is modeled with substrate, nearly 30 residues can be translocated into the channel. Additionally, similar open “lock-washer” conformations are populated by other translocases (19–22), which may represent a conserved off state. Disaggregation involves nonprocessive and processive mechanisms (23, 24). Cycling between the open and closed states may enable nonprocessive bind and release “pulling” events. Alternatively, the two different substrate-bound states suggest a processive mechanism whereby two protomers undergo ratchet-like conformational changes that enable substrate-binding and -release steps to occur while the hexamer remains engaged. This rotary-like mechanism could drive disaggregation when coupled to stepwise cycles of ATP hydrolysis around the ring (movie S2). Such a cooperative mechanism could enable dissolution of more stable aggregates or amyloids (23). Although this mechanism contrasts with stochastic models proposed for ClpX (1), Hsp104 may exhibit different conformational cycles tuned to different substrates (23). Notably, both extended and closed states reveal a precise 6 to 7 Å separation of the pore loop–substrate contacts. A two–amino acid step involving conformational changes at the spiral interface would continually maintain this register during translocation. This pore-loop spacing is observed in related AAA+ rings (25–27) and represents a conserved feature of translocases. Although additional states are likely involved, our structures reveal a substrate-dependent structural plasticity for Hsp104, which could enable adaptable mechanisms of protein disaggregation (2, 23).
Supplementary Materials www.sciencemag.org/content/357/6348/273/suppl/DC1 Materials and Methods Figs. S1 to S12 Tables S1 and S2 Movies S1 to S4 References (28–43)
http://www.sciencemag.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Acknowledgments: We thank J. Smith and L. Rice for discussion of the manuscript and F. DiMaio for help with Rosetta. A.L.Y. is supported by an American Heart Association (AHA) predoctoral fellowship. M.E.J. is supported by a Target Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Springboard Fellowship. E.A.S. is supported by an AHA predoctoral fellowship and NIH grant T32GM008275. E.C. is supported by NIH grant T32GM008076. M.P.T. is supported by NIH grants K12GM081259 and K22NS09131401. K.L.M. is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-1321851). J.S. is supported by NIH grant R01GM099836, a Muscular Dystrophy Association Research Award (MDA277268), the Life Extension Foundation, the Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins University, and Target ALS. D.R.S. is supported by NIH grants R01GM109896, R01GM077430, and R01GM110001A. Cryo-EM maps and models are deposited in the Electron Microscopy and Protein Data Banks (EMDB and PDB, respectively): Hsp104:casein closed state (EMDB: 8697, PDB: 5VJH), extended state (EMDB: 8746, PDB: 5VYA), and middle-domain conformation (EMDB: 8745, PDB: 5VY9); and Hsp104-ADP (EMDB: 8744, PDB: 5VY8).CIB voted unanimously to let the NBA team build the five-story, 130,000-square-foot facility across from Bankers Life Fieldhouse.
Rendering of St. Vincent Center, the practice facility the Pacers plan to build across from Bankers Life Fieldhouse. (Photo: Provided by Ratio Architects)
The Capital Improvement Board unanimously approved a contract Monday allowing the Indiana Pacers to build a $50 million practice facility on land owned by the CIB.
The CIB had already authorized parameters of the deal for St. Vincent Center, a five-story, 130,000-square-foot facility across from Bankers Life Fieldhouse. The Pacers released renderings in August.
The building, scheduled to open in 2017, will replace an employee parking lot on Delaware Street.
Board President Earl Goode reiterated that the team is paying for construction and operation of the building.
Use of the land, however, had been given to the team in a previous agreement, he said. The value of that land is uncertain.
"Keep in mind that we're really repurposing this land," Goode told the board. "The Pacers... had this land tied up through 2027 as it is. So it's not a piece of property that could be utilized for something else, at least until 2027. It's putting in a $50 million building and turning a facility that really has limited use into, hopefully, a very useful building, bringing jobs Downtown."
St. Vincent will offer medical and sports performance services to the general public in the building. Goode said St. Vincent will move 60 to 70 jobs Downtown "from the suburbs."
The facility will have two full basketball courts and offices for the Pacers and Pacers Sports & Entertainment, the team's parent company, which also puts on nonsports events at the fieldhouse. Pacers officials have said a state-of-the-art practice facility will help attract free agents and retain players.
A CIB lawyer told the board that if the Pacers were to leave Indianapolis, the agreement contains provisions allowing the CIB to buy or lease the practice facility at a predetermined rate.
Call Star reporter Mark Alesia at (317) 444-6311. Follow him on Twitter: @markalesia.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1iPcl7cCentral Intelligence Agency Director nominee Mike Pompeo told Sen. Joe Manchin Thursday that international terrorism remains the highest near-term threat to the U.S.
Manchin pressed Pompeo during the appointment hearing on which threat was the highest to the U.S., and Pompeo specified that the international terrorism emanating from Iraq and Syria remained the most immediate threat to everyday Americans. Pompeo clarified that Russia, China, and North Korea also remain threats to the U.S.
Pompeo’s opening statement also placed heavy emphasis on the threat of Islamic terrorism to the U.S.
“ISIS remains a resilient movement, has metastasized, and shockingly has controlled major urban centers in the Middle East for well over two years.” He continued, “the concern is making sure they, and those they inspire, are prevented from expanding their reach, returning home, or slaughtering more innocent people.”
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.When Google(s goog) chairman Eric Schmidt visited North Korea, party officials asked him to describe future updates to the company’s Android phone system. Schmidt refused but said this incident and others — including Iran’s plans for a “Halal internet” with no Israel — show how despotic leaders want to embrace technology even as they try to deny it to their citizens.
Speaking on Friday at the Google Big Tent, a free speech event in Washington, Schmidt said he is “worried” about a “balkanized” internet as governments try to chop up the web just as people in places like Burma are discovering it for the first time.
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Schmidt also offered examples, drawn from his just-published book The New Digital Age, of how the internet is helping in some of the world’s most benighted places. He cited women in Pakistan with faces and eyes burned by acid, who could nonetheless have lives as “virtual people,” earning a living and connecting with the world online. He also described smuggling systems for micro SD cards in South Sudan to show how people will go to desperate lengths to get information.
Schmidt’s anecdotes come partly from his extensive tours of scary countries, which included a stop in North Korea that brought criticism from the State Department.
For Schmidt, his travels reinforced how sinister governments are casting a growing shadow over the mobile phone revolution.
“We’ll hear the distinct voices of the citizens of these countries that we haven’t heard before,” he said. “These people are just like us but their governments are not like ours.”
The situation creates moral dilemmas for companies that make technology that connect people but that can also be co-opted as tools for oppression. As Google’s head lawyer, David Drummond, explained at the outset of the event, the most important battles over free speech have shifted from books and newspapers to technology. Drummond warned that bad governments are now turning to the United Nations and international treaties in an effort to exercise control over the world’s telecommunications infrastructure.
The event, which was hosted by Google and Bloomberg and included media executives discussing Chinese censorship, took place a day after the company’s latest update to its Transparency Report on global censorship.Facebook is building an app for television and is asking publishers to create exclusive, TV-like shows for it, according to a new report. The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has been building the app, which would be available for boxes such as Apple TV. It is also talking to media companies about licensing TV-quality shows to be available on the app, the Journal reported, part of a long-term strategy to make video the center of the platform.
Facebook began working on an app last summer after discussing the idea for years, according to the Journal. But it’s not enough to build an app: Facebook needs to fill it with programming. Video on Facebook today consists mostly of short clips and experimental live streams — both formats that will be difficult to sell advertising revenue against. And advertising is the whole point of the exercise, because Facebook told investors recently that it’s running out of places in the News Feed where it could insert new ads.
And so Facebook is asking media companies to develop programming in exchange for a licensing fee. Facebook could then sell ads against the shows, which will be up to 10 minutes long and reportedly consist of both sports and scripted shows.
The cable bundle is gradually falling apart
Meanwhile the cable bundle is gradually falling apart, creating an opening for tech companies to move TV programming and its attendant advertising revenue to their platforms. Google (with YouTube), Snapchat (with Discover), and Twitter (with its live shows) are all making this play. So far, the companies have struggled to siphon ad dollars away from TV. But by bringing the platform to users’ actual televisions, it may be easier for Facebook to make the case.
In any case, YouTube has a set-top app, which means Facebook needs a set-top app. YouTube’s app has always focused on search rather than discovery — you go there when you already know what you’re looking for. A Facebook TV app focused on exclusive, licensed programming might feel a bit less sprawling. (Facebook declined to comment.)
From the perspective of media companies — including Vox Media, which owns The Verge — Facebook’s investment in original programming could be a very good thing. Today publishers are heavily reliant on advertising revenue, which spurs them to seek massive audiences, sometimes at the expense of quality. Getting direct payments from Facebook and other media companies to make next-generation TV shows would reduce their dependence on advertising, and potentially help them build more sustainable businesses.Paul Pierce is a great basketball player. Forward for the Washington Wizards this past year, he led the team to some incredibly memorable moments. Although they were unable to advance past the Hawks in round two of the playoffs, he’s still a reason the Wizards are a team considered to be on the verge of being a contender for a title.
“The Truth,” although having had better seasons in the past, put up decent numbers this year, averaging 11.9 points per game. He found himself more and more towards the end of the year taking shots behind the three point line. This quickly became his specialty. He has been fairly comfortable from deep his entire career, but it was really showing this year as a Wizard.
Pierce nearly kept the Wizards season alive with an incredible corner three-point attempt, that did actually, somehow go in. It was, however, waved off, and the Atlanta Hawks left the game with a win that sent them onto the Eastern Conference Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers, where they would ultimately end their season after being swept.
This season-ending shot especially left Pierce with a bad taste in his mouth. After the game, Pierce was saying things that many took as him debating retirement.
This would be a huge loss for the Wizards, and there’s many reasons they need Pierce around for next year. Here’s five big reasons they really need him to stay.11/2/2016: This report has been revised to include updated data in categorizing white Protestants into the “white evangelical Protestant” and “white mainline Protestant” categories. Originally, the report relied partly on data from a previous wave of the American Trends Panel to make these categorizations.
Cutting-edge biomedical technologies that could push the boundaries of human abilities may soon be available, making people’s minds sharper and their bodies stronger and healthier than ever before. But a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults shows that majorities greet the possibility of these breakthroughs with more wariness and worry than enthusiasm and hope.
Many in the general public expect continued scientific and technological innovation, broadly speaking, to bring helpful change to society. Yet when people are queried about the potential use of emerging technologies for “human enhancement,” their attitudes are not nearly as affirming.
The survey examines public attitudes about the potential use of three emerging technologies that could fundamentally improve people’s health, cognitive abilities or physical capacities. The specific examples were: gene editing to give babies a lifetime with much reduced risk of serious disease, implanting brain chips to give people a much improved ability to concentrate and process information and transfusing of synthetic blood to give people much greater speed, strength and stamina. These are just three of many enhancements that scientists and bioethicists say could arise from biomedical technologies now under development. None of the three are currently available for the purpose of enhancing otherwise healthy babies or adults, though all are in a research and development phase or are being tested in very limited circumstances for therapeutic uses, such as helping patients to recover from a stroke or spinal cord injury. (For background see “Human Enhancement: The Scientific and Ethical Dimensions of Striving for Perfection.”)
When Americans are questioned about the prospect of these specific kinds of enhancements for healthy people, their views are cautious and often resistant:
Majorities of U.S. adults say they would be “very” or “somewhat” worried about gene editing (68%), brain chips (69%) and synthetic blood (63%), while no more than half say they would be enthusiastic about each of these developments. Some people say they would be both enthusiastic and worried, but, overall, concern outpaces excitement.
More say they would not want enhancements of their brains and their blood (66% and 63%, respectively) than say they would want them (32% and 35%). U.S. adults are closely split on the question of whether they would want gene editing to help prevent diseases for their babies (48% would, 50% would not).
At least seven-in-ten adults predict each of these new technologies will become available before they have been fully tested or understood. Some 73% say this about gene editing, while an identical share says the same about synthetic blood; 74% says this about brain chip implants.
Majorities say these enhancements could exacerbate the divide between haves and have-nots. For instance, 73% believe inequality will increase if brain chips become available because initially they will be obtainable only by the wealthy.
In addition, many Americans think recipients of enhancements will feel superior to those who have not received them; 63% say this about synthetic blood transfusions in particular. By the same token, but more optimistically, half of Americans or more think recipients of enhancements will feel more confident about themselves.
Substantial shares say they are not sure whether these interventions are morally acceptable. But among those who express an opinion, more people say brain and blood enhancements would be morally unacceptable than say they are acceptable.
More adults say the downsides of brain and blood enhancements would outweigh the benefits for society than vice versa. Americans are a bit more positive about the possibility of gene editing to reduce disease; 36% think it will have more benefits than downsides, while 28% think it will have more downsides than benefits.
Opinion is closely divided when it comes to the fundamental question of whether these potential developments are “meddling with nature” and cross a line that should not be crossed, or whether they are “no different” from other ways that humans have tried to better themselves over time.
The survey data show several patterns surrounding Americans’ wariness about these developments. First, there are strong differences in views about using these technologies for enhancement depending on how religious people are. In general, the most religious are the most wary about potential enhancements. For example, those who score high on a three-item index of religious commitment are more likely than those who are lower in religious commitment to say all three types of enhancement – gene editing to give babies a lifetime with much reduced risk of disease, brain chip implants to give people much improved cognitive abilities and transfusions with synthetic blood to give people much improved physical capacities – would be meddling with nature and crossing a line that should not be crossed. Americans who have lower levels of religious commitment are more inclined to see the potential use of these techniques as just the continuation of a centuries-old quest by humans to try to better themselves.
Second, people believe that technologies that would bring more dramatic or extreme changes to human abilities are less acceptable than technologies that cause less dramatic or temporary changes. For example, 47% of Americans consider the use of synthetic blood substitutes to improve physical abilities an “appropriate use of technology” if the resulting change to people’s speed, strength and stamina would be “equal to their own peak abilities.” But if the same enhancement results in physical abilities “far above that of any human known to date,” far fewer (28%) say it would be an appropriate use of technology. The same pattern occurs as Americans consider the potential use of gene editing and devices implanted in the brain to augment human abilities.
Third, women tend to be more hesitant than men about wanting the enhancements potentially available from these cutting-edge technologies. They are also more negative than men in their judgments and expectations about what such enhancements would mean for society. Interestingly, although majorities of the public expect these enhancements would lead to increased social inequality, there are, at best, only modest differences in attitudes about these topics by race, ethnicity, educational level, income or age.
Finally, there are some similarities between what Americans think about these three potential, future enhancements and their attitudes toward the kinds of enhancements already widely available today. Many are skeptical about the need for cosmetic procedures and other current enhancements. For example, 61% of Americans say people are too quick to undergo cosmetic procedures to change their appearance in ways that are not really important. Roughly a third (34%) say elective cosmetic surgery is “taking technology too far.” And, overall, 54% of U.S. adults say elective cosmetic surgery leads to both benefits and downsides for society, while 26% express the belief that there are more downsides than benefits, and just 16% say society receives more benefits than downsides from cosmetic surgery.
These are some of the key findings from a new nationally representative Pew Research Center survey of 4,726 U.S. adults conducted online and by mail from March 2 to 28, 2016. The margin of sampling error at the 95% confidence interval for results based on the total sample is plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
What do we mean by human enhancement?
Human enhancement encompasses a wide range of biomedical interventions intended to increase human abilities. In simple terms, this means making biochemical, surgical or other changes designed to improve cognitive, psychological or physical capacities, and can include changes aimed at bettering physical and mental health. The modern discussion of human enhancement often is traced to an essay by Julian Huxley in 1957. The essay suggested the human species could “transcend itself” through biological intervention. Over the millennia, people have tried to improve their abilities by learning, as well as using tools and gadgets. Enhancement is different from those attempts at human betterment because it involves biomedical intervention in the body to notch up a person’s capabilities.
Many also think about human enhancement as distinct from therapeutic interventions. Thus, medical treatments aimed at restoring a person’s ability to see or hear – for example, to regain motor control after a stroke or spinal cord injury – would stand in contrast to enhancing abilities in otherwise healthy and well-functioning people beyond their current capacities (or some typical level). The line between therapy and enhancement often is blurry, but this distinction provides a framework for thinking about human enhancement in everyday terms.
Although the phrase “human enhancement” is used primarily by ethicists, there are numerous enhancements available today. Examples include: anabolic steroids used to promote muscle development; reproductive technologies, including tubal ligation and vasectomies to increase human control over the reproductive system; and an array of cosmetic interventions to change people’s physical characteristics. Two widely available cognitive enhancements include the (off-label) use of modafinil and Ritalin (methylphenidate) to stimulate a person’s focus, concentration or memory. Some also consider vaccines a form of enhancement aimed at making people healthier by reducing the probability of disease, although others consider vaccines to be firmly rooted in medical or therapeutic treatment, not enhancement.
Until now, biomedical scientists have had the capacity to make only relatively modest enhancements in people. However, the convergence of innovations in biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology and other fields is raising the possibility that future enhancements could enable much more dramatic changes to human abilities. The pace of innovation is difficult to predict and sometimes takes much of the scientific community, let alone the broader public, by surprise. The development of CRISPR, a gene-editing technique, is one example in which potentially far-reaching techniques evolved very rapidly, within the space of just a few years.
Pew Research Center rooted much of this study in exploring public attitudes about breakthroughs that could expand the boundaries of human limits, potentially creating even healthier, stronger and smarter humans. In particular, the study focuses on U.S. public reactions to three potential kinds of enhancement: gene editing to give a healthy baby a much reduced risk of serious diseases and conditions over their lifetime, implanting a computer chip in the brain to give a healthy person a much improved ability to concentrate and process information, and using synthetic blood substitutes to give a healthy person much greater speed, strength and stamina. (For comparison, survey respondents also were asked about a number of procedures, such as elective cosmetic surgery, that are widely available today.)
The three future-oriented scenarios are meant to reflect the range of enhancements being discussed by scientists and others as potentially on the horizon, but it is by no means an exhaustive list. None of the techniques behind these ideas is being used for “enhancing purposes” today, although all exist in some form of development for therapeutic or medical applications. They were chosen in part because they each raise potentially enticing prospects. What if we, as a society, could virtually do away with illness? What if humans could all raise their thinking capacity manyfold? And what if synthetic “super blood” could boost physical prowess to “superman” and “superwoman” levels?
Whatever appeal these ideas may have, they also raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human. From the earliest days of civilization, people have sought to better their condition through the use of tools, medications, surgeries and other therapies. But as new scientific and technological breakthroughs arise, so do questions about whether such developments move beyond limits set by God, nature or reason. Thus, this research is aimed in part at understanding where, if at all, the public might “draw the line” on human enhancements and the possibilities they could bring to society.[Warning: this article contains mention, but not discussion or description, of gender-based violence and numerous other oppressions.]
In various social justice circles, ‘ally’ has become a common way of referring to people who do not share a particular oppressed identity, but who nevertheless have given up oppressing that group, and instead position themselves as supporter of their cause. While it has various advantages, important critiques have been made of the behaviour of such allies and of the concept in itself (e.g. serious critiques and fun ones). The failure of the concept of ally is best seen, I think, in the number of ‘how to be a good ally’ lists which start by describing ways to stop actively oppressing the group in question (e.g. this bi one or this disability one). This shows the commonness of people claiming the title who still haven’t forsaken their oppressive behaviours, let alone adopted useful ones.
So to replace, or work alongside the word ‘ally’, I suggest using ‘bearing witness’, which I think solves some of the problems. This article describes how.
1. It centres the right voices (or should do)
The best witnesses are those closest to the thing being witnessed: this language automatically acknowledges the superiority of the knowledge of people who have experienced oppression first-hand. I’m proposing that we use ‘bear witness’ as an activity which is primarily an activity of people who have experience of that injustice, i.e. are members of the oppressed group in question, so it’s not a straight replacement for ally language. I suggest it as a term that we can secondarily apply to those doing liberatory work on behalf of other people, and those who fall in the margins between those two groups (see section 6 below).
Much of the criticism of so-called allies has focussed on the way we tend to use our privilege to speak over or silence members of the marginalised group in question. Bearing witness language hopefully makes obvious the idea that in any situation, we need to listen most, or exclusively, to the best witnesses. The role for the secondary witness then, is to speak up in spaces where there are no primary witnesses, or where they do not feel safe to speak. The second job being to make those spaces safer and less exclusionary to members of those marginalised groups. So for example, responding to rape jokes when no-one there is out as a survivor, or awareness-raising about race in environments which are still 100% white. Even when relevant people are around, if they’re not being listened to, we can use our privilege to get others to realise that they’re not listening to the right people, or amplify the right voices.
However, bearing witness language does have the risk of ignoring the very people we ought to be centring: it would be possible for a load of white people to bear witness to racism as an almost abstract concept, using evidence distanced from black people’s experiences (e.g. stats). So this is not a perfect construct, and we still need to keep each other accountable.
2. It’s not about you
The language of ally-ship (like a mothership!) ties activism to identity, to who you are: we say “She’s an ally” rather than “She does useful thing x.” This seems like an advantage, since presumably if you can get someone to identify as a supporter of a movement, you can ask more of them. They have tied their self-image to their involvement with the struggle, so they would seem to have a greater incentive to be involved. It also neatly mirrors the emphasis on oppressed identities within social justice circles: you can see why if oppressed group X are organising based on their identity as X, then other who want to be involved are going to look for an identity, a noun, under which to organise and join in.
In my experience, lots of people who work with/for marginalised groups they’re not part of already have very strong emotional and identity-type links to that work anyway. This might be because they are close to someone in that group: a parent, a partner, a friend or child. Or they may have witnessed an event or worked in an environment where oppression was obvious, and have strong memories and emotions which inspire their work. Even nothing like that initially inspired them towards that work, if they have build up a reputation or indeed a career around it, they’re going to be deeply emotionally invested in their identity as an ally. My point is that the links to personal identity are already dangerously strong, and people’s strong feelings which inspire this work are often already taking centre stage: we don’t need to encourage them.
The identity language of ally-ship can also be pretty misleading, and conceiving of our identities in that way can be deeply unhelpful. If my self-image as an ally is inspiring my liberatory work, then I’m doing it for the wrong reasons. I’m also not going to react very well to criticism, because it will speak to the heart of how I see myself: I’ll be unwilling to acknowledge my oppressive behaviour because to do so would undermine my good opinion of myself. There are other ways in which identity-ally-ship makes me concentrate on me and my feelings instead of the people I’m meant to be working for. For example, in my own life, feeling guilt-ridden because one action meant I ‘wasn’t a good ally’ has got in the way of repairing the damage done by that action. Jay Smooth has an excellent talk here on how focussing on the person and their identity doesn’t serve justice, and a follow up here putting the responsibility where it should be, i.e. telling us how we can avoid focussing on our own identities when our behaviour is challenged.
So, using ‘bearing witness’ instead of ‘ally’ can avoid making it about my identity. I can’t hide behind my status as a Good Person™ to avoid accountability, and those feelings are less likely to distract me from the task in hand. It’s a label not for a person, but for an action.
3. It’s about action
If allyship is about what you are, not what you do, it’s easy to get complacent. I’ve seen lots of ‘how to be an ally to X’ lists which stress this point, that you have to go and do the work to earn the title. I suggest that instead of labelling the person, who may or may not be doing the work, to varying degrees of effectiveness or oppressiveness, and instead label the work.
I’ve seen various books and articles accompanied by an author biog which includes their status as an ally up front and centre: “Example Author is a trans ally and…” Bearing witness language would label the work instead: “This book bears witness to transphobic bullying…” If they really wanted something to put in the biog then maybe “Author writes on various topics including bearing witness to children’s experiences of transphobia…”
With this phrasing, no-one can rest on their laurels. Well, we can, but only if they are won fairly, and labelled with the race we ran, rather than our ‘identity’ as runner.
4. It’s not about their identity (or doesn’t have to be)
Lots of social justice work focusses on identity, and much of this is fantastically productive. Identities are extremely useful banners under which to organise, give emotional connections to the work, and facilitate human rights analyses of oppression (e.g. you can’t control your identity, therefore discrimination is unfair). It also speaks to one of the truths of many oppressions, that people (often) commit oppressive acts because of what they think a person is, not what they do. It allows us to talk about the status we’re given on the basis of identity. It also, importantly, allows us to celebrate aspects of our identities, the histories of those who shared it, and to cultivate a sense of pride in it.
However, I think an over-reliance on the concept of identity to analyse oppression lacks a few things, and in some areas can have negative effects. For example, sometimes people focus on identity when experience is a more pertinent measure: not everyone who shares an identity will have experienced certain forms of oppression based on that identity. Identity language can also erase the differences between the people who share a characteristic, often in oppressive ways: focusing on one identity tends to minimise the other oppressions felt by people in that group, or invisbilise their membership. For example, focusing on woman as an oppressed identity in a vacuum tends to create a norm that women’s issues are a separate thing from black issues, and to centre the experiences of white women, invisibilising many women’s experiences of racism, and of sexism and racism combined. (See ideas about kyriarchy and intersectionality).
The language of bearing witness can accommodate both diversity and the importance of experience, since the focus is on the oppression not the identity. There is still a risk of assuming that oppressions only strike one at a time, but I think talking about ‘bearing witness to the racism in/of…’ has less of a risk of this than ‘being an ally to black people’. In centring the injustice it makes no implication of a unified community who all share the same needs and goals.
Also, In focussing on oppressions instead of identity, we can open up the language to include specific types of oppression, e.g. gender-based violence.
5. But it (could) make people disclose privileged identities
It’s easy to invisibilise your privilege with use of the word ally: you can avoid using ‘white’, ‘without disabilities’, ‘straight’ etc. You can hide behind assumptions of neutrality and un-markedness: you don’t have to disclose privileged identities because they are the norm, the ‘unmarked’. Instead, if you want to describe yourself as bearing witness to something you don’t experience yourself, you have to actually disclose your position: “as a white person bearing witness to racism” or “I’m aiming to bear witness to the endemic sexism in this industry (insofar as a man can).”
6. It’s not a binary
One advantage of ally language is that it describes a fundamental difference between those who work against an oppression having suffered it, and those who haven’t. This is an important distinction and one we should never lose sight of, and bearing witness language doesn’t do that job, although it hopefully centres those with experience.
However, it does allow for more flexibility in distinguishing people in this way. This will be useful for people whose identities or experiences are often deemed liminal (i.e. on the boundaries) in terms of allyhood: for instance, mixed-race people, non-binary gendered and agender people (with regard to feminism), women who have experienced some forms of gender-based violence but would never call themselves a survivor of rape or abuse, people whose identities are closeted or invisible and so do not experience the same kinds of oppression as visible members of that group. Such people can be recognised for their bearing witness to the realities of oppression without designating them either as allies or as members of the oppressed group.
But…
There are some problems with allies and ally-language that bearing witness language doesn’t address. For example, nothing about it makes clear that it’s unethical to make any kind of profit from that work, or to pit marginalised people against each other to get the outcomes you want and lead from behind (what A.J. Withers calls “Leadership Shopping”). Also, the concept of ‘ally’ implies reciprocity and a degree of equality, both of which fit badly with the way we currently use it.
So people, what do you think? Pros and cons? What have I missed? Could you fit ‘bear witness’ into your sentences?
AdvertisementsThe actor responsible for cyberattacks against state and local election systems remains unknown to federal officials, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Wednesday, distinguishing the issue from breaches of the Democratic National Committee and related entities.
"It is the case that we face in this country an increasing level of sophistication in terms of cybersecurity attacks from a range of actors, nation-states, criminals, hacktivists," Johnson said at a forum hosted by The Atlantic.
"[E]verybody knows what happened with the DNC and some other related things. We've seen a limited number of attempts at intrusions into the online presence of state election officials," Johnson said. "Exactly who did it, we haven't been able to determine yet.
"But it does highlight the need for state and local election officials to be prepared and look for any potential vulnerabilities in their systems, and that's what the department of Homeland Security is able to provide by way of assistance, if they ask," Johnson added, noting 19 states to date have requested cybersecurity assistance from the feds.
The statement came after an acknowledgment from FBI Director James Comey Wednesday that attacks had increased following the summer disclosure that systems in Illinois and Arizona had been targeted.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2600588
"There have been a variety of scanning activities, which is a preamble for potential intrusion activities, as well as some attempted intrusions at voter registration databases beyond those we knew about in July and August," Comey told a panel of the House Judiciary Committee. "There's no doubt that some bad actors have been poking around."
Asked whether hackers could manipulate election results, Johnson said a decentralized voting system and state election officials should be able to deter the threat, provided they follow the appropriate processes.
"Because the way the systems work, they have the ability to audit, they have a backup. Let's say you email in an election return, you should also have a paper record as well, so if the election system went down, you can communicate it by another means.
"It would be difficult, in our judgment, to alter a ballot count," Johnson said.1. Overview
In this tutorial, we’ll secure a REST API with OAuth and consume it from a simple Angular client.
The application we’re going to build out will consist of four separate modules:
Authorization Server
Resource Server
UI implicit – a front end app using the Implicit Flow
UI password – a front end app using the Password Flow
2. The Authorization Server
First, let’s start setting up an Authorization Server as a simple Spring Boot application.
2.1. Maven Configuration
We’ll set up the following set of dependencies:
<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-jdbc</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>mysql</groupId> <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId> <scope>runtime</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.security.oauth</groupId> <artifactId>spring-security-oauth2</artifactId> </dependency>
Note that we’re using spring-jdbc and MySQL because we’re going to use a JDBC backed implementation of the token store.
2.2. @EnableAuthorizationServer
Now, let’s start configuring the authorization server responsible for managing access tokens:
@Configuration @EnableAuthorizationServer public class AuthServerOAuth2Config extends AuthorizationServerConfigurerAdapter { @Autowired @Qualifier("authenticationManagerBean") private AuthenticationManager authenticationManager; @Override public void configure( AuthorizationServerSecurityConfigurer oauthServer) throws Exception { oauthServer.tokenKey |
you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline," Prince wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: 'Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet.'"
Government pressure
Cloudflare says it handles 10% of all internet requests. So while this is the first time Cloudflare has stopped working with a website for political reasons, Prince said his company had faced plenty of external and international government pressure.
"There are human rights organizations that are criticizing the Chinese government that we continuously get pressured to restrict," he said. "There are LGBT organizations in the Middle East. Often times it's things covering abuses by government that governments would rather not have online."
This is not the first time, though, that Cloudflare has dropped support for a site. It has ended service to other websites in response to illegal activity, such as child pornography. And in 2015, a court ordered Cloudflare to block websites associated with the music-streaming service Grooveshark, which was in trouble over copyright violations.
In this case, though, Cloudflare dropped The Daily Stormer because the neo-Nazis claimed the company supported their cause.
"The tipping point for us making this decision," Prince wrote in the blog, "was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."The names have been changed to protect...the guilty?
Ridley Scott's long-awaited war movie Black Hawk Down may claim to be a true story, but its portrayal of one American soldier is apparently far from exact.
In fact, one of the military heroes depicted in the film is now serving a 30-year sentence for raping and molesting a young girl.
The war drama, about the U.S. military's botched raid in Somalia, stars Ewan McGregor as Ranger John Grimes, one of 100 elite U.S. Army Rangers pinned down in Mogadishu under heavy fire from a Somali militia, after two of their Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. The operation led to the deaths of 18 U.S. troops and became the longest sustained ground action by American forces since the Vietnam War.
But in reality, McGregor's Grimes is based on real-life Army Ranger John "Stebby" Stebbins, who, aside from being a hero in the Battle of Mogadishu, is now a convicted child molester.
The Army purportedly tried to hide that fact when Scott and company began shooting Black Hawk Down. Mark Bowden, author of the original bestselling book and its screenplay, told the New York Post he was pressured by Pentagon officials to change the name of Stebbins to Grimes to avoid the controversy.
"As it happened, Stebbins got in trouble with the law," Bowden told the Post. "The Army asked us to change the name."
Stebbins, now 36, tried three times to enlist in the military during the Persian Gulf War and was turned away before finally being accepted into the Army's formidable Ranger unit.
Relegated to desk clerk duty and labeled "chief coffee maker" by his peers until called into action, "Stebby" reportedly surprised his fellow soldiers with his bravery and was eventually awarded the Army's distinguished Silver Star--one of the military's highest honors--for his heroism during the bloody battle.
While he proved to be a tough fighter during the botched operation, Stebbins eventually ran afoul of the law. He was court-martialed on June 8, 2000, for sexually abusing a child under the age of 12 and sentenced to 30 years in Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, where he now resides.
Despite the name change, Stebbins' conviction blanketed the movie in controversy. His ex-wife, Nora Stebbins, wrote an email to the Post objecting to the movie making a hero out of a convicted sex offender.
"[Producers] are going to make millions off this film in which my ex-husband is portrayed as an All-American hero, when the truth is he is not," she wrote.
For his part, Bowden acquiesced to the Army's wishes and used Stebbins' real name only in the book, but not in the screenplay.
Revolution Studios, the company which produced the picture, did not immediately return a call for comment. But a company spokeswoman told the Post that the change was made for "creative" purposes.
"There were 100 men in the battle and only 40 speaking parts, so we had to condense some of the characters," said the spokeswoman. "[Grimes] is one who is a compilation of a number of soldiers who fought in that battle so his name was changed."
Meanwhile, Black Hawk is being heralded as one of this year's top awards contenders, but the film was shot down by the Golden Globes Thursday, coming away with no nominations.
The $95 million war flick lands in theaters Christmas Day.East Side Eating
Trimble’s Taste Trek
By Steve Trimble
Updated through December 30, 2015
I did it! I met my goal of eating at every East Side restaurant on the East Side in a single year. They were local sit-down places. No chains (unless they were small local ones), take out spots or food trucks. Now there are fifty-nine descriptions of where I went and saw. Notice I didn’t say I reviewed them in a critical manner. I described but didn’t judge. That is your job. A couple of places went out of business, but two new ones popped up to fill the void.
I wasn’t a food critic, so there were no judgments on quality, although I did eat something when I was there. You won’t find any statements like “the pate was too dry” or “the fava bean dish needed more arugula and sun dried heirloom tomatillos.” I tried to include their own web site, so you won’t have to scroll through numerous posts to find an on-line menu. While the palate parade is over, I will try to keep you up with any new East Side restaurants in an epilogue to East Side Eating 2015. I’m pretty sure there will be a few in 2016 and beyond.
January 1, 2015
Yarusso Brothers Italian Restaurant
635 Payne Avenue St. Paul 55130
(651) 776-4848
11:00-9:00 Mon-Thurs until 10:00; Fri-Sat
Sunday brunch 10:00-2:00
yarussos.com I probably shouldn’t admit it, but this initial foray was made because the establishment was offering a free spaghetti dinner to senior citizens on New Year’s Day - I did make sure to order a couple of beers so they could have some profit. But maybe it’s also because they were founded in 1933 and are probably the oldest East Side restaurant in continual operation. As the name implies they specialize in Italian food, but they are many things offered in addition to what I ate. Where else do they offer several kinds of “Dago” sandwiches? The restaurant has three general areas - one with a dozen or so tables and booths, a full bar area with some additional seating and a room off to the side that is available for groups, such as wedding dinners. The décor is filled with old photos of Swede Hollow and the Railroad Island neighborhood and the names of Italian families. However, as my friend Greg Cosimini points out, his family’s name is missing.
January 7, 2015
Taqueria Los Paisanos
825 E 7th St
St. Paul, MN 55106
(651) 778-8062
http://lospaisanostaqueria.com
8:00 A. M. -10:00 Mon-Thur and Sun 8:00-11:00 Fri-Sat
I had just finished my first tutorial from Carla Riehle on how to build this blog site, so I felt she deserved to be the first East Side Eating guest ever. The Taqueria is located at the northeast corner of East Seventh and Arcade. Some will remember it as the old home of Clark’s submarine sandwiches. It is smallish - maybe a dozen table and booths - but is nicely decorated. Food is ordered at a counter near the entrance that has a board with the menu items of mostly traditional Mexican foods. I had a burrito served with rice and refried beans and it was so big I took half of it home with me. You may order ahead of time on-line. There is a small amount of off-street parking. On our way out two women in an older car called to us and asked if we could help them push. It seems they had no reverse gear. Fortunately two other people came to their aid and they were able to get out of the little lot. January 14, 2015
Eastside Thai Restaurant
879 Payne Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55130
51) 776-6599
Mon-Wed 11:00-7:30 P. M.; Thurs-Sun 11:00-8:00
http://www.eastsidethai.com
I decided it was the time to go see what one of the Asian restaurants had to offer. I checked in with my neighbor Alan who is somewhat of an expert on Asian dishes, especially Thai cuisine. So off we went for lunch. When we got to the designated dining spot on Old Hudson Road it was no longer in business. On to Payne Avenue to and spot on my list that neither of us had been to before. No expectations, just an adventure. We entered a fairly small business that was attractively decorated and clean. There were maybe twelve tables and there was no buffet. The menu had a lot of options. I chose a Pad Thai with a combination of chicken, beef and shrimp. The huge pile on the plate created leftovers. My friend was taken with the large number of curry dishes. Service was nice, but the food took a while to arrive. Alan said it was some of the best curry he had ever had and noted that the condiments included jalapeno peppers in vinegar and fish sauce. They use mostly family recipes and offer catering.
January 21, 2015
St. Paul Saloon
1045 Hudson Road, St. Paul, MN 55106
(651) 340-9028 https://twitter.com/eastrivereats
After a neighborhood meeting at night I was hungry so, along with another political meeting participant and neighbor Jane Prince, I headed to the St. Paul Saloon on Hudson Road just west of Earl Street. East River Eats provides the bar food from another room and sends it through a small window.
The Saloon is not fancy but is clean and friendly. There are around ten tables, a game room with electronic entertainment, a pool table and a juke box. If you’re into gambling, there is a pull tab booth. There is a full bar and a decent selection of beers. Jane found the fact that they had Rolling Rock beer on tap interesting. There are several televisions set to sports venues. The night we were there it was a young crowd, at least compared to us. They have a small patio, but it was too cold to try it out.
There is limited service so its best to order at the bar and the food will be brought to you. It is typical bar food, including burgers, tacos, chicken wings and hot dagos with specials for each night. You can “build your own burger” with a choice of cheese and three out of a dozen or so add-ons. I chose a burger with Swiss cheese, bacon, onions and a fried egg. Until this bar, I had never had an egg on my burger, but it added an interesting taste. It was served with chips, but you can pay a bit more and get French fries.
January 31, 2015
Hur Feng Cafe
1010 Payne Ave
St. Paul, MN 55101
651-776-9179
Mon-Thurs 11:00-9:00
Fri-Sat 11;00-9:30
Sunday 12:00-8:30
http://www.suiyepcafe.com/
It was a Saturday night and I wanted to be sure to do a fifth eat-in during the first month of my Taste Trek. I decided to try out what was new at the old Sui Yep Restaurant. It looks a lot like what it used to. Small, clean, featuring Chinese dishes with about eight booths and two tables, one of them a large round one. There is no liquor available. Large photos of lunch dishes on the wall. There is a different special each day of the week. You can also do take-out and they deliver for orders of at least fifteen dollars. They will take reservations and can offer special family style serving for large groups. I was there around 7:00 P. M. and was alone for twenty minutes or so. Apparently this is more of a lunch spot.
It did give me a chance to find out a few things. I found out that the Initials of the place comes from the name of the owner Hur Feng, a Mandarin speaker, who came to Minnesota from northern China around twenty years ago. Her husband, who does the cooking, had been a chef at several restaurants and wanted to have a family business. I had my usual sweet and sour chicken. The sauce was thin rather than thick and sticky. Little red pepper icons are added on the menu to warn that some dishes are pretty hot. There are vegetarian dishes and other things that looked interesting, such as Korean Style Beef Ribs, Szechuan Duck and Thai style fish.
February 2, 2015
Marquez Grill Taqueria
870 Payne Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55130
651-774-7109
Hours9:00-9:00
https://www.facebook.com/pages/by-More-Taqueria/116141561742812
A new month, time to make another round of visits to a variety of restaurants. I decided to treat Elliott, my neighbor, who had just came back to the East Side from Massachusetts, to a dinner. He was mourning the death of his pet squirrel. We ended up going to a Latino establishment, helped by the fact that he speaks Spanish. He brought along his brother and Mother - call me cheap, but I asked those two to pay for themselves.
The menus includes tacos, tortas, burritos, quesadillas, caldos and other choices that were all pictured in photos on the wall outside the cooking area. We started out with an appetizer of nachos. Then I had a plate of four enchiladas complemented with refried bens, rice and a touch of shredded lettuce. My friends had a quesadilla, alambre, a plate of diablo shrimp and couple of Jarritos fruit punch. My companions were positive in their opinions.
The restaurants will cater banquets. Rodolfo Marquez and his wife are the owners. They were born in Mexico, and raised in California before coming to St. Paul. His brother owns the ByMore grocery across the street. The busiest time is lunch and we were alone at a little after 8:00 P. M. Before we left there was a group four police officers
who came in for a snack. They will cater food.
February 7, 2015
Roadside Pizza
296 Larpenteur Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55117
651-778-8786
11:00-9:00 every day and open till 10:00 on Friday
http://www.roadsidepizzastpaul.com/
Roadside Pizza is just east of the 35E exit at Larpenteur in a small strip mall. With more than sixty years in business, they are one of the older establishments in the city. They were on Snelling Avenue for many years and catered to the classic car crowd, which explains why there are numerous signed photos of autos on the wall. They also have sports mementos. It’s not huge but is clean and has room for more than a dozen booths and a few tables.
They feature pizza and wings, but the menu also includes “gourmet salads,” wraps, and hot entrées, including the classic “hot dagos.” There are soft drinks but no beer or liquor. I decided to try their Special Deluxe Pizza, said to be the most popular choice. It featured Italian sausage, pepperoni fresh mushrooms, green pepper and onions. I ordered the ten-inch medium and, as I suspected, took half of it home.
I was there on a Saturday night and was the only seated patron, but several folks came for take-out. I ended up having a conversation with a man said he used to be afraid of the East Side, but now thought it was generally getting better. My only regret was not trying out the cinnamon fries made out of pizza dough, but I was full. They do have free WiFi and coloring sheets for kids, some of which decorated the walls. Roadside Pizza will deliver and do catering.
February 13, 2015
Saigon Express
1098 Arcade St
St. Paul, MN 55106
651-774-0379
Open everyday 10:00—9:00
http://saigonexpressmn.com/
Even though the printed menu says “authentic Vietnamese Food,” there is also a good selection of Chinese cuisine. Saigon Express has been open for around five years. It looks small from the outside, but because of the building’s depth it is sizeable. There were seven tables for two and six larger ones for family groups.
Chi Nguyen who was from Vietnam and lived through the war living in Da Nang, hiding from bombs and bullets. They moved to Saigon before coming to the United States.
They have lunch specials for and some chef specials such as Hunan Beef, Mongolian Beef, Kung Pao Shrimp. I had General Tso’s Chicken that was served on bed of broccoli and topped with green onions. A side dish of white rice was included. There were large portions, so I had the next day’s lunch to take home.
Ms.Nguyen was interested why I chose the dish I did. I told her I had it once in Japan and wanted to try it out here. She asked because most of her customers order Pho, which may explain what there is a blazing green neon sign saying “Pho” in the window. She insisted that I at least try a small bowl of beef Pho so I did. One interesting menu item that caught my eye was Bun Thit Heo Nuong, a grilled pork salad. There is no beer or wine but they serve Vietnamese iced coffee and condensed milk and feature Boba teas.
It was somewhat busy that night. There was a diverse group of customers, some eating in, others taking out. There is Delivery with a $20.00 minimum and a $2.00 extra cost. I’m not sure of the delivery area, but they say it takes 30 - 45 minutes. The best way to get to their Eat Street web site with its menu is to put “Saigon Express” into Google and find the East Street click-on.
February 23, 2015
Tea House
1676 Suburban Ave
St. Paul, MN 55106
651-771-1790
Sun-Thurs 11:00-9:30 Fri-Sat 11:00-10.00
www.ourteahouse.com
I may be fudging a little on this East Side Eating visit. I was there at a political event with a few dishes on a buffet table rather than partaking in a sit-down dinner that I ordered. But here was food to taste, including chicken wings, pork dumplings pork and vegetarian egg rolls. I was able to get a sense of the space and was able to read the menu. Also, I have been there in the past, so I decided this was all right. I’m so old that I remember when it was Yang’s before the current owners bought it. It is a large, well-decorated restaurant. That night, the political event took over all of the southern side of the room, but there was a lot of space left for frequently-arriving customers. The Tea House is a well-known restaurant that has won several awards for best Twin Cities Chinese restaurant in local newspapers and magazines.
On to the menu. There are seventeen different appetizers. You can find beef and lamb dishes as well as chicken and duck items. Seafood offerings include shrimp, prawn, scallops, whole fish and fish fillets. For a somewhat lighter meal, choose from a large number of soups. There are a dozen special vegetarian dishes with different vegetables or made with tofu. Dim Sum is served on the weekends. Chef recommended items feature tea-smoked duck, whole fish stewed in bean sauce and pork with chestnuts and eggplant in garlic sauce. Most of the main entrees come with white rice, an egg roll and soup. There are lower cost lunch specials Monday through Friday from 11:00 to 2:00 with a sizeable list from which to choose—I’m trying to use the proper grammar stressed by my fifth grade teacher in Kansas. The menu of the restaurant says “Authentic Taste of Szechuan” and is careful to clearly mark the hottest of the Szechuan dishes with tiny red drawings of peppers. There is a full beer, wine and liquor bar at the back of the dining area as well as plenty of off-street parking.
March 6, 2015
Ari’s Best Steak House
1676 White Bear Ave N.
St. Paul, MN 55106
651-776-5419
Mon-Sat 11:00-9:00 Sunday 11:00-8:00
www.arisbeststeakhouse.com
My son, who now lives in Northeast Minneapolis, came to visit me on this day. I often treat him to dinner so I decided to make sure Tom became part of the Trimble Taste Trek. He decided that beef would be a nice change so we headed for Ari’s Best Steak House, the last of its kind on the East Side. The restaurant was started in 1973 by a Greek family, who have been frequent owners of such establishments in the Twin Cities. The man still owns the establishment, but the current main cook on the day we came was a Serbian from Sarajevo. There were around fifteen comfortable booths and over ten tables and many more places to sit in a large back room with numerous tables. It is clean and well lit, with patriotic pictures and scenes from Greece on the walls. Even though its name says it’s a steak house, they have other things, including chicken, gyros, shrimp baskets, pork chops and barbecue ribs.
You order at the front of a cafeteria-like counter, tell how you want your meat cooked—sorry, no vegetarian entrees- make your own salad, order a soft drink if you want and/ or select a piece of pie or pudding and then pay the cashier. You seat yourself and they will bring the beef along with a baked potato and a large piece of “Texas Toast” with any entrée. I decided to have medium sized sirloin. As usual, I took some of it home in a Styrofoam container. These days steak is quite expensive, so I didn’t want to be wasteful. There is a separate kids menu with reasonably-priced burgers, chicken tenders, cheeseburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches. Steakhouse Specials that change often are available for lunch from 11:00—2:00, which cost $5.99 at the time this was written. March 11, 2015
Great Dragon Restaurant
887 Arcade St Paul, MN 55106
651-774-3853 and 3856
Sun-Thurs 11:00 A. M.-10:30 P. M.
Fri and Sat 11:00 A. M.-11:00 P. M.
http://yumyumgreatdragon.com/homepage.aspx
I was at an evening meeting about the direction of the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood. It got over around 8:00 and, accompanied by two others, I decided to go to a place in a small strip mall built atop a small hill. It was smallish, having one booth and five tables—one of which was filled with a variety of unidentified stuff. There was a counter on the west side where you ordered. It had photos of many of the dishes on the wall so you could see, but it looked like it had been there a while since the colors were faded.
According to the menu, this Chinese restaurant was part of what they called “New York Style.” Still not sure what that means. Lunch served from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM and dinner after that served with pork or chicken fried rice and egg roll. There are many appetizers, soup with crispy noodles, fried rice, chow mien, lo mien, Mai Fun, which apparently is thin noodles, pork beef, chicken, seafood (only shrimp) and vegetable dishes.
There was a section of the menu called “House Special.” It included three kinds if scallops, sesame chicken that included squid, Four Seasons scallops chicken, pork, shrimp and squid. There were two items called “Happy Family” and “Seven Stars Around the Moon.” Hot and spicy dishes were printed in red. In fact, there was a separate Szechuan and Hunan sections that was printed in crimson.
In our little group, every one had something different to eat and perhaps share-which we did. C. R. had the General Tao, S. H. chose chicken and broccoli. I opted for the House Specialty Fried Rice, which had lot of extras mixed-in, including shrimp. They deliver food with a minimum order of $15.00--cash only.
March 17, 2015
Governor’s Fine Food and Drink
959 Arcade St. Paul, Mn 55106
651-6778-1045
closed on Monday. Tues, 11:30-8:00; Wed, 12:00-8:00;
Thurs, 11:30-8:00; Fri-Sat,
11:30-9:00 Sun, 11:30-8:00
https://www.facebook.com/Governors-Fine-Food-Drink-583282021734060/ I decided to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by going out to eat. Knowing that the later hours of this particular time can get gets a little rowdy, it might be best to show up for lunch. Of course I wanted to get corned beef and cabbage, so I had to do some research and see who was serving this traditional fare on the East Side. I decided to invite Mike, Tony and Frank to join me, since none of them had ever been to Governor’s and they needed to have an East Side experience. Oh, I did have one beer.
The restaurant has been around for a long time. Even though a sign on the front says “Since 1987,” there has been a bar here since the end of Prohibition under different names. When current owner Lou Lentsch named his new venture, he and many of the patrons were graduates of Johnson High School, whose nickname was “The Governor’s.” The charity for the pull tab booth goes to the school’s hockey team.
The décor has the flavor of an older style eatery. The building is divided into two basic sections--a dining area six booths and four tables and a horseshoe bar area with around thirty stools. There is also a banquet room that can serve groups from fifteen to 150. They have an old-time meat raffle every Thursday and karaoke on Wednesday, Friday and Saturdays. They have sandwiches appetizers, burgers, sandwiches and a classic “sloppy hot dagos.” According to their menu, popular items at Governor’s includes garlic toast, “famous cheese bread,” clam or smelt, chicken parmesan dinner and prime rib dinner. There is also a small children’s menu. They also have a Friday fish fry throughout the year.
March 23, 2015
Café La Palma
655 Payne Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55130
651-772-4313
Mon-Sun 8:00 A.M. to 9:00 P. M.
Facebook: La Palma Supermercado
I decided to have the first lunch on my taste trek but didn’t want to have a large one and set out for Café La Palma. The restaurant is inside La Palma Supermercado. I had visited it and knew there was a restaurant in the back, but I hadn’t ever gone there. By the time I got in a little after 1:00 there was a line. It was a cafeteria style arrangement with twenty pictures on the wall showing what the food looked like. There were two televisions which, at the time were loudly following a Latino soccer game, six four-person booths and five tables. In addition there is a small side room with more tables.
If you aren’t in a hurry, you can order off the menu which I did. I decided to stay with my small portion idea and had two pupusas—one cheese and one meat-with a tangy cole slaw. I chose a lime Jarrito for my drink. Since they were not on the buffet I did have to wait ten to fifteen minutes.
The menu says that the house specials are churrasco (steak) and both Salvadorian and Cuban style tortas. There also is a selection of soups and various kinds of sea food such as shrimp or even whole fish. They have several offerings for desayunos, aka breakfast. Some choices include choriza omelet, Mexican style scrambled eggs and even pancakes. There is even a kid’s menu with mini-tortas, a kid’s burrito and small quesadillas. There is no beer or wine, but there is a selection of interesting juices and soft drinks.
I wondered why there were Salvadorian dishes-some listed as specials- at what seemed to be a Mexican food store. I found out why, when I meet Blanca Solis on my way out. She is one of the three owners and is from El Salvador. She also showed me some of the Salvadorian items in the grocery, including a large offering of baked goods that came from the nearby El Guanaco.
March 28, 2015
Schwietz’ Saloon and Eatery
956 Payne Avenue
St. Paul 55106
651-776-9132
Facebook: Schwietz Saloon and Eatery Saturday evening and nowhere particular to go. So I decided to check out the new offerings at one of the older Payne Avenue venues. Even if it wasn’t part of the recently declared Payne Avenue “East Street” locations. New owners have recently been running the Schwietz’ Saloon. In fact, they are having a one year anniversary celebration on June 21st. I hadn’t been there for ages but the insides looked the same. I still like the century-old tin ceiling. They serve beer as well as liquor. There are eight tables and seventeen spots along the long bar. There is one pool table that was in use when I was there and a juke box that played everything from hard rock to oldies, including Freddy Fender. There is a new patio with smoking allowed, but this was inside weather. They also have a second floor banquet/party room.
The menu selection isn’t extensive. There are appetizers, burgers, Hot Dagos, toasted Italian subs, a catfish platter and a choice of dry rub or barbecue ribs.
They can also heat up frozen Heggie’s pizza. I decided to try what was called Schwietz Spinners, party because they came with good old mashed potatoes and gravy. They are round biscuits with mixed-in chicken that were created by Judy, the owners mother. She also designed Screamers, that are little burgers topped with a special hot sauce. Judy does some of the cooking and while I was waiting with a beer, she came around and offered samples of pierogi, which may be added to the menu. By the way, I chose to have a Hamm’s because before Prohibition this bar, as well as many others, was owned by Hamm’s Brewery. April 7, 2015
Tazumal Pupuseria
990 Payne Ave
St. Paul, MN 55130
651-786-9311
Tues-Sun. 9:00-7:00
Closed Monday
Facebook: Tazumal Pupuseria
When I found out this was National Beer Day, I decided to continue my Taste Trek by going out for a drink and some food. Mexican food is often accompanied by some cerveza, so off I went up Payne Avenue to Plaza del Sol. Unfortunately Senor Sol, the restaurant inside where I was headed, had closed at 7:00 that night. Just when I was afraid that I would miss out on National Beer Day until I spotted a smal
Salvadorian establishment next to Senor Sol that was still open and decided to check it out.
I had a serving of two pastels de pollo which were crispy flour or corn turnovers chicken filled with chicken along with a Tamales Oaxaqueno. Since this was National Beer Day I added a bottle of Sol Beer from Mexico. Later I found out that the tamale, a traditional item wrapped in banana leaves, originated in Oaxaca, Mexico. The menu also included plantain turnovers, shrimp turnovers, Hurachesitos and Antoj Salvador that are Salvadorian snacks. True to the place's name, there was a choice of several different pupusas. The other part of the name of the restaurant comes from the archeological site of Tazumal that contains the largest Mayan pyramid in El Salvador.
One owner of the pupuseria is Gloria Casas from El Salvador, who speaks Spanish almost exclusively which, unfortunately, I do not speak beyond a few words. Her husband Angel Casas is from the Oaxaca, a state is southern Mexico, which explains the tamales.
Fortunately Isis Deluca, one of the servers for the just closed Senor Sol restaurant, was still around and agreed to become my
unofficial translator. I was able to communicate with Gloria and found out she had opened the business around a year ago. She came to St. Paul to be with her son, who was already here. I asked how she liked it here she smiled and said “good, but too cold.”
April 17, 2015
Polly’s Coffee Cove
1382 Payne Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55130
651-771-5531
Mon 7:00-8:00; Tues-Fri 7:00- 5:00
Sat 7:30-4:00; Sunday 8:00-3:00
Facebook: Polly’s Coffee Cove
This is an interesting neighborhood coffee house and meeting place inside a 1921 structure that was originally Olson’s Grocery Store and later a small bakery. Ann Policheck started Polly’s Coffee Cove in 2006. The décor is based on comfort, with a sofa or two, stuffed chairs and tables of various sizes. The walls and shelves are filled with curios and a large number of parrot collectables. There is even a tiny table with little chairs and lots of crayons for kids. Although, at least when I was there around 11:30, almost all of the patrons, including myself, seemed to be senior citizens.
Polly’s is the home of the “Tight Knit Group,” a knitting club that meets on Saturday. Every Friday a local woman drops by and plays piano from 1:30 to 4:30. With a small group of East Siders, Ann helped start the St. Paul Optimist Club that headquarters there. Sometimes book groups meet with authors and other interesting speakers.
Starting in January of 2013, Ann started roasting their own coffee and hers was the only the Eastside establishment to do so at the time. While its name suggests an emphasis on coffee, there is a small selection of food that includes sandwiches, soups and quite a few treats such as cookies, pies and rolls. There is quality ice cream, a dollar a scoop that day. Besides cones, there are malts, shakes and root beer floats. The spot is available for private parties and has free WiFi, but instead of texting, I had interesting talks with two or three East Siders. I had a turkey and cheese sandwich and a cup of wild rice, chicken and carrot soup. Of course, I had to have a cup of coffee. After all, it’s the Coffee Cove. April 22, 2015
Ho Ho Gourmet
1985 Old Hudson Rd
St. Paul, MN 55119
651-731-0316
Sun-Thur
1:00-8:30: Fri-Sat 11:00-9:00
http://hohomn.com
A few kind folks have said they would like to accompany me on the East Side Eating adventure. This day it was Ashlee Olds, who is the founder of Sweet Science Ice Cream, a gourmet dessert with many unique flavors. She favored Asian food, and since it was noonish, we decided to go to a spot with a buffet -so onto Ho Ho Gourmet. They actually have two separate buffets: one from 11:00 to 2:30 and another between 5:00 until 9:00 pm..
There were around ten different choices including fried rice, lo mein, beef with broccoli chicken wings and pork dishes. There was a selection of fruit and cookies for dessert. Menu appetizers include pot stickers, cheese puffs and Fantail Shrimp. Ten soups are available, including corn soup, hot and sour and noodle soups. Pan fried noodles and different kinds of chow mein and chop suey. There are also a dozen “chef suggestions.” Other offerings are Hot Pot sea food—mostly shrimp—but one of them had lobster sauce. There were twice cooked pork, shredded chicken, various kinds of lo mein, Stir-Fried Vegetable with Chicken, Beef, or Pork and Szeschuan style family dinners for two to four. Combination plates—“new style American menu,” shrimp with French fries and fried chicken wings.
I did notice that a majority of customers were Asian, suggesting that the food was seen as close to the traditional fare. We talked with one of the owners, who was born in China. She wondered how we like some of the new things, such as enclosing the old sunroom area and adding a high ceiling so the name could be seen from the freeway. I said I was somewhat disappointed that the soft serve vanilla that I liked and was gone. I was told that because of technical problem, it had been eliminated. But I was with the creator of fine ice cream, so maybe I would get my fix of ice cream after we left.
April 29, 2015
Wong’s Kitchen
1191 Earl St
St. Paul, MN 55106
651-776-2522
Mon |
he was born on Armistice day. He was a man with deep reverence for peace who knew firsthand the horrors of war and the ending of war was something to be celebrated. Today, in honor of Vonnegut, we are reprinting Steve Almond’s essay in full.
– Stephen Elliott
The Failed Prophecy of Kurt Vonnegut (and How It Saved My Life)
Part One
You are writing for strangers. Face the audience of strangers.
It would be fair to call me one of the Kurt Vonnegut cult, though a member in poor standing. I read all of his books in high school and college, most of them six times, and I’m sure I walked around for a good number of years spouting little Vonnuggets of wisdom, as his followers so incessantly do.
I devoted most of my senior year in college to a detailed study of his work, writing a thesis titled “Authorial Presence in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut,” a copy of which I recently asked my mother to send me, in her capacity as Chief Curator of the Steve Almond Archives, a capacity, I should add, that she views as the necessary burden of having raised an itinerant narcissist. The Archives have fallen on hard times in the past few years. The result being that the original bound copy of the document – which I feel compelled to note was dedicated to the Chief Curator – no longer exists. It was apparently lent out to my uncle Peter, a man whose own literary archive resides in the backseat of his car.
The Chief Curator was able to find, after what she described as “many hours of excavation” a draft of the thesis, which included the proofreading marks of my college pal James Shiffer who, perhaps not coincidentally, no longer speaks to me. The last page bore a circular stamp at the bottom right. I initially took this to be some sort of academic notarization before coming to recognize it as a large, oddly filigreed coffee stain.
*
I was revisiting my thesis because I had been asked to write an appreciation of Vonnegut, a request I initially refused. I was at work on a dying novel, after all, and I hate to be distracted in the midst of such satisfying masochism. But the request lingered. It activated certain deeply rooted fanboy tendencies. I started thinking about how much Vonnegut had meant to me, and why, and whether writing about him might lead to a rendezvous. That was what I wanted. I wanted to interview him. I wanted to sit around on his porch smoking Pall Malls with him, or at least breathing in his second-hand smoke.
Note: this is the fantasy of every single Vonnegut fan.
*
Eighteen years ago, upon my successful expulsion from college, I was invited to stay with a friend of my girlfriend, out in Sagaponeck, Long Island. I was on the brink of breaking up with this particular girlfriend. But it was also true that these friends of hers were neighbors of Vonnegut. Friends, actually. (They called him Kurt!) So I took a bus out there and hung around for a few days, feeling poor and unsophisticated and properly caddish. In my backpack was a bound copy of my thesis.
All weekend, I fantasized about dropping it off in his mailbox, with a note explaining that I was staying just down the road. He was a busy guy, and a notorious grouch, so he wouldn’t read my thesis immediately. But eventually he’d crack the thing and read a few pages and realize, with a discernable jolt, that, by God, this young Almond fellow knew a few things, that I alone, among his legion of literary investigators had divined his essence, understood his crusade, could be trusted with his secrets. This would lead to an invite for cocktails, a long wistful discussion, many Pall Malls, and his eventual decision to adopt me.
But I chickened out.
*
Cluck cluck.
*
Fast forward to early 2006. I had agreed to write about Vonnegut. But the word on the street was that no one got to Vonnegut. The best I could hope for was to get a note to his attorney, one Donald Farber. I imagined this Farber as a sour, bloodless figure, a dead ringer for Bela Lugosi, with a massive desk upon which sat a single small rubber stamp. From time to time, a small, possibly deformed assistant would place a document before him, allowing Farber the solemn pleasure of whacking a bright red “No” on each request.
Around this time, I traveled down to Hartford, Connecticut[1] for a reading and by chance started thumbing through a local paper and suddenly saw Kurt Vonnegut staring at me. He was slated to appear at something called the Connecticut Forum, along with Joyce Carol Oates and Jennifer Weiner. This was obviously kismet, but I managed not to notice, and immediately filed this information away in the precise part of my brain that has been eroded by pot smoke. The newspaper got tossed into my own backseat archive.
A month later, while uncharacteristically cleaning my car, I came upon the ad for the Connecticut Forum, which was taking place the very next evening. I was no longer suffering under delusion that I would be able to contact Vonnegut directly. And thus, a notion now took root inside my pointy little head: I had to go see Kurt Vonnegut. I had to drive down to Hartford and ask him for an interview. I became convinced this would be my one and only shot at a face-to-face. The man was 83 years old. He had been smoking those Pall Malls (unfiltered) for longer than my parents have been alive. To put it indelicately: he would soon be dead.
*
The Connecticut Forum event was, naturally, sold out. But my friend Catherine, who appears to know every person of consequence in Hartford, managed to finagle me a ticket. And not just to the panel, but to the cocktail reception and dinner beforehand, at which the authors would be appearing.
I spent all that Friday composing a brief letter of introduction[2] and rehearsing what I would say to Vonnegut. I bought a special envelope, one that would fit into his pocket. I got a haircut. For the first time in years, I had a pair of pants dry-cleaned.
*
About the haircut: it was the worst of my adult life. I had asked my stylist Linda to make sure the bangs weren’t too long, as I didn’t like the idea of looking shaggy for Vonnegut. I wanted him to be able to see my eyes, and specifically the nobility shining forth from them. But Linda left the bangs about a half-inch short and boxy at the corners. I looked like a Beatle, if you can imagine the Beatles reuniting for a tour at age 40 and returning (ill-advisedly) to the moptop look.
*
Another irrelevant detail: on the way down to Hartford I was pulled over by a cop for eating a ham sandwich.
It is illegal to eat pork on Connecticut byways.
*
I arrived in Hartford in an addled state. It did not help that I was attending what I would call a corporate event. Honestly, I had no idea what the Connecticut Forum was. But it was immediately apparent they have a lot of money. As soon as Catherine and I arrived at the venue we started to encounter people who had that unmistakable sheen of prosperity: tailored suits, jewelry, the subtle dermal cross-hatchings of a ski tan.
We got to talking to one such couple in the elevator.
“Are you all Vonnegut fans?” I asked.
“Not really,” the man said. He was probably in his mid-50s. “I’ve never read any of his books.”
“None of them? Not even Slaughterhouse-Five?”
He shook his head.
“What about Joyce Carol Oates?”
“What has she written?” he asked pleasantly.
*
And this is what I mean by a corporate event. Most of the people at this cocktail/dinner thingee were there not because they were fans of the authors, but because it was a way of supporting the arts, being a good corporate citizen.
Being a good corporate citizen means shaving an infinitesimal portion from your profits – profits that have skyrocketed as the government has dedicated itself to the financial aggrandizement of the private sector, while virtually eliminating public funding for the arts (forget the poor) – and politely tossing it at programs like the Connecticut Forum, where lots of well-heeled patrons can experience the joys of literature or, at least, a literary dog and pony show, along with noshing on some truly excellent hors d’ouerves.
I’m sounding angry here. What I felt in talking with these folks in the elevator was something closer to despair.UFC 205 drew $17.7 million dollars in ticket sales at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, according to UFC President Dana White. That's more than any MMA or pro wrestling event ever, and more than any event of any kind at New York's most famous arena
The new record edges out the gate for WWE's WrestleMania 32 event this year, which drew a gate of $17.3 million. WrestleMania 32 set the all-time record gate for pro wrestling, even when adjusting for inflation. UFC says the event main evented by Conor McGregor's UFC Lightweight Title win over Eddie Alvarez was attended by 20,427 fans.
WrestleMania 32 at AT&T Stadium in Dallas on April 3 had a far higher attendance than UFC 205. WWE's biggest event of the year was attended by somewhere between 97,769 and 101,763, depending on whether you believe the Wrestling Observer Newsletter's report or WWE's press release. We know however from WWE's own financial reports that paid attendance was between 73,711 and 85,888.
This means there was a huge difference in average ticket price between UFC 205 and WrestleMania 32. Based on the above figures, the average ticket price for UFC 205 was roughly $867, compared to WrestleMania's $217.
White commented on his events high ticket prices. "We definitely priced people out [of buying tickets]. Not my favorite thing to do... When there's so much demand that's what happens."
The success of UFC 205 is likely due in part to the fact it was the first major professional mixed martial arts event in New York State since the sport was banned in the state 19 years ago. The ban was lifted earlier this year.
"It wasn't ignorant; it was dirty politics is what is was," White said about why UFC was kept out of the state for so long. "The Las Vegas Culinary Union is what kept us out of here, and [former New York State Assembly Speaker] Shelly Silver."
"We broke every [business] record in UFC history tonight. The only one I'm waiting on now is the Fox [Sports 1 TV rating] number." When asked whether he expected UFC 205 to break the pay-per-view record as well, based on early trends, White responded: "We did. We broke the record." UFC 202 (also featuring McGregor) last set the PPV record with 1.65 million buys. It's worth noting that both UFC 196 and 202 passed the previous company record of UFC 100's 1.6 million when UFC.TV, and other PPV distributors are added.
"I would like to thank the Las Vegas Culinary Workers' Union for spending their members' dues to help make this the biggest night ever in UFC history," White quipped. "Thank you, dummies."
Some MMA gate records were sourced from the Nevada State Athletic Commission website.This is a show about videogames, the people who play them and the people who make them. Each episode, a guest on the show talks about the games that have shaped their life in one way or another. Games that have inspired them, games that forged connections with others and games that have soothed wounds. Checkpoints!
Today's guest on the show is Shailesh Prabhu, creative director of Yellow Monkey Studios and owner of one of the finest beards I know of.
We talk about the videogame scene in India, the Nintendo Samurai (!), how the credits sequence at the start of Day of the Tentacle completely shifted how he understood games, and the agony and ecstasy that comes with starting your own videogame studio.
We also hit on the joys of rhythm games, how having limited access to lots of games can make you an absolute pro in the ones you have, cricket, Counter Strike and the joy of making things.
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Games discussed: Road Fighters, Mortal Kombat 2, Day of the Tentacle, Black, Socioball, Huebrix, Super Mario, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Device 6, Thief, Arkham Asylum and Counter Strike.
Cover design: Craig Stevenson - http://onedinosaurandhisballoon.blogspot.co.uk
Music: Samuel Baker - http://soundcloud.com/furoshikiA person who made his living trapping sea otters, might, upon learning that the animal was in danger of going extinct, voluntarily stop hunting them, but a corporation, informed that it us overfishing and will wipe out an entire fish species or fishing ground, will not, unless forced to do so, and will predictably fight and bribe politicians and regulators to allow it to keep fishing until there are no more fish.
The fundamental point of corporate law is to limit the liability of actual owners of a firm – to insulate them, that is, from responsibility for their own wretched and self-serving actions. This means that the actions of a corporation, however noxious or criminal, do not generally get blamed on its officers and managers. A good example of this is the felony penalties being assessed today against five of the world’s biggest banks by the US Justice Department for manipulating global currencies. Not a single executive of any of those banks, as I wrote earlier this week, is being indicted for this crime, though the banks themselves are now felons. Aside from some $6 billion in fines that will hardly be noticed by investors, the banks get away scott-free.
We have also seen, during the recent global fiscal crisis, how the big banks all gambled recklessly with their and investors’ assets, ultimately losing so much money that they had to be either bailed out by national governments and taxpayers, or allowed to go bust. The managers simply didn’t care either way. They had already become among the world’s richest people, rewarded year after year by themselves and their boards of directors and shareholders for their epic corruption and mismanagement. Even if they had been ordered to leave their jobs as a part of the rescues (they weren’t), they would have walked away billionaires.
The same is true of all the giant corporations of the world. There is no penalty for failure or even criminality in the corporate world, only for a failure to keep pushing growth each year to impossible heights until eventual collapse.
Given this dysfunctional model, how could anyone expect the commanding heights of the US or the global economy to take the kinds of steps needed to slow or halt climate change?
A this point, if we want to try and hold global warming to the 2˚C limit that scientists say is the maximum increase in temperature that would offer any hope of preventing runaway heating and the resulting chaos of mass extinctions, huge human die-offs and the likely collapse of civilization, we will have to halt the production of internal combustion engines, shut down most corporate farming, close down all coal-fired power plants, massively convert to on-site solar and wind power generation, and most importantly, stop pumping and digging carbon-based fuels out of the ground.
Huge companies like Shell, ExxonMobil, BP and the like would have to be shut down, or massively downsized and broken up.
We’re talking here in other words about a revolution — a total shift away from an economic model that elevates “growth” to godlike status to one that focuses on human needs (as opposed to wants), and away from a philosophy that sees humans as destined to conquer and exploit nature to one that sees humans as simply one integral part of nature — a philosophy that requires us to figure out how to fit in with and preserve the natural world.
In such a new world, there can be no rich, because the rich – even the ones who may pose in their dotage as do-gooders — are dangerous and self-centered parasites. Neither can there can be poor because where there are poor, there will be inevitable demands for more — demands that, while understandable, will lead to destruction of the natural world. Only if all humanity shares to ensure a decent secure life for all can there be any hope of long-term human survival on this limited planet.
That’s admittedly a tall order, but at least we are reaching a point — perhaps too late, but we’ll see — where the enormity of what humanity faces can no longer be avoided. The methane is already boiling or even exploding up out of the Arctic permafrost and, even worse, out of the seafloor of the coastal continental shelf above Siberia and North America, and over the short term, methane is about 180 time as potent a greenhouse gas as is carbon dioxide. All over the perimeter of Antarctica, which we were earlier told was not showing significant warming, we are seeing the ice melting now, while the Arctic Ocean, solidly frozen year round for the last 2.6 million years, will be ice-free in summer, possibly this year, but assuredly in the next couple of years. Greenland, meanwhile, once a huge sheet of white ice a mile thick, should now be called Greyland, as the rapidly melting ice sheet has now exposed so much of the pollution dumped there over several centuries of Industrial-Era snowfalls, that its surface in summer looks like the remnant snow in New York City three days after a snowstorm: more soot than ice.
Expect corporate America and the bought politicians in Washington to start pushing for “technical fixes,” as a New York Times opinion-page writer did yesterday. But this kind of “Hail Mary” effort to avoid the necessary revolution in our economic system and in our whole way of viewing the human experiment will not work. Tinkering with the amount of sunlight that strikes the earth by increasing cloud cover or injecting sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, or trying to continue burning coal and oil while “sequestering” the resulting carbon are all actions beyond any conceivable technological development because of the scale required, and would, if they could be done, have such enormous negative consequences (many unpredictable), that they simply cannot happen, or be allowed to happen.
For now, the best that can be said is that we are leaving behind the period of denial and the false hopes. As with addiction, the first step is acknowledging one’s sickness, and we are now beginning to acknowledge the real sickness of our capitalist world.Former Texas governor and newly announced “Dancing With The Stars” contestant Rick Perry is calling on FBI Director James Comey to resign over his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices at the State Department.
“The Clintons were clearly trying to hide this server,” Perry said Wednesday in an interview on Fox News, referring to a private email server set up by the former secretary of state. “They did not want that information in. And for Comey to stand up and make excuses for Hillary Clinton is absolutely and totally unacceptable. For a man who prided himself of being the top law official in this country, I would suggest the man ought to resign.”
When announcing the results of the monthslong investigation earlier this year, Comey called Clinton “careless” in her handling of sensitive information. FBI investigators found 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified material on the private email server, for example ― contrary to Clinton’s claims that she hadn’t sent classified information. But Comey also said he could not ultimately recommend that the Justice Department bring charges against Clinton based on the facts.
In his interview Wednesday, Perry said he disagreed, and accused Comey of being biased toward Clinton.
“I think [Comey] has some skin in the game somewhere to protect the Clintons at this particular juncture,” Perry said. “It’s an extraordinary failure on his part.”
Perry is the first prominent Republican to call for Comey’s resignation. In speaking about the investigation into Clinton’s emails, most Republicans have focused their criticism more on Comey’s decision not to recommend charges against Clinton, and less on the man himself. When asked about the credibility of Comey ― a well-respected official appointed to the FBI by President George W. Bush ― they generally punt on the question and do not give a direct answer.QuoTW The first days of April saw the death of OnLine, the judgement of TrueCrypt and Cisco going insane for the Embrane.
We also picked up a few epic utterances. Here are some of the best quotes:
It wasn't the best of weeks for Sony. The PlayStation purveyor came off looking less than cordial when it refused to reverse a fraudulent £49.99 charge on its network. PS4 owner Ben Smyth said:
I was advised on the telephone by Sony support that all use, including fraudulent activities committed by an unknown third party, is my responsibility. He advised me that Sony takes no responsibility for fraudulent use of my credit card details and security rests solely with me.
Meanwhile, at the Ft. Leavenworth penitentiary, whistleblower Chelsea Manning has managed to get back online. The one-time soldier has gained access to Twitter and offered the following as her inaugural Tweet:
Starting with a shout out to the friends who have always stood by me @ggreenwald @amnesty @carwinb @savemanning and so many others #thankyou — Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
In Washington, politicos seem, once again, to be confused as to how the internet works. Senator Dianne Feinstein thinks that getting The Anarchist Cookbook will be as simple as yanking a title from the local library. Said DiFi:
I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bomb-making guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire magazine. These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the internet.
Now over to China, where Google has dropped the Chrome banhammer on local root authority CNNIC. The Chinese certificate house did not take the news particularly well, saying:
The decision that Google has made is unacceptable and unintelligible to CNNIC, and meanwhile CNNIC sincerely urge that Google would take users’ rights and interests into full consideration.
Over in Blighty, London mayor Boris Johnson decided to go all in on transparency. Speaking up for more contact with the media, BoJo offered hacks this titbit:
Most civil servants understand that there’s a difference between being useful and helping public debate, and undermining the operation that they are in. I’m in favour of transparency
And finally, a tip of the cap to the UK National Museum of Computing, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this week. Museum director Derek Taylor described the mission of the museum thusly:
We do the best job of going all the way through the history of computing up to the present day and everything in between. And I think that to tell the story of computing, and the influence that the UK had on that story, is a very important one.
®A trade agreement reached between the U.S. and China looks set to reduce Apple’s manufacturing costs by removing import tariffs on components imported into the country.
Apple uses components from a number of countries around the world, notably Korea and Japan, which are imported into China for the assembly of iPhones, iPads and Macs. China currently imposes import tariffs on these components. The new deal would allow companies like Apple, Microsoft and HP to bring components into China free from these charges …
NordVPN
The WSJ reports that while the agreement between the two countries needs to be ratified by the remaining 76 member countries of the Information Technology Agreement, agreement between the U.S. and China was seen as the key step.
Tuesday’s agreement between China and the U.S. clears a critical hurdle toward expanding the Information Technology Agreement, whose 78 members account for 97% of IT exports […] If other member economies approve the pact as expected, the new agreement would boost tech companies in the U.S., Japan and Taiwan, among others. The agreement could cover $1 trillion in trade, according to U.S. estimates.
The ultimate aim of the agreement is to cut costs for consumers, allowing the free passage of both parts and finished products between member countries. The hope is that the agreement will be finalized before the end of the year, and that lower prices will start filtering through to consumers at some point in 2015.
While Apple is course positioned at the premium end of the market, it does cut prices on occasion, such as the $100 drop across the range of MacBook Air models seen earlier this year.Two men were shot in Pittsburgh’s South Side Flats neighborhood early Sunday morning.Police were called to South 22nd and Wharton streets just after 1 a.m. The shooting took place during a fight in the 2000 block of East Carson Street, police said.One of the men was shot in the ankle. He was taken to UPMC Presbyterian and was listed as stable.The other victim was shot in the groin and was taken to UPMC Mercy.Both men are from Beechview and were treated and released from the hospitals.
Two men were shot in Pittsburgh’s South Side Flats neighborhood early Sunday morning.
Police were called to South 22nd and Wharton streets just after 1 a.m. The shooting took place during a fight in the 2000 block of East Carson Street, police said.
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One of the men was shot in the ankle. He was taken to UPMC Presbyterian and was listed as stable.
The other victim was shot in the groin and was taken to UPMC Mercy.
Both men are from Beechview and were treated and released from the hospitals.
AlertMeI traveled with my family in Australia for three weeks as a guest of the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, invited to explain what’s happening in President Trump’s America.
As if there were an explanation.
Of more interest was what I learned from the Australians. To visit this stalwart ally and talk with its people was to see how the United States, in the space of just a few months, has utterly lost its moral authority.
You see it at the street level: Off Sydney’s Circular Quay, where, just down the street from the felicitously (if coincidentally) named Trumps Alto Ego salon, Trump look-alikes wearing orange wigs and too-long red ties amuse passersby with boorish antics; on Melbourne’s Hosier Lane, a street-art haven now featuring a mural of children throwing rocks at a tank emblazoned with Trump’s scowling face; and even in little Port Douglas in the tropics, where anti-Trump graffiti is spray-painted on the trash bin in the marina.
You see it, too, in only slightly more diplomatic terms, at the highest levels:
Paul Keating, the former Labor prime minister, declared in response to Trump’s election that Australia should “cut the tag” with the United States. He later warned that the United States “threatens to involve Australia in war.”
Penny Wong, shadow foreign minister for Labor, which is favored to win the next election, wrote that Trump’s views are “counter to what are core values for most Australians” and suggested Australia orient itself more to the Asia-Pacific region.
Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, asserted last month that the “U.S.-anchored rules-based order” can no longer be “taken for granted.” Turnbull said foreign policy should be determined by Australia’s interests “alone,” and he declared that the U.S. alliance isn’t “a straitjacket.”
It isn’t just rhetoric. In late June, Australia, one of the coalition partners in Syria, suspended air operations over that country after the U.S. military downed a Syrian jet.
Simon Jackman, chief executive of the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, sees a dramatic rethinking in the country about the United States. Australians, he says, are asking: “So why are we so close to this country again?”
There were already differences on gun laws (Australia’s are strict) and inequality (Australia is more egalitarian). But Trump has pushed forward on a new set of issues that offend or frighten Australians: building a border wall, abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the Paris climate-change accord, trying to take away health insurance from millions of Americans (Australia has universal coverage) and making noises about war with North Korea. “The changing U.S. domestic policy leads people to believe our military policy ought not to be so closely entwined with America’s,” says Jackman.
Polling by the U.S. Studies Centre finds that in the past two years, the number of Australians who say the United States has the most influence in Asia has dropped by half. More Australians see the United States as a force for harm in the region and in Australia than did two years ago.
Trump is the reason. When a half-sample of poll respondents were asked the U.S.-influence question with the phrase “now that Donald Trump is president” inserted, negative responses jumped 20 percentage points. Similar results were found in Indonesia, Japan and South Korea.
This is consistent with the Pew Research Center poll of 37 countries released while I was down under. A median 22 percent of those surveyed have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in international affairs, down from 64 percent who had confidence in President Barack Obama. The percentage abroad with a favorable view of the United States has fallen by 15 points. Some of the sharpest drops were among allies.
This will have consequences. Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland says that America’s questioning of “the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts in sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course.” And Germany’s Angela Merkel memorably said in reaction to Trump that Europe must “take our fate into our own hands.” This became only more clear after last week’s Group of 20 meeting, where Trump was the sole dissenter on the Paris accord and his protectionist talk set off fears that a trade war was forming.
Allies’ alienation from the United States will increase, I suspect, when they come to realize what they’ve seen over the past six months is unlikely to change soon. At almost every stop in Australia, I detected an innocent optimism that the Trump effect would be short-lived: How long until he’s impeached? Can’t he be removed on grounds of insanity? Surely his fellow Republicans won’t tolerate this for long?
I wish I could have reassured them.
Twitter: @Milbank
Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.The cash-strapped Mets have hired the consulting company that worked with the Texas Rangers during that team’s bankruptcy and sale in 2010
“Mets Limited Partnership engaged CRG Partners to provide services in connection with financial reporting and budgeting processes,” the team said in a statement late Thursday, responding to a report by SBNation.
“Lots of talk about CRG,” the team later posted to its official Twitter account. “To be clear: CRG’s services aren’t bankruptcy-related. There are no bankruptcy services being provided by anyone.”
The Mets have been trying to raise $200 million through the sale of $20 million non-controlling shares following the collapse of a deal last summer with hedge fund manager David Einhorn.
They also owe $25 million to Major League Baseball, a loan whose repayment was extended from November until March; and $40 million to Bank of America. General manager Sandy Alderson said last month the team lost $70 million, although he didn’t put a timeframe on the losses.
Last March, Forbes reported the Mets had lost 13 percent of their worth amid legal and debt problems. Listed by the publication at $858 million in 2010, the franchise was valued at $747 million in 2011.
The trustee recovering money for victims of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, Irving Picard, originally sought $1 billion from the Mets’ owners, claiming they should have known millions they collected from Madoff represented phony profits. Owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz have denied the claims in lengthy litigation.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed nine of 11 counts on Sept. 27, limiting the exposure of the Mets’ ownership to about $386 million. A trial is scheduled to start March 19.
“In times of unprecedented economic change, organizations are facing unique and daunting challenges,” CRG Partners’ website reads. “CRG Partners works with organizations to address these challenges, resolve complex problems and significantly improve operating performance.”
Mets fans: Your thoughts on the hiring of CRG Partners? Be heard in the comments below…
(TM and Copyright 2012 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Feb. 15, 2016, 7:15 PM GMT / Updated Feb. 15, 2016, 7:24 PM GMT By Maggie Fox
A team at Wake Forest University has used a combination of living cells and a special gel to print out living human body parts — including ears, muscles and jawbones.
It’s an advance on previous attempts, which either involved making a plastic scaffold and then trying to get cells to grow in and on it, or that printed out organ shapes that ended up being too floppy and dying.
Completed ear and jaw bone structures printed with the Integrated Tissue-Organ Printing System. Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine
The new approach mixes live cells with a gel that starts out as a liquid but quickly hardens to the consistency of living tissue, and layers them in with tiny tunnels that serve as passages for nutrients to feed the cells until blood vessels can grow in and do the job naturally.
“We are actually printing the scaffolds and the cells together,” said Dr. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the study team.
“We show that we can grow muscle. We make ears the size of baby ears. We make jawbones the size of human jawbones. We are printing all kinds of things,” Atala told NBC News.
Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the team describes both the new 'bioprinting' technology and the organs they have been able to grow using it.
“We present an integrated tissue–organ printer (ITOP) that can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue constructs of any shape,” they wrote.
“The correct shape of a tissue construct is obtained from a human body by processing computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data in computer-aided design software.”
Atala has been working for more than a decade to make grow-your-own organ transplants. He's not the only one trying — other teams are working on bioprinted hands, for instance.
In 2006, Atala's team made the first full organ ever grown and implanted into a human — the bladder — and rabbit penises that were the first solid organs.
He’s been working under contract with the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which is seeking new ways to help military personnel injured in battle. But the principles could apply to any patient needing a new ear, organ or a replacement for a shattered jaw.
The challenge is that living body parts are complicated. It’s not enough to make, say, a heart-shaped blob of tissue. Even a simple structure, like an ear, has several types of cells and they must all be fed by tiny capillaries.
“What happens if you don’t have them is the surface gets fed but if you make them any larger the central core with not get fed and they will die,” Atala said.
Atala’s team started out with actual inkjet printers but they’ve now developed customized devices.
“We started working with the printers about 12 years ago, trying to design printers specific to human tissues,” he said. “Nature itself gives us this limit where you cannot really print tissues in volumes larger than 200 microns.”
Anything thicker and the cells on the inside die. “Because the cells need vital nutrients. as we print the cells we can create microchannels. It’s like a highway,” he said.
The Integrated Tissue-Organ Printing System is at work, printing a jaw bone structure. Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine
And within 24 hours, blood vessels start to sprout in these microchannels, Atala said.
A second challenge is getting the bioprinted material to take on the right consistency at the right time.
“You want the cells to go through the nozzle as a liquid. But you don’t want it to land as a liquid because it will just make a blotch. You want it to land like a gelatin,” Atala said.
“Then as it hardens you want about as hard as a gummy bear.”
The result is a mixture of polymers, living cells and the nutrients they need. “We call it bioink,” Atala said.
The team’s also working to print out livers, lung tissue and kidney tissue.
A printed bone structure. Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine
It’s still years away from being used in actual human patients, but what Atala hopes for is a way for people to get custom-made transplants using their own cells, or closely matched cells, grown to just the right size and shape.
Currently, people must rely on organs taken from other peoples who have just died, or a kidney or piece of liver from generous and courageous live donor willing to go through the surgery.
Recipients must then take drugs for the rest of their lives to make their bodies tolerate the foreign tissue.
According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, more than 121,000 Americans are on the waiting list for an organ.Not many people would associate the Hollywood blockbuster, Star Wars, with the Nazis’ rise to power, or describe the evil Sith lord, Palpatine's ascent to become emperor of the Star Wars universe in “Weimarian” terms.
But that’s exactly what Csaba Toth, a liberal Hungarian political scientist is doing in a series of lectures in Budapest, which he is also turning into a book, to be published in Hungary in spring.
Yoda (left) and Juncker (Photo: Jonathan Powell and ec.europa.eu)
Toth relates politics to science fiction films and literature in the hope that, via analogies to pop culture, which is free of political prejudice, students become better equipped to decode undemocratic tendencies, expose populism and stand up for democracy.
"The rules of politics are universal. It revolves around power and essentially means a struggle of interests," Toth told EUobserver in an interview.
Old Republic under |
o
As it turned out, there were a goodly number of baubles and coin on the Centaurs and Satyrs, as well as more than a few potions. Weiss was able to identify the more useful of those, Healing and Stamina Restoration and the like. There was one potion of Strength, which Weiss immediately handed over to Nora, much to her joy, and another of Aura Regeneration, which she slipped into her own pouch. Ren claimed a sickly-green-looking liquid which Weiss assured him was a potion to neutralize many poisons.
As they trekked along the path, cognizant of the fact that they wouldn't be making much more progress tonight, Blake strode alongside Ruby's side, eyeing the gleaming dagger in the brunette's hands.
"Picked up a new toy?" the raven-haired Rogue asked humorously.
"Well…" Ruby mused, turning it over in her hands. "It's only a minor enchantment, but I suppose it's better than not having anything that… Yeah, okay." She seemed to come to a decision, and handed it over to Blake, hilt-first. "It's not much, but at least you can defend yourself with it at close-range, right?"
"Er… right," Blake murmured, accepting the gift and tucking it into her belt. "Thank you."
"Well, I'm still gonna work on enchanting Gambol Shroud for you tonight. I managed to retrieve all of my supplies. Hey, your arrows… do you make them yourself?"
"Most of them, yes," Blake replied, reaching back to touch the feathered shafts over her shoulder. "I tend to supplement with bought ones, but they're usually of poorer quality."
"Gotcha. And how many did you retrieve?"
"About half a quiver."
"Okay… So while I'm working, see if you can't fletch a few more, the enchantment I'm going to place will work best if the arrows are made by your hand."
Blake nodded wordlessly, her mind running through what fletching supplies she had brought along, deciding that she could perhaps create another quiver's worth.
An hour later they had camp set up. Half of the Knights volunteered for first watch while Ren and Nora cooked up dinner for everyone.
Ruby, after making sure everyone was settled well enough, situated herself up against a tree trunk on the edge of camp. She sat cross-legged with her knapsack at her side and several items spread out before her, including a scroll that she was reading intently.
The Cat Faunus quietly walked up to her, taking her time while watching how focused the brunette was on what she was reading, the tip of her small, pink tongue poking out from between her lips in concentration. Gods, she is adorable. She gave herself a quick shake to dispel the unwanted thought, gracefully dropping into an identical pose across from Ruby.
The other girl's silver eyes snapped up, immediately crinkling in pleasure at her company. I will not blush, I will not blush…
"Is there anything you require from me, besides… this?" She handed her Duskwood bow over to the brunette. She was slightly surprised at the amount of reverence Ruby displayed as she handled it, turning it over in her hands and making soft little noises of appreciation at the scrolling runework carved into the bow.
"There's one thing…" Ruby murmured as she easily unstrung the bow, setting the string aside next to her. "I'm going to need a hair from you, not cut but rather with the root attached."
"Okay," Blake shrugged. She complied, pulling on a strand and plucking it out before setting it in the brunette's hands. "How long with this take you?"
"Oh, all night," Ruby replied unconcernedly.
"What?"
"Really, it's not a problem." The shorter girl smiled guilelessly at her. "Done it plenty of times before."
Blake nodded slowly. "Very well… Er, is it alright if I stand watch over you while you work? I can do my fletching and still keep you safe…"
Ruby blinked her wide silver eyes at her. "I would like that," she stated softly, a faint pink dusting her cheeks.
"Okay," she murmured, turning away in embarrassment. She snuck a peek over her shoulder as she went to get her supplies, and was surprised to see the girl pluck one of her own red-tipped hairs and add it to Blake's in her hands. Shrugging, she grabbed what she needed and got herself set up against a neighboring tree not five feet away.
The diminutive girl didn't make any further conversation as she read a few words aloud from the scroll, words that seemed to linger in her mind as fleeting as a summer storm before wisping away. Then she rested her hands on the bow, eyes closed and back erect, mumbling more words under her breath that were too soft for even her Faunus senses to catch.
Ren stopped by with dinner, quietly asking if he should disturb Ruby, but she waved him off. The Rogue paused in her fletching preparations to wolf down the tasty stew. It wasn't seafood, but quite pleasurable nonetheless.
A half hour later, and six arrows in, Yang plopped inelegantly next to her, careful not to jostle her elbow.
"How's it going?" the blonde asked softly.
"Well," Blake replied neutrally, showing her efforts so far. Yang just grunted but then indicated her sister with her head for further clarification. The Cat Faunus sighed and shook her head.
"I have no idea what she's doing, but so far so good, I suppose."
Yang nodded, content to lean her head back against the tree and observe the brunette openly. The Rogue gave up on her efforts for the time being and did the same.
"Yang," she began hesitantly. "What was it you talked about with King Ozpin? Why was he so eager to help us?"
The blonde worried at her bottom lip for a moment, displaying an uncharacteristic reluctance. "Did Ruby mention anything?" she finally asked.
"No, she keeps avoiding the subject."
"Well… Okay, I can't go into the specifics, but… The King, he knew my dad. And Ruby's mom."
Blake nodded slowly. "And that was sufficient to obtain his assistance?"
"He knew them really well," Yang clarified. "So, yeah, he felt obligated to help."
"Very well," Blake sighed, knowing she wouldn't get any more out of the unusually recalcitrant woman.
"Right, then," Yang grunted, levering herself to her feet. "I got me a certain Elf who's keeping my bedroll warm, don't wanna leave her waiting too long."
Blake snorted humorously, waving her off as she sauntered deeper into the woods. The Faunus woman supposed there was no harm in the two of them sleeping outside the camp edge, the both of them could hear anything coming up to them and could easily handle themselves.
She settled back against the tree, unwilling to resume her fletching just yet. Instead she watched the annoyingly attractive brunette, her mind's eye reminiscing upon the maid's outfit that she'd tricked the shorter girl into wearing in the castle. A small grin formed on her lips, and an involuntary purr rumbled through her chest at the memory.
"I know what you're thinking about," a playful, sing-song voice whispered from behind her.
The Cat Faunus gave a startled squawk as she gracelessly spun around in her seated position. Twinkling turquoise eyes looked back at her.
"Nora," she hissed. "What are you… I mean… I don't know what you're talking about," she finished weakly.
"Uh-huh," the orange-haired warrior smirked, hopping down next to her and leaning against her shoulder. "You were purring."
"I wasn't-"
"While looking at Ruby."
"That doesn't mean-"
"And you had a really sappy grin on your face while doin' it." Nora giggled as she nudged the raven-haired woman. "You got it bad for her, don'tcha?"
"I…." Blake sighed, staring down at her hands. "Yes... yes I do." She turned her own amber eyes upon her companion fiercely. "Not a word of this to anyone!"
"No worries, Blake, your secret's safe with me," she snickered. "So when are you gonna make a move?"
"I don't… Does she even like girls?"
Nora clapped her hands over her mouth, laughing silently and allowing tears of mirth to freely flow over her cheeks. Blake just sighed indulgently as she waited for the hammer-wielder to calm down, mindlessly working on another arrow as she did so.
"Okay," Nora eventually wheezed. "So… yeah, I can definitely say she likes girls."
"How do you know?"
"Hmm... Nope, can't tell you. Another secret, okay? But yeah, totally into girls. And, like, not the way Yang likes everyone, I mean she's exclusively into girls. More like Weiss."
Blake blinked her eyes uncertainly, almost dropping the arrow she was working on. "I… see. That was disturbingly comprehensive."
"I aim to please!" Nora giggled. "Seriously, though, when you gonna ask her?"
"Perhaps…" Blake set the completed arrow down, glancing up again at Ruby to make sure she was still heavily engaged in her enchanting. "Perhaps when this is over and the Orb returned to Vale," she whispered.
"That long?"
"Yes, I don't… I don't want to complicate things. Even if…" Blake's head dropped, her raven tresses hiding her face. "Even if there's a chance… I can wait."
"Hmm." Nora got to her feet, but bent down over Blake, tipping her head back and boring her intense turquoise orbs into her. "But can she?"
With that, the orange-haired girl skipped away, calling out for Ren to hurry up with the dishes so they could "...hit the sack, if you know what I mean."
Blake managed to finish the arrows that she had materiels for, bundling them into her quiver and taking the purchased ones aside. Those she began to disassemble, keeping the arrow heads and fletching if they were of a good enough quality, but discarding the generally inferior shafts.
Her eyes rested upon Ruby the whole while, her mind awhirl with conflicting thoughts, emotions, and desires.
o o o
Morning dawned bright and early. Blake had taken a shift with Weiss in the middle of the night, their enhanced night vision allowing the pair a better chance of detecting any approaching threats. For all that, though, the night passed without incident. Blake even managed to grab a few hours of sleep while Yang took her spot at the tree to watch over her sister.
When the Cat Faunus awoke, it was to a gentle nudging. A pair of sparkling silver eyes peered at her as she cracked her own amber orbs open. The brunette looked disturbingly awake for someone who didn't sleep at all the night prior.
"Wakey wakey, Blakey!" the shorter girl giggled. "C'mon, I got something to show you!"
Groaning, the raven-haired girl dragged herself out from under her bedroll. A few others were up already, blearily walking around and gathering their wits.
By the time Ruby had dragged her to the other side of the camp where the pathway lay, most of them had gathered around curiously.
The brunette reached behind a tree trunk and withdrew Gambol Shroud, as well as her new quiver of arrows. Blake accepted the bow gratefully, running her hands along the smooth, dark surface. It seemed to resonate slightly, like a tingly feeling where her fingertips caressed the wood.
"Yep, she recognizes you," Ruby giggled from her side. "You can feel it, right?"
Blake just nodded wordlessly, her eyes wide with wonderment at the feeling of, well… life within her previously inert bow.
"Okay, so here's what we do," Ruby began in a firm voice. She indicated with a pointed finger a spot up the road where she'd previously secured a brightly-colored ribbon. It was a good distance off, but nothing Blake hadn't managed before. "Nock an arrow, draw but don't release."
The Rogue complied with her directions, the arrowhead unwavering on the target while she absentmindedly took into account wind speed and direction.
"Think about the target," Ruby continued.
Okay, sure… Hello little ribbon, you're my target today, how are you? She suppressed a giggle at her uncharacteristic silliness. Presumably the petite brunette was beginning to rub off on her.
"Now look at me while keeping the arrow drawn."
She furrowed her brow in confusion, but glanced her way in compliance once again.
Ruby grinned at her widely. "Keep your eyes on me while thinking about your target, and then release. Don't look away from me, okay?"
"Alright," Blake conceded. She knew by now her aim had drifted off target, but with a shrug she released the string, fully expecting it to be lost into the woods.
Her eyes widened as she looked over, echoing the gasps from the others of the fellowship observing. The arrow was embedded through the ribbon and into the tree, quivering slightly from the impact.
"How…?" she breathed incredulously.
"That's the enchantment," the brunette said, clapping her hands together with palpable glee. "You'll always hit the target you're thinking about. But you gotta use arrows you make yourself or it won't work. I mean, it'll be a regular bow then, but it's attuned to your aura, and you leave a trace of that when you fletch…" She grinned and shrugged. "Well, I'm not gonna get technical about it, but that's how it works."
Blake shook her head, still in shock at the incredible enchantment that her leader had crafted for her. "This is… amazing."
"Oh, and it gets better!" the brunette burbled. "If Weiss and me can enchant your arrows while locking in the aura signature… hmm, I'd have to let her know… Hey, Weiss, you know how to do that?"
The platinum-haired Elf shook her head slowly, eyeing the brunette like she'd never seen her before.
"Well, no worries, I can teach you… Anyways, if we can enchant some arrows up, they'll still work, but then the actual arrow will do more damage, like to Dragons and other beasties you can only hit with magical weapons." She stood in front of Blake, her hands behind her back and a wide grin still on her face. "Sooo… you like?"
Blake enveloped the brunette in a wordless hug, careful of her newly enchanted bow still in her hands. "I love it," she whispered. "Thank you so very much."
Ruby chuckled embarrassedly as she returned the hug warmly "My pleasure, Blakey."
"Okay!" a loud voice called out from back in the camp. "Where's everyone? We gettin' ready to head out or not?"
Ruby and Blake were quick to once again separate from their hug before Yang could come up on them. From the snickers of the others in the group, nobody was fooled in the slightest.
"Heya, kitty cat!" the blonde called out cheerfully as she slung an arm around the Faunus Rogue. "So what do ya think of my little sister's work, huh? Pretty impressive, right?"
"It is, most definitely," Balke replied, shrugging the arm off but giving the brunette a warm look before walking to retrieve her arrow.
When she returned, the fellowship was gathered and packed up, save for one usually boisterous orange-haired hellion.
"She's difficult to rouse on the best of days," Ren sighed. "Especially right at dawn."
"I can kick her," Jeanne stated dubiously, earning her several incredulous stares.
"Do you truly value your life and limb so cheaply?" Weiss scoffed amicably.
Ruby chuckled as she walked up. "Don't worry guys, your fearless leader has this."
She bent over the cocooned form of the prone girl and whispered loudly. "Nora, some girl just hugged Ren!"
In the blink of an eye, the orange-haired warrior was up and ready for immediate action, Magnhild at the ready.
"Where is she? I'll break her legs!" She glared around the gathered companions. "Wasn't anybody here, was it?"
Every female in the group took a hurried step away from the chagrined man, shaking their heads rapidly.
"Good. Hey, we going somewhere?"
A/N: Some get jewelry for their crush. Ruby enchants a magical bow. Hey, whatever works. And it seems as if Nora and Ruby have already had a heart-to-heart.
Much love for my marvelous Betas, KellyConnely and PandaAnimeLover, and tons of hugs for my wonderful reviewers, RatedRSuperStar87, RedWing36, Nicodemus Cain, AntonSlavik020, kaiju62, FoxyFoxation, ExKage, TacoKing23, and bankerrtx01. Love you guys!
Stay shiny!A year ago, DJ Knight, a 7-year-old boy from Fort Meade, sat in a hospital bed, crying from the pain of his newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia. His mother, Bridgett, said she and her husband, Dustin, were “utter messes.”
It was hard for the three to envision the next year that included weekly chemotherapy treatments, spinal taps and extended emergency room stays for fevers.
But at the Orioles game Saturday, a year after DJ returned home from the hospital for the first time, the Knights will put the grief and hassle aside. Casey Cares Foundation and UMPS CARE Charities have partnered to surprise DJ and celebrate his milestone on the field at Camden Yards.
“It makes us so happy to see how he’s improved,” Bridgett said of DJ’s treatment entering the “maintenance phase,” which began a few months ago and continues until 2019. “It’s just hard to think about that little boy last year in the hospital bed and just being in tears from being in pain, and this year he’s running around.”
So far, the Knights, who also have a 2-year-old and 10-month-old child, have told DJ he’s going to a baseball game.
While he’s excited — especially to spend the evening with his grandpa, Roger Perdue, who’s visiting from Michigan while battling kidney cancer — DJ doesn’t know about the pregame festivities the charities have planned.
Casey Cares, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that offers activities and treats for ill children and their families, and UMPS Care, an organization founded by major league umpires to provide monetary, in-kind and emotional support for children in need, have partnered in cities across the United States to give families VIP treatment at games.
The umpires take the kids on the field for batting practice, and often bring them into their clubhouse, snapping pictures and providing them with baseballs, sunflower seeds and bubble gum. Kids also interact with the mascot and sometimes players.
“They’re always surprises to the kids,” said Casey Baynes, founder and executive director of Casey Cares. “The kids just think they’re going to a baseball game, and they’re over the moon.”
“To be able to see them smile,” said Adrian Johnson, a major league umpire on the UMPS CARE board. “That’s what we’re about and bring happiness to their lives for a quick moment.”
The Knights tried to go to an Orioles game through Casey Cares last year, but it was rained out. They went to a preseason Ravens game instead.
This time, they’re eager to see DJ’s happiness, a stark contrast from their outlook a year earlier.
“It’s cool that there’s foundations … that are able to do things like this,” Dustin said. “Kids, with whether it be cancer or any kind of debilitating disease, can enjoy an afternoon and kind of take their minds off things.”
ccaplan@baltsun.com
twitter.com/CallieCaplanÖnder Aytaç Twitter It's often said that responding to a text or a tweet with a certain single letter — "k" — means you're angry, or mad, or annoyed.
But while a "k" amongst millennials in the United States can spark a miscommunication between lovers or friends, it can actually put you in prison in Turkey.
Just ask Önder Aytaç, a Turkish columnist for opposition newspaper Taraf.
Aytaç was sentenced to 10 months in prison Monday for 'insulting public officials' after a tweet he wrote about Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan contained a typo.
This story was initially reported by Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, in a Medium Post entitled "Forget 140 characters: Here's How to Go to Jail for 10 Months for One 'k'".
Here's the tweet from September 2012, responding to the news that Erdogan was planning to shut down private schools:
Twitter
In Turkish, the word "ustam" means "my chief" or "my master," but Tufekci explains that the letter "K" tacked onto the end of that word changes the meaning significantly.
Now that portion of the message turns into the more profane version of "screw off" (use your imagination.)
Turkey has strict defamation laws that prohibit insulting public officials, so tweeting "screw off," even though Aytaç claims it was a typo, puts the journalist on the naughty list.
In March, Erdogan pledged to "wipe out" Twitter and temporarily banned access to the site.
You can read Tufekci's full story on this issue in her Medium post.Cirque Colors - Winter Bloom
Cirque Colors - Ambrosia
Cirque Colors - Halcyon
Cirque Colors - Idyllic
Be sure to keep up-to-date with Cirque Colors on social media:
Hiya guys! I can't believe how quickly time is flying. It's already time for holiday collections to start rolling around and that blows my mind! But I'm not complaining, it's one of my favorite times of year to buy polish. Enabler mode fully activated, haha. Today I'm sharing swatches for theby Cirque Colors, which consists of four sparkling shades. With this release marks the return of the fan-favorite! So if you've had this on your wishlist then it's time to cross it off!Theby Cirque Colors is now available for purchase. Each full-size (13.2 mL) bottle retails for $13. Most of the shades in this collection are limited edition, so be sure to nab them while you can!can be described as a blushing mint green with holographic flakes. A favorite among favorites! I wasn't expecting to love this shade against my skin-tone, so it was a much welcomed surprise. And that sparkle... *drool* so much depth and dimension.The fornula has a smooth application with a sheer build-up. The consistency is great for layering and you can easily achieve full coverage. It dries down to a minimal gritty finish, but smooths down perfectly with topcoat. Shown here in three coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.can be described as an oxblood red holographic. No holiday is complete without a little vamp factor and here it is. I love how sexy and sleek this shade is! Pair this up with a little black dress and you'll be the star of anyholiday party.Fornula has an opaque and smooth application with minimal need for layering. Great consistency, not too thick or too thin. Despite its rich pigmentation, I experienced no staining to my cuticles or nail bed. Shown here in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.can be described as a highly reflective rose gold made with pure silver-coated micro-flakes. If you missed out on nabbing this beauty last year now is your chance! As someone who absolutely loves rose gold this is perfection. I'm actually pretty sure I just found the shade I'll wear at my wedding, haha.The formula has an amazingly opaque application, it felt like I barely needed the second coat. Very smooth with good even consistency. Definitely a must-have in every sense. Shown here in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.can be described as a highly reflective icy blue made with pure silver-coated micro-flakes. Photos don't do this gorgeous shade any justice. It legit made my camera completely freak out with how reflective and high shine the finish is. I love it so much and can't help but find it perfect for capturing the essence of an icy winter!The formula has a similar application to that of, very smooth and opaque throughout. It dries to a high-shine on its own, but I did add topcoat to help smooth down the flakes. Shown here in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.Overall this is another winning collection from, which comes as no surprise. From formulas to finishes it's aces all around. Each one of these shades feels and looks very unique for the holidays. Which I love because it's different than what you expect to see for the season. It goes without saying that you needin your nail life, especially now that you have a second chance at grabbing it! Tell me guys, which one is these shades is making your wishlist this year?To recap, theby Cirque Colors is now available for purchase. Each full-size (13.2 mL) bottle retails for $13. Most of the shades in this collection are limited edition, so be sure to nab them while you can!It's been a long time since we've witnessed three benches-clearing brawls, eight ejections and a ton of punches being dished out during a big league game.
That's what went down Thursday between the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers, and while Miguel Cabrera's initial punch that started the first brawl was something to note, it's the cheap shots from Yankee phenom Gary Sanchez when Miggy was on the ground that's making the rounds last night and into Friday.
Lol Gary Sanchez got two defenseless cheap shots in, one in the beginning & one towards the end, just follow him #24 pic.twitter.com/G55SG41apD — Alex B. (@KnicksCentral) August 24, 2017
While I'm sure Miggy didn't take kindly to the cheap shots by Sanchez, especially since the Yankee catcher was never ejected throughout this battle royal, the former MVP wants one thing from Sanchez: do it face to face next time.
"He can do whatever he wants to," Cabrera said of Sanchez. "But if he wants to punch me, let it be face to face."
Sorting through the Miggy/Romine/Kraken main event at yesterday's Comerica Park fight card. #Yankees #Tigers https://t.co/P0X2SYGz05 — Ken Davidoff (@KenDavidoff) August 25, 2017
“I was in the dugout and I saw Romine rolling on the [ground] with the other guys,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. “At that moment, just instincts take over, because you want to defend your teammate. That’s your family out there.”
Sanchez can talk about protecting his family, but his acts were cowardice.
He may have stayed in the game Thursday, but there's no way the league hasn't seen this and a hefty suspension is likely for the Yankee backstop.Russell Broadbent says Coalition needs to consider whether there are adequate safety measures to protect those in detention
The Liberal MP Russell Broadbent says the government needs to consider whether there are adequate checks and balances to ensure the safety of people in immigration detention after the release of new records revealing the scale of abuse of children in offshore detention.
Broadbent, who was active alongside fellow Liberal moderates on asylum issues during the Howard era, said the incident reports published by the Guardian on Wednesday are “the sort of thing that brought John Howard to a place where he had to do something about it”.
The Victorian Liberal said the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was fully aware of Australia’s responsibilities with offshore detention but, he added, when governments moved to contract out responsibility for the management of the centres the adequacy of checks and balances was called into question.
The Nauru files: cache of 2,000 leaked reports reveal scale of abuse of children in Australian offshore detention Read more
“That is now being tested by your story,” Broadbent said.
The backbencher said churches and “people of conscience” needed to rally on the issue and he blasted the new Senate crossbenchers for prioritising a discussion about repealing protections in the Racial Discrimination Act.
“When there are issues like this that face the nation – compared to [concerns about the welfare of detainees on Nauru], changing 18C is a 15th-order issue.”
Broadbent’s intervention followed an undertaking on Wednesday from Turnbull to “carefully examine” the material about incidents on Nauru to see if there are any complaints or issues that were not properly addressed.
The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, said the government needed to implement Labor’s policy of putting in place an independent children’s advocate because offshore detention had to be conducted “in the safest possible way”.
Labor MPs also remain deeply troubled by conditions in offshore detention. The Tasmanian Labor senator Lisa Singh told Guardian Australia on Wednesday it remained her personal view that the offshore detention centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea should be shut down.
Labor had a bruising debate about asylum policy at its national conference last year, which resulted in the party supporting offshore processing with additional safeguards – but Singh said that debate would not be the end of the party’s internal conversation about asylum policy.
Singh said people detained on Nauru had committed no crime and yet they faced periods of indefinite detention where they were retraumatised.
“If [the Guardian Australia report] is not a wake-up call to end the practice of detaining children then I don’t know what is,” Singh said on Wednesday.
She said there was now a number of strong components to Labor’s asylum policy as a consequence of the conference debate “but that doesn’t mean the debate is over”.
The Labor MP Andrew Giles – who led the left faction push at the national conference for the ALP to oppose boat turnbacks – told Guardian Australia he was horrified and distressed by the material published on Wednesday.
UN, human rights groups and refugee groups demand solutions following Nauru data leak – as it happened Read more
Giles did not disavow the policy Labor resolved at the national conference but he said: “That material shows [the immigration minister] Peter Dutton’s claims that asylum seekers are safe are baseless.
“What these revelations do is ask all of us to think about how we approach the politics of this issue.”
Josh Wilson, the new Labor member for Fremantle who replaced one of Labor’s strongest campaigners on protecting the human rights of asylum seekers, Melissa Parke, said there was clear evidence of “chronic, systemic, institutional harm” going on in immigration detention.
“In the view of any sensible, caring Australian, these practices are unacceptable and have to change,” Wilson said.DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – Two people are in police custody after a shooting in Rowlett led to a high-speed chase that ended with a fiery crash Dallas.
According to investigators, the incident started just after midnight when at least one person fired shots at a home in the 2600 block of Remington Drive in Rowlett. A couple inside called 911 and told the dispatcher they were there with children.
When police arrived they found no one injured, but learned the woman, Iesha Davis, had been involved in a domestic dispute with her ex-boyfriend.
The woman’s current boyfriend, Joshua Duncan, was inside and said he hit the floor when he heard the shots. “Basically it was a bad case of an ex-boyfriend getting mad and wanting to show his rage. And he came out and did some dumb stuff and shot a couple of rounds through the house and we’ve got kids in there and everything, so it was pretty scared, pretty rough, traumatizing.”
After police gathered information about the suspect a Rowlett police officer spotted his car traveling on Interstate-30, with two men inside. The pair was later identified as Zseron Dukes and Gary Grayson.The officer tried to stop the car but the driver sped off beginning what would be a 20-mile chase that eventually included Dallas police and the Air One helicopter. At one point, officers allegedly spotted someone inside throw a gun from the car.
The chase wove onto Dallas side streets and when the driver tried to make a U-turn on the Haskell/Blackburn bridge, over Central Expressway, the car crashed into a pole and caught fire.
Two officers were able to pull the men to safety. Both men were arrested at the scene.
Dukes was charged with Unlawful Possession of a Firearm by a Felon, Evading Arrest and Deadly Conduct. Grayson has been charged with Tampering with Evidence. Both men remain in the Rowlett City Jail.
(©2017 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)In 2010, an Air Force CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor – a hybrid warplane that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like an airplane – crashed in southern Afghanistan, killing four people on board. When Brig. Gen. Don Harvel, the lead accident investigator, concluded that engine failure might have been to blame for the Osprey's loss, he was overruled by a superior officer who Harvel says was eager to protect the military's $36 billion investment in the controversial V-22.
Harvel finally retired this summer and, in his first major interview with U.S.media since the accident, accused the Pentagon of "trying to turn all eyes away" from the Osprey's ongoing safety woes, which have contributed to a dozen or more crashes or other dangerous incidents since the speedy warplane with the rotating engine nacelles was redesigned between 2001 and 2005.
But one Air Force engineer and veteran of the Osprey program, who also examined the 2010 crash data, tells Danger Room that Harvel misinterpreted the facts surrounding the V-22's fatal tumble – and then followed flawed assumptions to incorrect conclusions regarding the Osprey's airworthiness. "Gen. Harvel was wrong," says Eric Braganca, recently retired as the Air Force's chief V-22 systems engineer.
"Harvel is no hero who fought the'system,'" Braganca adds. Instead, he was "a man who leaped to a conclusion."
Braganca, who spent 22 years as an Air Force engineer and helicopter pilot, stresses that he's not sure what caused the 2010 crash. He's got company. Having rejected Harvel's findings, the Air Force never settled on a definitive cause, either – although it did cite pilot error as a "substantially contributing factor."
For the record, Braganca says he was friends with the pilot and flight engineer on the doomed V-22 and had even helped train the pilot. Both crew members died in the crash. "These were fine, well-trained men that I had routinely flown with and both had been in combat before."
"I do not understand why such highly capable warriors crashed what appeared to be a fully functional aircraft," Braganca adds.
After visiting Afghanistan to interview crash survivors, and reviewing video of the V-22's final seconds in flight (shot by an escorting A-10 attack plane), Harvel concluded that the Osprey's engines possibly failed as it was coming in for a landing. He based this assessment in part on puffs of smoke that could be seen coming from the tiltrotor's nacelles before it slammed into the ground – apparent evidence that the crew was trying to restart stalled motors.
It was the claim of engine problems that raised the ire of the V-22's defenders, who for years have fought back against accusations that the tiltrotor's multimillion-dollar engines are prone to fires, failures and maintenance problems. Harvel says his boss, Lt. Gen. Kurt Cichowski, ordered him to omit references to engine failure from the final crash report. Harvel refused. "I turned [my report] in and I knew that my career was done," Harvel tells Danger Room.
Cichowski sought a second opinion about the crash from a team of Air Force and Navy engineers, including Braganca. The engineers did not travel to Afghanistan like Harvel did. Instead, they analyzed crash data on paper and ruled out engine failure. Cichowksi approved of their conclusion and included it in his official rebuttal of Harvel's report.
Braganca says Cichowski was right to overrule Harvel. "As these events were unfolding, [Harvel] came across as a man who leaped to a conclusion based on the puffs of smoke. And having made that leap, he appeared to focus his investigation solely on proving himself correct and was unable to accept anything that didn’t match his personal assessment of what happened that night."
The puffs of smoke were not proof that the V-22's engines had failed in mid-flight, thus causing the plane's out-of-control descent, Braganca says: "Despite pulling apart the data repeatedly and in different ways, we could only determine that an engine failure was possible in the three seconds before impact."
"The puffs of smoke that Harvel saw on the video are common occurrences and were not timed within the three-second window before impact," Braganca adds. According to him, the puffs were a red herring – an artifact of normally operating engines that only appeared alarming to an misinformed investigator.
But Harvel says he based his conclusion on more than the smoke puffs. Harvel tells Danger Room his team also closely analyzed the video of the crash and were able to count the RPMs of the V-22's rotors. They concluded the engines were functioning at 92 percent, a figure Harvel says was corroborated by the pattern of rotor gashes in the earth where the Osprey struck ground. "These engines should always be at 100 percent," Harvel explains. He insists they weren't that fateful night over southern Afghanistan.
Braganca says the evidence leads him just about the opposite direction. He believes his friends – the crew of that Osprey, some of who he trained himself – must have contributed to the aircraft's crash "Despite having a highly experienced pilot and flight engineer, a normally functioning aircraft crashed and four people died," he says.
"The crashes are a constant source of anguish for me and others who worked and continue to work on the aircraft," Braganca says. But that does not alter his overall view of the V-22, which he says is "a sound military aircraft."
Braganca agrees that Osprey models from the 1990s and early 2000s suffered from a "rush to field |
Caster/Player, gave some insight on her involvement in some DC festivities.Unfortunately other community members were unable to comment, but there are many that are involved in other organizations in esports!Be sure to check out Hazelynut and the CSL Muffins with ONOG and Barcrafts Orb with ESV, as well as some active TL community members like CaucasianAsian, Storrzerg, Torenhire, EvilTeletubby, etc.If you live around the Washington, DC area, here are some threads for a bit more information on them! There will be a DC LAN coming up sometime in May, as well as a dinner coming up soon! Attending a meetup will be an unforgettable experience and you’ll meet many new friends in the gaming community.Weekly Dinner: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=129574 DC Area Archives: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=156671 Special thanks to everyone that made this article possible, be sure to check out everyone below!If any of you would like to have your community highlighted by Clarity Gaming, feel free to PM me here on TL or tweet @a9azn2 VOD finder guy for sc2ratings.com/! aka: ogndrahcir, a9azn2 | Go ZerO, Stork, Sea, and KawaiiRice :D | nesc2league.com/forum/index.php | youtube.com/watch?v=oaGtjWL5mZoBerlin's Internationalen Funkausstellung is by no means an unexciting consumer electronics show. Sure, there aren't nearly as many new gadgets to play with as you'll find at even the tamest year of CES, but there's still plenty else around to leave almost any tech buff feeling full. Still, this year's most exciting gadget -- to me, at least -- wasn't a new tablet, or cell phone, or even that Android-controlled robotic vacuum. No, the highlight of my week was these clip-on 3D glasses, which LG reps handed out to every interested spectator as they entered the company's booth. These dead-simple, yet completely life-changing specs were almost certainly overlooked by the 20/20 vision-abled, but for folks like me who can't stand sliding one pair of glasses over another just to watch Kung Fu Panda in three dimensions, those clip-ons you see above are the absolute best swag I could ever hope to find.
There's really not much to them. The 3D experience was identical to what you'll get with traditional passive glasses -- these simply clip on top of your eyeglasses, rather than resting on their own. They also offer UV protection, and "communicate seamlessly with the TV." Well alright then. While attendees could get their own pair for free at IFA, you can also find these online for about 20 bucks -- sold as the LG AG-F220. I'd like to see them become much more widely available, and more affordable as well. So listen up, Hollywood: if you ever again want me to hand over five extra bucks at the box office to watch an animated bear kick his furry paw directly toward my temple, these better be waiting on the other side of the ticket scan.Cogent Accidentally Blocks Websites In Global Ham-Fisted Piracy Filtering Effort
from the scorched-earth dept
Last week, reports began to emerge that internet users were unable to access The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent-focused websites. Ultimately it was discovered that this was courtesy of transit provider Cogent, which was blackholing an undetermined number of IP addresses allegedly linked to copyright infringement. The IP addresses in question didn't belong to the websites -- but to popular CDN provider Cloudflare. All told, Cogent's blockade impacted around twenty different websites -- but the impact was global, with ISP users worldwide unable to access these IP addresses if they traveled the Cogent network.
Initially, Cogent wouldn't comment whatsoever on why this was occurring, but later confirmed to Ars Technica that the company had received a Spanish court order (it's not clear if it's the same 2015 order demanding Cogent block access to music streaming website Goear.com). Cogent was vague about the order itself, but did confirm that The Pirate Bay was blocked -- despite it not being a target of the court order. Subsequent routing checks confirmed the impact was global across Cogent's footprint.
As we've seen time and time again, actual pirates with just a modicum of technical knowledge utilize a variety of tools (VPNs most specifically) to tap dance around such restrictions, making these filtering efforts ham-fisted "solutions" that cause more problems for the internet and end users than they traditionally solve. In talking to Ars, Cogent acknowledged the potential "collateral impact" that such orders and filters can cause, especially when applied globally at scale to multihosting transit operators like Cloudfare, where one IP address may be home to multiple, unrelated websites:
"Cogent went on to say that “as a general matter, courts may require Cogent, as an ISP, to take certain actions with respect to a third-party website, an IP address or block of IP addresses. If Cogent’s customer decides to commingle traffic from the website that is the target of the court order with the traffic of other websites, the other websites that point to the same block of IP addresses may be adversely affected. When a Cogent customer controls the affected IP addresses, Cogent does not have the ability to know ahead of time what other websites may be affected or to control the collateral impact on these other websites. When collateral effects occur, we do work with our customer to try and mitigate the effects on others websites."
While U.S. net neutrality rules do prohibit network providers from blocking specific websites, exceptions were carved into the rules governing copyright infringement. Cloudfare, which helps websites improve performance and fend off DDoS attacks, can manage its IP addresses in such a way to help Cogent comply with court orders more narrowly. But this becomes arguably untenable when dealing with multiple court orders, all dealing with different websites and ISPs at global scale. Take the kind of filtering collateral damage we've long seen, and apply it globally in disjointed chorus.
Cloudfare often pops up as an entertainment industry bogeyman simply because its services often obscure the real origin server from the end users. But Cloudfare's General Counsel Doug Kramer was quick to complain that these sorts of orders, especially if poorly crafted and targeting core transit networks, can have a broad impact on the general health of the internet:
"This is part of the danger you get into when you start to censor the Internet or you get orders to pull things down,” Kramer said. “It may not be so easy to limit access to a specific domain," or to make sure a block applies only in a certain country. Cogent, and not Cloudflare, is the company that had to implement the block, but Cloudflare is “trying to set up a technical system where Cogent can respond to the order that they’ve been given, but within the narrow scope of that and not have impacts that go beyond that," Kramer said."
Kramer also pointed out that it might be important to understand how the internet works before you set about chopping giant holes in it via court order:
"It’s important for courts to understand how Internet systems work so they can write orders that don’t end up having unintended consequences,” Kramer stresses. "As a company, Cloudflare believes strongly in an open, free, and secure Internet. And it is also our policy to fully comply with legitimate court process," Cloudflare’s General Counsel says. "This can be challenging at times, especially when courts target backbone providers and don’t understand fully how they work. Cloudflare takes steps to make sure those court orders don’t lead to unintended impacts."
Take the non-transparent, ham-fisted, and ultimately futile filtering efforts we've come to know and love, and apply them at global scale, with little to no real concern about the obvious unintended impact on the health of the internet itself. What could possibly go wrong?
Filed Under: blocking, censorship, copyright, piracy
Companies: cloudflare, cogent, the pirate bayBy my reckoning, I’ve been the victim of dozens of hate crimes in recent days. I was all geared up to talk about this when I appeared on Question Time last month following reports of a 41 per cent rise in this hot new genre of criminal offence. Apparently, post-Brexit Britain is in the grip of an outbreak of malice towards foreigners, gays, the elderly, the disabled, etc., and I was looking forward to sharing my personal experience.
You see, like all political pundits, every time I open my mouth on TV or radio, I get a barrage of abuse — and there’s nothing quite like appearing on the BBC’s flagship political discussion show for an upsurge in hate mail. I would have been in the unique position of discussing a crime while the crime was being committed against me —and no doubt my discussion of it would have prompted even more people to commit it.
Even the anticipation of my appearance was enough to prompt an outburst of vitriol which (in the bizarre parallel universe occupied by hate-crime campaigners) could theoretically constitute a criminal offence.Normally, I’m perfectly prepared to roll with it. After all, if you put yourself and your opinions out there, you expect some blowback.
I’m aware that with each appearance on Question Time (last week was my fourth) I’ve become more forthright, and I expect some folk to dislike my views. Hell, I’m sure I’d find myself annoying if I wasn’t me.
But in the context of mounting hysteria among Remainers about hate crime, I feel it would be a dereliction of civic duty not to report a new wave of offences following my latest outing on David Dimbleby’s show.
Where to begin? Perhaps with the suggestion that I devoted my airtime to ‘representin’ evil’ or that I am so reprehensible that I fill people with ‘desperation for the human race’? Or the accusation from @ SKargotis that I am a ‘traitor to this nation’?
I’m not sure what could have prompted such a damning indictment. Perhaps it was a feisty exchange with our new shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry (yes, really) over Labour’s lack of immigration policy? According to one of my more complimentary Twitter correspondents, I ‘proper owned fatty Thornberry’ (though another Tweeter felt I ‘couldn’t bitch-slap anyone’ because I’m a ‘droid with no brain or emotions’.) Maybe I went too far accusing Thornberry of ‘talking nonsense’. Or was it my blunt description of Scotland as an ‘economic basket case’? I knew that would wind a few folk up. It was all just political knockabout, but as usual I was labelled ‘stuck-up’, ‘ignorant’, ‘stupid’ and ‘despicable’. For good measure, one woman told me I’d upset her young child.
The irony is, these people are potentially guilty of hate crime — not me. Under the laughably loose definition, it only takes someone to feel slighted to give rise to a hate-crime case. According to the police ‘operational guidance’: ‘For recording purposes, the perception of the victim, or any other person, is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident… The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.’
Throw in an element of misogyny, and if I wanted to boost hate-crime statistics I’d be home and dry. When some bloke called @ KeithRandall addressed me as ‘Ickle Issy’, my ‘perception’ was that he was being hatefully sexist (‘Ickle Alex Salmond’ doesn’t have quite the same ring). As for the man who decried me as a ‘vile, pretend shockjock’ whose sole claim to fame is ‘silicone [sic] and hair extensions’ — does it get much more hateful than that?
After the show, one @PgaMatt wondered ‘why do many hate you or have a vendetta? It’s unreal!’ Actually, I thought I escaped pretty lightly. I don’t know what a ‘hot puppet’ is but I ‘perceive’ the remark to be flattering. It was one of many positive comments. About 20 good folk took time to write me long, carefully considered letters about the issues debated on the show. Encouragingly, the number of emails and tweets praising my contribution far outweighed the number of attacks. At least nobody called me an ‘escaped gorilla’ (poor Thornberry).
Sadly, we didn’t discuss the ludicrous burgeoning hate-crime industry on the show. Had we done so, I’d have said that the majority of ‘victims’ should man up, and let the police concentrate on crimes involving sticks and stones. Which would probably just have spawned yet more offences.San Francisco County Supervisor Jane Kim addresses a crowd during a "Yes on Prop 61" rally outside City Hall in 2016. Josh Edelson/AP The tech industry collectively face-palmed when Trump's treasury secretary said earlier this year that the threat of robots taking human jobs was "not even on our radar screen."
There is a growing evidence that robots and artificial intelligence could displace huge swaths of the American workforce in the next couple of decades, much sooner than the "50 to 100 more years away" timeline that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he expects.
In San Francisco, where robots already run food deliveries for Yelp's Eat24 and make lattés at a mall coffee kiosk, one politician is working to ensure the city stays ahead of the curve.
Supervisor Jane Kim is exploring a tax on robots as one solution to offset the economic devastation a robot-powered workforce might bring. Companies that use robots to perform tasks previously done by humans would pay the city. Those public funds might be used to help retrain workers who lose their jobs to robots or to finance a basic income initiative.
Kim, one of 11 city supervisors in San Francisco, has been interviewing tech leaders, labor groups, and public policy experts in the hopes of creating a task force that will explore how a "robot tax" might be implemented. San Francisco would become the first city to create such a tax, after European lawmakers rejected a similar proposal in February.
"We think that [automation of work] could be one of the bigger — or biggest — policy issues that will face us in, not the next 50 to 100 years, as Mnuchin said, but in the next five to 10 years. And I think that government needs to get ahead of the curve," Kim tells Business Insider.
A robotic arm handles a cup of coffee at automation-powered coffee kiosk Café X in San Francisco, California. Cafe X Technologies
Kim learned the concept of a robot tax when Bill Gates called for one in an interview with Quartz. It struck a chord with the San Francisco politician, who represents some of the poorest and wealthiest residents across the Tenderloin, South of Market, Civic Center, Treasure Island, and several other neighborhoods. She hears of robots cropping up in hotels, hospitals, and even her local bar, and worries about how automation might deepen the income gap.
A new study from research fim PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates 38% of US jobs could be lost to automation by the early 2030s. Jobs that are repetitive and do not require human interaction — like flipping burgers or making deliveries — are likely to be the first to swap out people for robots.
The disruption will hurt low-income earners first, Kim predicts. San Francisco has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the US, according to figures from the Brookings Institute.
Sam Altman, president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, has said automation will bring "a change in the economy on the order of the Industrial Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution, where you see a huge amount of human jobs change in a very short period of time."
On-demand food delivery startup DoorDash relies on a fleet of six-wheeled couriers to make deliveries in Redwood City, California. Starship Technologies
When Kim hears tech workers talk about automation, she says they often put a positive spin on the displacement. "No one's going to have to work at McDonald's anymore," they tell her.
"That wealth will accumulate among a very few due to automation," she says. "[So the question is,] what do we do with that accumulated wealth that's being distributed to fewer people?"
A robot tax could potentially give the city of San Francisco the ability to channel those savings into a fund that helps low-income workers make a living. The Office of Economic and Workforce Development already provides training in healthcare, hospitality, construction, and technology to residents who face barriers to employment, like a lack of higher education.
The tax might also provide funds for a universal basic income experiment, such as the one currently underway in Oakland, California. The program gives roughly 100 families $2,000 a month to live on, and has racked up some impressive supporters from Silicon Valley.
This isn't the first time a robot tax has been floated in the US. In 1940, a US senator suggested a tax on machines to offset the unemployment they may cause. It was called an "economic monstrosity" that has "no chance whatsoever of congress [sic] ever enacting it into law."
A robot from startup Savioke makes a room-service delivery at a hotel in Silicon Valley. Savioke
When Gates resurfaced the idea in February, internet commenters took to Twitter in protest.
Most tech leaders have been quiet on the issue. The CEO of robotics startup Savioke, whose robots deliver fresh towels and coffee at hotels across the region, compared the tax to an "innovation penalty" in an editorial. Ulrich Spiesshofer of European automation-technology solutions company ABB Group also attacked the proposal in an interview with CNBC.
"Taxing robotics is as intelligent as taxing software," Spiesshofer said. "They are both productivity tools. You should not tax the tools, you should tax the outcome that's coming."
Kim made clear that she is in the beginning stages of assembling a group that will explore solutions for automation. San Francisco is a long way from seeing a robot tax implemented.
"I do think it's important that we're the city that looks at this issue, because we're at the center of the technological revolution. We have access to so many academics, researchers, and tech companies that can help us brainstorm and think about this issue," Kim says.
"And why not? DC's not thinking about it."I am hesitant to write this essay because the first time I explored the relationship between atonement theology and justifications for torture in public, a woman spit in my face.
Two years ago, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion about the effects of interpreting the photographs from Abu Ghraib as crucifixion images. I proposed that versions of atonement theology that frame the violence on the cross as “salvific” and “necessary” influence how Christians understand torture. I pointed out that the United States government uses a version of atonement theology to sanction torture and abuse: soldiers and military police are ordered to use “harsh techniques to gain information to save lives”; they “felt pressure to obtain information that could help save the lives of American soldiers.” [1]
Might atonement theologies and images of the crucifixion prepare Christians to see torture as salvific?
After my presentation, a woman from the audience spit in my face.
People at the Pew Research Center might want to keep an eye out for her. I think the results of their survey released last week lend support to my proposal that some forms of Christianity have prepared some Christians in some communities to understand torture as salvific, necessary, and justified. The results of the survey revealed that those who attend weekly church services are more likely than those who rarely or never attend services to say the use of torture on suspected terrorists is justifiable. Going to church increases the likelihood that people will support torture, especially if they are white evangelical Protestants. This is not good news.
But is it a surprise?
Almost immediately after the publication of the photographs from Abu Ghraib in 2004, commentators began to refer to them as crucifixion images, likening the pictured bodies to the “mortified Christ.” Most particularly mentioned the “hooded man’s” similarity; insisting that that “the image is particularly evocative for Christian viewers.” [2]
Commentator after commentator insisted that the “symbol of the Christ figure” was “unmistakable” in the images of prisoners tied to jail bars and handcuffed to beds; of prisoners standing with their arms stretched out, palms facing upward. [3]
Even one of the soldiers engaged in the abuse thought the detainees looked like Jesus. In a letter written home while she was stationed at Abu Ghraib, Private Sabrina Harman wrote, “I cant [sic] get it out of my head. I walk down the stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with a [baton] to find ‘The taxicab driver’ handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ.” [4]
How violence is interpreted shapes how people respond to it. The comparison of the photographs from Abu Ghraib to crucifixion images suggests that the violence in those photographs has been seen through the lens of the crucifixion, and that this theological story has shaped how torture is understood. What does this interpretation reveal about the relationship between theologies of atonement and torture? Are Christians theologically prepared to accept torture? Even to practice it?
I do not presume to know the answers to these questions, but I hope Christian communities will be brave enough to ask them. I hope the results of the Pew survey will challenge Christians to ask difficult, critical, uncomfortable questions about what happens in churches on Sunday mornings. Despite our intentions, how might the words of our liturgies justify torture? How might the images hanging in our churches justify torture? How might our theology justify torture? How might the very symbols that give comfort also cause harm? What needs to change?
When I am teaching about the photographs from Abu Ghraib, I sometimes put an image of the crucifixion on the screen and ask students what phrases come to mind when they see this image. “He died for us,” some say. “By His wounds, we are healed,” others say. Still others call the violence “cleansing” and “necessary,” “payment for our sins,” a “ransom,” a “gift.” If you believe that a man was tortured to save your life, if you believe that the violence on the cross was necessary, if you believe God demanded Jesus’ death on the cross, how do those beliefs affect how you understand violence more generally? At the center of Christianity is a man who was tortured. How this event is understood, interpreted, and believed in will, at least in part, shape how Christians understand torture. What kind of interpretation of the crucifixion might generate an anti-torture response?
In his sworn statement about his experience at Abu Ghraib, Ameen Sa’eed Al-Sheikh details what the guards did to him: they beat his broken leg, threatened to rape him and his wife, threatened to kill him, put a gun to his head, deprived him of blankets and clothing, drew pictures of women on his back, made him stand naked and hold his buttocks, urinated on him, hung him from his bed using handcuffs until he lost consciousness, hung him from the cell door, took photographs of him, forced him to eat pork and to drink liquor. In the middle of his deposition, Al-Sheikh said”
Someone else asked me, “Do you believe in anything?” I said to him, “I believe in Allah.” So he said, “But I believe in torture and I will torture you…” Then they handcuffed me and hung me to my bed. They ordered me to curse Islam and because they hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus I’m alive. And I did what they ordered me. This is against my belief. [5]
What will it take to make torture against Christians’ belief?
NOTES:
1. The Honorable James R. Schlesinger, et al., “Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations,” in The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Reports of the Independent Panel and the Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq, ed. Steven Strasser, (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), xvi-xvii, xix, 25.
2. Paul A. Taylor, “The Pornographic Barbarism of the Self-Reflecting Sign,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 4, no. 1 (January 2007)
3. Steven C. Caton, “Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 120.
4. Joanne Wypijewski, “Judgment Days: Lessons From the Abu Ghraib Courts-Martial,” Harpers, February 2006.
5. Mark Danner, “The Depositions: The Prisoners Speak,” in Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 227.Keyshawn Johnson breaks down the performance of Jacoby Brissett and the Patriots in a 27-0 victory over the Texans. (0:52)
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Jacoby Brissett ran 27 yards for his first NFL touchdown, zigging when one poor Houston Texan zagged, and man, that had to be some feeling, right?
Imagine the adrenaline rush for a 23-year-old rookie playing Tom Brady's position and scoring in the first quarter, on national TV, with a dash out of a third-stringer's wildest dreams. It was a perfectly appropriate time for a young quarterback to celebrate himself, and it sure looked like Brissett was doing just that when he tucked the touchdown ball in his arm and ran toward the New England Patriots' bench.
But what did Brissett do when he arrived at the sideline? He handed the ball to his head coach, Bill Belichick, and gave him a hearty pat on the back before shaking the coach's hand. It was a small-picture window into a couple of big-picture truths about the Patriots:
The players know a different man behind closed doors than the one who plays dead in his daily media conferences.
Belichick could find a way to win on any given Thursday if he needed to start Rob Gronkowski at quarterback.
This is no knock on Brissett, a third-round pick out of Florida and North Carolina State who already had earned the trust of Bill Parcells (who has acted as the quarterback's father confessor) and Belichick, not an easy daily double to pull off, before this 27-0 shredding of the Houston Texans. Brissett showed remarkable poise under the circumstances, managing the game without taking too many unnecessary risks.
With Jimmy Garoppolo down and out, Brissett knew his backup was a wide receiver, Julian Edelman, a truth demanding some caution on his part. And yet when he saw an opening on that touchdown run, Brissett wasn't afraid to pounce.
"I was just running until I got stopped," he said. "So it worked out how we planned it was going to work out. Just had to make one guy miss at the end zone."
After watching the 6-foot-4, 235-pound Brissett race around the right edge and toward pay dirt, who would've guessed that his 40-yard dash time at the draft combine (4.94) was slower than those recorded by the lead-footed brothers Manning, Peyton (4.8) and Eli (4.92), back in the day? Just another Patriot who plays faster and better than the stopwatch suggests.
"It was crazy, it was awesome," Brissett said. "It was definitely great to see all the players run up to you, and I got a headache from all the head-bumping. But it was definitely worth it."
Bill Belichick, Josh McDaniels and the Patriots rolled over the Texans with a third-string rookie quarterback. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
Minutes earlier, as he dressed at his locker, Brissett turned to see an ungodly tangle of cameras and cell phones boxing him into his stall. He shook his head and smiled. Thirty-one teams in the NFL would've marched their winning quarterback into an interview room to field questions at an elevated podium, with a backdrop of team logos framing the scene. Bill Belichick's Patriots?
No way some third-string rookie is going to be lifted above the team-first, team-second values that define the organizational ethos.
At the same podium Brissett didn't qualify for, Belichick spoke of how much he'd asked of his players in this short work week, and of how convincingly they'd responded. The Patriots plowed open enough holes to get LeGarrette Blount 105 rushing yards and two touchdowns. They were brilliant on special teams, knocking the ball loose, and on defense, making the same 6-foot-7 quarterback who ended their unbeaten run last year, Brock Osweiler, look smaller than the coin used for the opening toss.
"They played the game," Belichick said of his guys, "exactly the way we asked them to play it. It wasn't perfect, I'm not saying that. But they tried to do what we wanted them to do, and as a coach you just can't ask for any more than that."
This was a purist's delight, a three-hour documentary on the hows and whys of New England's dominance since Brady took over for Drew Bledsoe 15 years ago Friday. Belichick had to drop down to No. 3 on the depth chart at the most important position in the sport by 10 country miles, and he had to do it against a protégé who knew his program and what made it tick about as well as anyone.
Bill O'Brien, son of nearby Dorchester, walked into his old Gillette Stadium office with a hopeful bounce in his step. He had a 2-0 team and, for the first time in Houston, a young quarterback he believed in as much as he believed in Christian Hackenberg at Penn State. O'Brien also had some people around the league predicting that he would be the guy who bucked the trend of former Belichick aides who flamed out after venturing outside that ever-protective Foxborough cocoon.
Nick Saban might go down as the greatest college coach of all time, but he was a product of Belichick's mostly miserable time in Cleveland and, of course, he went 15-17 in his two seasons as head coach of the Miami Dolphins. Charlie Weis went 41-49 at Notre Dame and Kansas with no major bowl victories. Romeo Crennel went 28-55 for the Browns and Chiefs with no playoff appearances. Josh McDaniels went 11-17 in Denver. Jim Schwartz (Cleveland division) went 29-51 for the Lions with one playoff loss, and Eric Mangini went 33-47 with the Jets and Browns with one playoff loss -- to Belichick. Saban, Crennel, McDaniels, Schwartz, and Mangini combined to win 38 percent of their NFL games without delivering a single postseason victory.
"You can understand why all those guys got jobs coming out of Bill's system," one former New England executive said. "They're all good coaches, no question. But what owners around the league seemed to forget when they hired Bill's assistants is that they weren't bringing Bill with them."
Or Brady. O'Brien didn't have Brady on his side anymore, either, but he did show up Thursday night with a winning NFL record (20-14), a playoff appearance and a track record that showed he wasn't afraid of any challenge. He did follow Joe Paterno at Penn State. He did sign up to coach in the immediate wake of one of the most tragic college scandals of all.
In Houston he has surrounded himself with all sorts of former Belichick coaches and players. Crennel. Mike Vrabel. George Godsey. Larry Izzo. Vince Wilfork. O'Brien even hired the former Patriots scout who helped discover Super Bowl hero Malcolm Butler, Frantzy Jourdain. It made sense, too. If your goal is to dominate the AFC like the Patriots have over the past 15 years, why not hire as many old Patriots as possible?
Jacoby Brissett attempted just 19 passes, relying on the running of LeGarrette Blount to power the offense in the win. Greg M. Cooper/USA TODAY Sports
None of it mattered Thursday night. O'Brien and his team were completely outclassed by Belichick and his.
"Their program has been in place for a long time," O'Brien said. "They have what I think is the best head coach in the history of the league and they do a great job."
It's funny how this has worked out, too. Belichick made his name in this league as a defensive coordinator, one of the best around, and over time he has developed into a formidable offensive mind, with an assist from McDaniels. He has practically the Abner Doubleday of the slot receiver position. He has turned Gronk into a monster. He has preserved an aging Brady with a quick, short passing game. He has proved he can go 11-5 with Matt Cassel and 3-0 with Jimmy Garoppolo and Brissett.
Belichick might as well start Edelman under center against Buffalo to stick it to commissioner Roger Goodell, who never fathomed the Patriots would bleed all remaining air out of Brady's Deflategate suspension by going 4-0 in his absence. Chances are, assuming Garoppolo's shoulder doesn't heal, the Patriots will stick with Brissett, who would've ended up with a touchdown pass had Edelman not dropped one in the back of the end zone.
Given that Brissett made history as the first African-American quarterback to start for the Patriots, Doug Williams, the first African-American quarterback to win the Super Bowl, watched on TV with great interest. Now an executive with Washington, Williams had given Brissett a third-round grade before the draft. His marks were a bit higher after the quarterback's first start.
"He didn't set the world on fire with [103] passing yards," Williams said by phone, "but he was efficient, he showed poise, he showed athleticism, and he operated exactly the way his coaches wanted him to operate. They didn't want him to be an All-Pro tonight. I liked how all his teammates ran to him in the end zone; that tells me they like him. And I liked it when Bill Belichick put out his hand for a handshake and Jacoby handed him the ball instead."
As it turned out, Belichick gave the ball back to his winning quarterback after the game, just as he had with other gift-giving Patriots of the past. "It's all about the players," the coach kept saying with conviction, and he didn't feel any great need to single out Brissett.
But without a healthy Gronk, Belichick leaned on a rookie to stay clear of J.J. Watt and to secure New England's 22nd consecutive home victory over a non-divisional AFC opponent. Before leaving his Gillette Stadium locker room for the night, Brissett looked up at a clock and said, "Damn, it's already midnight. Past my bedtime."
Somehow, some way, the league's best coach made it to 3-0 with a kid at quarterback. In two weeks, Tom Brady won't be returning to a broken system. Just one that keeps getting notarized against all odds.Vegan Kibbeh?
Is that even allowed?!
Well, in this instance, it is because this dish is absolutely amazing!
So, what exactly is Kibbeh?
It’s an extremely popular Middle Eastern dish made of meat, bulgur and onions that are ground together with spices to make a dough. This dough then goes on to become a variety of delicious, and many times labor intensive dishes.
The ground dough can stay in its raw form and be enjoyed as what is known as Kibbeh Nayyeh (raw kibbeh), a delicacy that is scooped up in pita bread and only made when the meat is at its freshest. It can be made into hallow croquette style balls that are filled with sautéed ground beef, onions and almonds and then deep fried, which is the most wide spread version known simply as Kibbeh or even Kibbeh Mi’liyeh (fried kibbeh). The dough can be layered into a pan with a filling of the same sautéed ground beef mixture and then baked which is known as Kibbeh Bil Saniya (Kibbeh in a pan). It can also be made into mini domes that are stuffed with a sautéed ground beef and fresh animal fat mixture then barbecued, known as Kibbeh Mishwiyeh (barbecued Kibbeh).
There are so many other varieties that we can hopefully one day get to, but just from the few sentences above, you can see that meat is an integral part of traditional kibbeh. There are versions where the dough is made of potatoes or rice and bulgur, but even then, it is stuffed with ground meat so how can we make a vegan version of what is basically a meat lover’s dream food?
It’s actually pretty simple and the results will have you craving this dish day in and day out. This meatless version is most popular and most likely originated in Aleppo, Syria.
It is made of fresh bell peppers and tomatoes in place of the meat which are ground up with the bulgur, onions and pepper paste to form the Kibbeh Nayyeh. The dough is then spread in a plate and topped with walnuts, parsley, fried onions and olive oil. You can eat it on its own or with fresh pita bread, which of course is my preferred way to enjoy it.
The easiest way to serve this is to spread it in a large platter and top it with all the yummy toppings. You can also do small plates this way for individual servings so your guests can dig into a whole plate of their own.
The kibbeh dough can also be formed into mini Kababs and served as such. I decided to make mine into mini domes and top them with the parsley, fried onion and a walnut half.
No matter how you decide to serve your Kibbeh Nayyeh, the flavors will be there and the colors will make for a beautiful presentation. It’s a great dish to serve as an appetizer or side that will add a unique |
to be the baby she really is.
"It feels really good to see her now, she looks beautiful and happy," Fatima says.
Back in her village, Roona has become the center of attention. It's still painful for her to sit up but she smiles a lot, and her eyes, now visible, keep wandering in a frenzied pace.
"We want Roona to read and write once she grows up. Both of us (mother and father) are illiterate so we don't want her to be like us. We want her to have a bright future," Fatima says.
It's too early to tell if Roona will ever be completely normal in her appearance as several operations still lie ahead, but the signs thus far are promising.According to Ryan Satin of Pro Wrestling Sheet, former WWE star Adam Rose will continue using his WWE party gimmick on the independent scene, but he will be changing his ring name.
Rose revealed on Twitter his new ring name is Aldo Rose and his Twitter bio now reads, “Ain’t no more PG in this party!”
Read Also: Adam Rose Arrested on Charges of Domestic Violence
According to sources close to Rose, the former WWE star decided against using his Leo Kruger character from NXT in favor of sticking with his WWE party gimmick, despite the NXT gimmick being a popular one. The new Aldo Rose character, however, will have a new feel to it and will likely be edgier than what we saw in WWE.
Rose is now accepting indy bookings.Writing on Twitter, actor George Takei said there is nothing more that mothers in America want on Mother's Day than a "sealed indictment of [President Donald] Trump from the FBI."
"What do many mothers want today? Simply love from their children, care from their partners, and a sealed indictment of Trump from the FBI," Takei wrote.
However, as one Twitter user quickly addressed, Takei's assertion that the FBI can indict Trump is not true.
"DOJ indicts, FBI presents a case and recommends prosecution," wrote Twitter user Lauri Love, whose tweet was the top reply on Takei's tweet.
@GeorgeTakei DOJ indicts, FBI presents a case and recommends prosecution :) — 🏴 Lauri Love 🏴 (@laurilove) May 15, 2017
"You must be fun at parties," Takei shot back.
@laurilove You must be fun at parties. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) May 15, 2017
Indeed, the FBI does not have the legal authority to issue an indictment. Indictments are issued on the recommendation of a grand jury, which are convened by prosecutors to decide whether or not a criminal case has enough probable cause to charge a suspect with a crime. Grand juries, and the issuance of indictments, are typically reserved for serious felonies.
Takei's statement that Trump should be indicted likely refers to the liberal narrative that Trump's presidential campaign committed a crime last year by colluding with Russia to undermine American democracy — and Hillary Clinton's campaign — in order to win the White House, a victory that critics argue would benefit the interests of Trump and Russia.
However, despite the FBI confirming an investigation into the allegations, the claims have thus far proved to be unsubstantiated with concrete evidence, and it is also unclear what specific crimes might be charged even if collusion with the Russian government is proven. Still, in the wake of Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey last week, Democrats are calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the case.
To that point, Takei later on Sunday posted a photo of former President Barack Obama that said he should be the special prosecutor who leads the FBI's investigation into Trump's campaign.So far in this series, I have discussed how the MoarVM dynamic optimizer gathers statistics, uses them to plan what to optimize, and then produces specialized versions of hot parts of a program to speed up execution. In this final part, I’ll look at how we switch from unoptimized code into optimized code, which centers around argument guards.
But wait, what about code-gen?
Ah, yes, I knew somebody would ask that. At the end of part 3, we had a data structure representing optimized code, perhaps for a routine, method, or block. While going from bytecode to a CFG in SSA form was a fairly involved process, going back to bytecode is far simpler: we iterate the basic blocks in order, iterate each of the instructions within a basic block, and write out the bytecode for each of instructions. Done!
There are, of course, a few complications to take care of. When we have a forward branch, we don’t yet know the offset within the bytecode of the destination, so a table is needed to fix those up later. Furthermore, a new table of exception handler offsets will be needed, since the locations of the covered instructions and handlers will have moved. Beyond those bits of bookkeeping, however, there’s really not much more to it than a loop spitting out bytecode from instruction nodes.
Unlike bytecode that is fed into the VM from the outside, we don’t spend time doing validation of the specialized bytecode, since we can trust that it is valid – we’re generating it in-process! Additionally, the specialized bytecode may make use of “spesh ops” – a set of extra opcodes that exist purely for spesh to generate. Some of them are non-logging forms of ops that would normally log statistics (no point logging after we’ve done the optimizations), but most are for doing operations that – without the proofs and guards done by spesh – would be at risk of violating memory safety. For example, there’s an op that simply takes an object offset and reads a pointer or integer from a certain number of bytes into it, which spesh can prove is safe to do, but in general would not be.
What I’ve described so far is the portable behavior that we can do on any platform. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re running MoarVM on x86, x64, ARM, or something else, you can take advantage of all the optimizations that spesh can do. On x64, however, we can go a step further, and compile the spesh graph not back into specialized MoarVM bytecode, but instead into machine code. This eliminates the interpreter overhead. In MoarVM, we tend to refer to this stage as “the JIT compiler”, because most people understand JIT compilation as resulting in machine code. In reality, what most other VMs call their JIT compiler spans the same space that both spesh and the MoarVM JIT cover between them. MoarVM’s design means that we can deliver performance wins on all platforms we can run on, and then an extra win on x64. For more on the machine code generation process, I can recommend watching this talk by brrt, who leads work on it.
Argument guards
By this point, we have some optimized code. It was generated for either a particular callsite (a certain specialization) or a combination of callsite and incoming argument types (an observed type specialization). Next, we need a mechanism that will, upon a call, look at the available specializations and see if any of them match up with the incoming arguments. Provided one is found that matches, we can then call it.
My original approach to this was to simply have a list of specializations, each tagged with a callsite and, for each object argument index, an expected type, whether we wanted a type object or a concrete object, and – for container types like Scalar – what type we expected to find on the inside of the container. This was simple to implement, but rather inefficient. Even if all of the type specializations were for the same callsite, it would be compared for each of them. Alternatively, if there were 4 specializations and 3 were on the same callsite, and one was on a second callsite, we’d have to do 3 failed comparisons on it to reach the final one that we were hunting.
That might not sound overly bad, because comparing callsites is just comparing pointers, and so somewhat cheap (although it’s branching, and branches aren’t so friendly for CPUs). Where it gets worse is that parameter type checks worked the same way. Therefore, if there were 4 specializations of the same callsite, all of them against a Scalar argument with 4 different types of value inside of it, then the Scalar would have to be dereferenced up to 4 times. This isn’t ideal.
My work during the summer saw the introduction of a new, tree-structured, approach. Each node in the tree represents either an operation (load an argument to test, read a value from a Scalar container) with a single child node, or a test with two child nodes representing “yes” and “no”. The leaves of the tree either indicate which specialization to use, or “no result”.
The tree structure allows for loads, tests, and dereferences to be lifted out. Therefore, each argument needs to be loaded once, checked against a particular type once, and dereferenced once if it’s a container. So, if there were to be specializations for (Scalar:D of Int:D, Str:D) and (Scalar:D of Int:D, Num:D), then the first argument would be loaded one time and tested to see if it is a Scalar. If it is, then it will be dereferenced once, and the resulting value tested to see if it’s an Int. Both alternatives for the second argument are placed in the tree underneath this chain of tests, meaning that they do not need to be repeated.
Arg guard trees are dumped in the specializer log for debugging purposes. Here is how the output looks for the situation described above:
0: CALLSITE 0x7f5aa3f1acc0 | Y: 1, N: 0 1: LOAD ARG 0 | Y: 2 2: STABLE CONC Scalar | Y: 3, N: 0 3: DEREF_RW 0 | Y: 4, N: 0 4: DEREF_VALUE 0 | Y: 5, N: 0 5: STABLE CONC Int | Y: 6, N: 0 6: LOAD ARG 1 | Y: 7 7: STABLE CONC Int | Y: 8, N: 9 8: RESULT 0 9: STABLE CONC Str | Y: 10, N: 0 10: RESULT 1
As the output suggests, the argument guard tree is laid out in a single block of memory – an array of nodes. This gives good cache locality on the lookups, and – since argument guard trees are pretty small – means we can use a small integer type for the child node indices rather than requiring a pointer worth of space.
Immutability wins performance
Additional specializations are generated over time, but the argument guard tree is immutable. When a new specialization is generated, the existing argument guard tree is cloned, and the clone is modified to add the new result. That new tree is then installed in place of the previous one, and the previous one can be freed at the next safe point.
Why do this? Because it means that no locks need to be acquired to use a guard tree. In fact, since spesh runs on a single thread of its own, no locks are needed to update the guard trees either, since the single specializer thread means those updates are naturally serialized.
Calls between specialized code
In the last part of the series, I mentioned that part of specializing a call is to see if we can map it directly to a specialization. This avoids having to evaluate the argument guard tree of the target of the call, which is a decidedly nice saving. As a result, most uses of the argument guard are on the boundary between unspecialized and specialized code.
But how does the optimizer see if there’s a specialization of the target code that matches the argument types being passed? It does it by evaluating the argument guard tree – but on facts, not real values.
On Stack Replacement
Switching into specialized code at the point of a call handles many cases, but misses an important one: that where the hot code is entered once, then sits in a loop for a long time. This does happen in various real world programs, but it’s especially common in benchmarks. It’s highly desirable to specialize the hot loop’s code, if possible inlining things into the loop body and compiling the result into machine code.
I discussed detection of hot loops in an earlier part of this series. This time around, let’s take a look at the code for the osrpoint op:
OP(osrpoint): if (MVM_spesh_log_is_logging(tc)) MVM_spesh_log_osr(tc); MVM_spesh_osr_poll_for_result(tc); goto NEXT;
The first part is about writing a log entry each time around the loop, which is what bumps the loop up in the statistics and causes a specialization to be generated. The call to MVM_spesh_osr_poll_for_result is the part that checks if there is a specialization ready, and jumps into it if so.
One way we could do this is to evaluate the argument guard in every call to MVM_spesh_osr_poll_for_result to see if there’s an appropriate optimization. That would get very pricey, however. We’d like the interpreter to make decent progress through the work until the optimized version of the code is ready. So what to do?
Every frame gets an ID on entry. By tracking this together with the number of specializations available last time we checked, we can quickly short-circuit running the argument guard when we know it will give the very same result as the last time we evaluated it, because nothing changed.
MVMStaticFrameSpesh *spesh = tc->cur_frame->static_info->body.spesh; MVMint32 num_cands = spesh->body.num_spesh_candidates; MVMint32 seq_nr = tc->cur_frame->sequence_nr; if (seq_nr!= tc->osr_hunt_frame_nr || num_cands!= tc->osr_hunt_num_spesh_candidates) { /* Check if there's a candidate available and install it if so. */... /* Update state for avoiding checks in the common case. */ tc->osr_hunt_frame_nr = seq_nr; tc->osr_hunt_num_spesh_candidates = num_cands; }
If there is a candidate that matches, then we jump into it. But how? The specializer makes a table mapping the locations of osrpoint instructions in the unspecialized code to locations in the specialized code. If we produce machine code, a label is also generated to allow entry into the code at that point. So, mostly all OSR does is jump execution into the specialized code. Sometimes, things are approximately as easy as they sound.
There’s a bonus feature hidden in all of this. Remember deoptimization, where we fall back to the interpreter to handle rarely occurring cases? This means we’ll encounter the osrpoint instructions in the unoptimized code again, and so – once the interpreter has done with the unusual case – we can enter back into the specialized, and possibly JIT-compiled code again. Effectively, spesh factors your slow paths out for you. And if you’re writing a module, it can do it differently based on different application’s use cases of the module.
Future idea: argument guard compilation to machine code
At the moment, the argument guard tree is walked by a little interpreter. However, on platforms where we have the capability, we could compile it into machine code. This would perhaps allow branch predictors to do a bit of a better job, as well as eliminate the overhead the interpreter brings (which, given the ops are very cheap, is much more significant here than in the main MoarVM interpreter).
That’s all, folks
I hope this series has been interesting, and provided some insight into how the MoarVM specializer works. My primary reason for writing it was to put my recent work on the specializer, funded by The Perl Foundation, into context, and I hope this has been a good bit more interesting than just describing the changes in isolation.
Of course, there’s no shortage of further opportunities for optimization work, and I will be reporting on more of that here in the future. I continue to be looking for funding to help make that happen, beyond what I can do in the time I have aside from my consulting work.
AdvertisementsThrough their official Facebook page, 'Samsung Galaxy' announced that they have finalized the contract signing procedure and that all 2017 World Championship Attendees of the team have decided to stay with the organization.
According to the post, CuVee, Ambition, Crown, Ruler, CoreJJ, and the sixth man Haru have all renewed their contracts.
As for Wraith and Stitch, however, the news regarding their contract renewal has yet to be announced. The results will be announced at a later date.
The following is the official English text of their announcement:
Hello fans, this is Samsung GALAXY Game team.
Here we present the 2018 LoL team players.
Samsung GALAXY team has concluded a contract with Sungjin Lee(Cuvee), Chanyong Kang(Ambition), Minho Lee(Crown), Jaehyuk Park(Ruler) and Yongin Cho(Corejj).
Regarding the player Jimin Kwon(Wraith) and Seungjoo Lee(Stitch), we are still considering about their position.
We will announce the precise news soon.
We hope to all our fans to cheer us and love us in 2018 too.
Thank you.Individuals Zach Ward and Thomas Buchar have along with their legal counsel filed a Class Action lawsuit against Apple for locking consumers into the AT&T Network without first obtaining the consumers' contractual consent to have their iPhones locked. They're seeking, amongst other claims, to have Apple immediately provide consumers with unlock codes for their iPhones and for Apple to do so as a matter of practice in the future.
Conspiracy to Monopolize the iPhone Voice and Data Services Aftermarket
A new Class Action was filed against Apple late yesterday with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. The complaint's single count against Apple is for "Conspiracy to monopolize the iPhone voice and data services aftermarket in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act."
Summary of Material Facts
Apple launched its iPhone on or about June 29, 2007. Prior to launch, Apple entered into a secret five-year contract with AT&T Mobility (ATTM) that established ATTM as the exclusive provider of cell phone voice and data services for iPhone customers through some time in 2012 ("Exclusive Agreement"). As part of the contract, Apple shared in ATTM's revenues and profits with respect to the first generation of iPhones launched, known as the iPhone 2G, which was a unique arrangement in the industry. The Plaintiffs and other class members who purchased iPhones didn't agree to use ATTM for five years. Apple's undisclosed five-year Exclusivity Agreement with ATTM, however, effectively locked iPhone users into using ATTM for five years, contrary to the users' knowledge, wishes and expectations.
To enforce ATTM's exclusivity, Apple among other things, programmed and installed software locks on each iPhone it sold that prevented the purchaser from switching to another carrier that competed with ATTM in the cell phone voice and data aftermath industry. Under an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, cell phone consumers have an absolute legal right to modify their phones to use the network of their carrier of choice. Apple prevented iPhone customers from exercising that legal right by locking the iPhones and refusing to give customers the software codes needed to unlock them.
Under its Exclusive Agreement with ATTM, Apple retained exclusive control over the design, features and operating software for the iPhone, including the code that "locks" iPhones to the ATTM network.
Through these actions, Apple has unlawfully stifled competition, reduced output and consumer choice, and artificially increased prices in the aftermarkets for iPhone voice and data services.
Summary of Claims
In pursuit and furtherance of its unlawful anticompetitive activities, Apple: (a) failed to obtain iPhone consumers' contractual consent to the five-year Exclusivity Agreement between Apple and ATTM, the effect of which was to lock consumers into using ATTM as their voice and data service provider, even if they wished to discontinue their use of ATTM service; (b) failed to obtain iPhone consumers' contractual consent to having iPhones "locked" to only accept ATTM Subscriber Identity Modules ("SIM cards"), thereby preventing iPhone purchasers from using any cell phone and data service provider other than ATTM; (c) and failed to obtain iPhone consumers' contractual consent to make unavailable to them the "unlock code" that would enable the consumers to use a service other than ATTM, even though ATTM routinely provides such unlock codes for other types of cell phones.
Apple violated section 2 of the Sherman Act by conspiring with ATTM to monopolize the aftermarket for voice and data services for iPhones in a manner that harmed competition and injured consumers by reducing output and increasing prices in that aftermarket.
What the Plaintiffs Seek
Plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief, treble and exemplary damages, costs and attorneys' fees. As for equitable relief, Plaintiffs seek an order: (a) restraining Apple from selling iPhones that are Programmed in any way to prevent or hinder consumers from unlocking their SIM cards; (b) requiring Apple to provide the iPhone SIM unlock codes to members of the class and other iPhone consumers immediately upon request: and (c) restraining Apple from selling or disturbing locked iPhone without adequately disclosing the fact that they are locked to work only with ATTM SIM cards and without obtaining the consumers' contractual consent to have their iPhones locked.
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Sites Covering our Original Report
Reddit, MacSurfer, Twitter, Facebook, Apple Investor News, Google Reader, Macnews, iPhone World Canada, Tech Blog Huston Chronicle, Techmeme, and more.Don't hold up a sign on the internet, because the internet will make fun of you.
Like Anne Coulter before him, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong inadvertently made himself the target of online jokers Thursday when he allowed himself to be photographed by the Toronto Sun earnestly holding up a sign to protest the cost of a public washroom on the waterfront.
His sign originally carried the price of the Cherry Beach loo, $600,000, but there being a few hundred Torontonians out there who don't like Minnan-Wong's politics, know how to use Photoshop, and have a lot of free time on their hands, other versions quickly began to pop up.
His critics had a lot to work with, given the combination of Minnan-Wong's oh-so-serious face and the subject of his outrage being a place where people poop. The visual gags range from the political to the scatological, but a common theme is that Minnan-Wong is attempting to manufacture some outrage and get his face in the papers in the run-up to the October election.
Mayor Rob Ford has certainly decided to run with the controversy over the costly commode, calling a press conference on Thursday to demand the resignation of the Waterfront Toronto CEO. Seven months after registering for the election Ford has yet to release a platform, and it appears he thinks that reprising his crusade against small-time public expenditures is his best bet to keep his job. The fact that he never went to any meetings when he had a seat on the Waterfront Toronto board from 2010 to 2012 is apparently no obstacle to him attempting to cast himself as a keen-eyed defender of the public purse.The kind of graffiti-covered, poster-plastered, weathered and visibly aging architecture that once characterized many big cities and has now largely been demolished is recreated in miniature by artist Joshua Smith. Every aspect of Smith’s tiny urban environments is crafted in loving detail, with absolutely nothing overlooked. Photographs of each miniature (by Andrew Beveridge of ASB Creative) will make you wish you could examine them in person with a magnifying glass, appreciating the realism in every sidewalk crack, weed, pebble and fallen leaf.
A dumpster at the Oakland Docks is packed full of tiny trash, some strewn around its base, a plastic bag fluttering on the barbed wire fence behind it. Melbourne’s Liberated X Bookshop and Shoe repairs features some fantastic Bladerunner-inspired wheat pasting, peeling plywood and the world’s tiniest padlocks. Big Bang Fireworks Company, based on 15 Pell Street in New York City’s Chinatown looks like you could slide those windows open and find a tiny family dining inside.
Based in South Australia, Smith previously worked for sixteen years as a stencil artist, and has now shifted his focus to model-making. The artist recently granted an interview to ArchDaily about his modeling process.
“The longest build, which was my Kowloon Miniature, took three solid months working on average six to seven days a week and eight to sixteen hour-long days,” says Smith. “I strive to create a reality. I take as many reference photos as possible to mimic every single streak of rust, grime and chipping of stonework. I want viewers to be fooled, if I are a photo of the completed work in sunlight, to think it is the real thing.”
Take a closer look at some high-resolution images at Joshua Smith’s website.French-style secularism is an ideology, defining what it means to be French
French elections have seldom been less predictable, nor so fraught with grand philosophical terms for which there are no equivalent words in English.
Just as the cynical British find it hard to comprehend how a French person, no matter how brainy, could refer to themselves as an "intellectual", so they also struggle to comprehend the concept of laicite.
Britain's head of state, the Queen, is also head of the Church of England. In the United Kingdom's second chamber there are 26 Lords Spiritual, who take an active part of legislation alongside the Lords Temporal. There is no separation of state.
But neither is Britain an especially religious country - tolerance seems cultural, rather than legally enforced.
Not so in France, where a final wedge was driven between the (Catholic) Church and the political state in 1905 during the Third Republic. This was when the term "laicite" was born. It derives from the word laics meaning laity and is now a central pillar of what many believe to be the essence of Frenchness.
What does far-right leader Le Pen want to do in France?
Under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, laicite "assures the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction to their origin, race, or religion. It respects all religious beliefs".
:: What you need to know about the French elections
This tradition goes to the heart of contemporary French life and politics today.
It has underpinned a long held belief across the ideological divide that led Francois Hollande, the enfeebled outgoing president, to decree that France should not recognise cultural and religious differences, much less celebrate them, but rather embrace the idea of a unified "people Francais".
This is so entrenched in France that, for example, that there is no census data on the ethnic or religious backgrounds of its citizens.
It's a sweet idea but it has not worked - at least in the eyes of people in the front line of France's most dangerous schism: the rift between immigrants and the rest.
"The idea has been to ignore our differences, not see them and try to overcome them. It has been a disaster," a senior law enforcement official told me in Nice more than a year before a French citizen of Tunisian origin killed 86 people with a 19-ton truck.
France's socialists and the far right National Front Party of Marine Le Pen have tried to harness laicite to their own political ends.
:: Who is Marine Le Pen?
:: Who is Emmanuel Macron?
:: Who is Benoit Hamon?
:: Who is Francois Fillon?
Ms Le Pen's party is virulently anti-immigration and she is riding a wave of support that has kept her in the top two places throughout the presidential race.
Critics have suggested that laicite, which forbids manifestations of religious conviction in state school and has resulted in the bizarre burkini ban on Nice's beaches, is a secular doctrine rivalling a theological creed.
As such, the far right has been most successful in "weaponising laicite".
Ms Le Pen recently won plaudits among her followers for refusing to cover her hair and walking out of a meeting with a senior French Muslim cleric.
"Muslim terror" and how to cope with it.
Image: Ms Le Pen's party is anti-immigration
The failure of the French policy of "assimilation", driven by laicite, and the growing sense of alienation among many Muslims who simply cannot comprehend what many see as an injunction to abandon their faith, has resulted in deep divisions within French society.
Some, mostly liberals and Muslims, see laicite today as a gossamer facade for Islamophobia.
But with the rise of Emmanuel Macron from the En Marche movement who, although he served a socialist president, is not tied to a recognisable political philosophy, France is beginning to see a rebranding of laicite that could take it away from a secular theology and, perhaps, back to its root meaning.
A centrist independent, Mr Macron is likely to face Ms Le Pen in a runoff for the presidency.
She may represent the feelings of many in France that Muslims should show greater respect for laicite.
She's happy to lose the support of France's Muslims, who make up an estimated 10% of the population.
Image: Emmanuel Macron is not tied to a recognisable political philosophy
That loss is Mr Macron's gain and he has opted for a different definition of laicite.
And when it comes to the runoff he'll be likely to secure the left-wing vote that does not want to see secularism co-opted entirely by the extreme right.
He may be able to move laicite from what is seen as a wilful refusal to acknowledge difference back to what those who first coined the term may have really meant - tolerance.
That won't be a solution to French tensions - but it may begin to set new terms for discussing the problem.AVALANCHE-JOURNAL
A Lubbock courtroom could be the location of a major change in national gun laws.
James A. D’Cruz, 18, has asked a federal judge to declare unconstitutional the ban on handgun sales by federally licensed dealers to 18-20-year-olds.
The suit against the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and explosives was filed just days after D’Cruz visited Sharp Shooters, Inc. and asked if he was legally able to buy a handgun. The employee told him he couldn’t.
According to the suit, D’Cruz is a well-trained, lawful owner of both long guns and handguns and is a decorated competitive Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps marksman.
D’Cruz’s suit argues the ban violates the rights of millions of responsible Americans and therefore is invalid under the Second and Fifth Amendments.
D’Cruz is represented by local attorney Fernando M. Bustos, as well as Washington, D.C., firm Cooper and Kirk, which has represented the National Rifle Association in constitutional litigation for years.
Bustos did not return a phone message left Monday morning.
News of the lawsuit quickly spread across gun rights forums and message boards, and the lobbying arm of the NRA quickly released a statement.
“In Heller and McDonald, the U.S. Supreme Court clearly stated that the Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms for all law-abiding Americans,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action.
“That right is not limited only to Americans 21 years of age and older.... But while the Supreme Court has consistently made clear that the federal government cannot ban or unduly restrict sales of items protected by the Constitution, the federal government continues to prohibit these adults from purchasing handguns from federally licensed dealers, which represent the largest and most accessible means of purchasing handguns.”
Heller and McDonald are recent Supreme Court cases clarifying the Second Amendment.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution grants adults the individual right to bear arms inside a home in federal enclaves.
McDonald v. Chicago went further in holding that the Second Amendment is made applicable to the states by the 14th Amendment.
Current law prohibits Federal Firearm License holders from selling handguns or handgun ammunition to anyone under the age of 21. It is also illegal for a person who doesn’t hold an FFL to sell a handgun to a resident of another state.
The only remaining way for an 18-20-year-old to legally purchase a handgun is in a face-to-face transaction with a seller who lives in the same state as the buyer.
D’Cruz argues in the suit that the Gun Control Act of 1968 “significantly discourages and eliminates the private ownership of firearms for lawful purposes by certain law-abiding citizens.”
The suit asks Judge Sam Cummings to declare the section of law banning handgun sales to 18-20-year-olds unconstitutional and to bar the BATFE from enforcing it.
University of Texas School of Law professor and Second Amendment expert Lucas Powe said 18-year-olds are considered adults in some situations and considered minors in others, such as in regards to alcohol consumption.
“There is no second amendment right for a 6-year-old, so it is a matter of line drawing since a blanket ban on adults is unconstitutional under Heller,” Powe said in an e-mail.
To comment on this story:
logan.carver@lubbockonline.com • 766-8704
shelly.gonzales@lubbockonline.com • 766-8747The Department of Defense's (DoD's) base budget grew from $384 billion to $502 billion between fiscal years 2000 and 2014 in inflation-adjusted (real) terms—an increase of 31 percent and an annual average growth rate of 1.9 percent (see figure below). Several factors contributed to that growth. The largest rate of growth was in the costs for military personnel, which increased by 46 percent over the period. The costs for operation and maintenance (O&M) increased by 34 percent, and the costs for acquisition increased by 25 percent. About two-thirds of the $117 billion real increase in the budget went for the following activities: procurement; O&M costs for the Defense Health Program; research, development, test, and evaluation; the basic allowance for housing; fuel; and basic pay for active-duty military personnel (see table below).
For this analysis, CBO examined DoD's base budget, which excludes supplemental and emergency funding for overseas contingency operations (those conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq and other countries). DoD's base budget includes both discretionary funding (controlled by annual appropriation acts) and mandatory funding (generally determined by eligibility rules, benefit formulas, and other parameters that are set in current law). All costs are expressed in 2014 dollars of budget authority, adjusted for the effects of inflation over the 15-year period using the gross domestic product price index; unless otherwise noted, all growth rates are measured in those real terms. CBO's analysis is based on data from DoD. In addition, CBO relied on analyses described in several of its publications.A visit to Spain would be incomplete without a well spent trip to Barcelona and especially more so if you are a team Barca football fan. ⚽⚽⚽
Nevertheless, a traveler seeking new pastures to explore must visit Barcelona which is in itself, a city at par with the state Capital Madrid as well as the heart of Catalonian culture. Barcelona’s unique character as a conflux of tradition and modernity earmarks it as a major global city and one of tourist centres of Europe.
⚡ In this post we are offering a big discount for Gaudi Exhibition Center: €̶1̶5̶.̶0̶0̶ for €̶7.50 only! Get tickets now!
via GIPHY
Here are top 20 places (attractions, museums and amazing places) to visit in Barcelona from museuly.
1) Camp Nou
If you are an avid football fan, then this is your starting point. Camp Nou is the largest football stadium in all of Europe as well as the second largest association football stadium in the world. Being the Home Stadium of FC Barcelona, it has relics associated with the history of the team as well as the countless matches played here since its inception. One can walk through the changing rooms, marvel at legacies of the trophy room and get a feel of the entire stadium from the commentary box. There is also a special section dedicated to Lionel Messi. If you seek a hassle free trip, the best option is to book tickets online to avoid lengthy queues at the booth. Tickets start at $35 upwards.
2) Sagrada Familia
One of the most curious monuments on earth is this minor basilica that has remained unfinished for over a century; its work still in progress! Its neo-gothic architecture based on Antoni Gaudi’s designs is an ongoing project of interpretation and innovation. The church is a complex interlock of geometrical designs. A site well worth a visit for art enthusiasts. Tickets with a tour guide can be booked online and can offer you a chance to visit the upper levels of the structure.
Gaudí Exhibition Center is the first point of the Barcelona Gaudí route. To learn about the life and work of this genius architect, a visit to the exhibition Walking with Gaudí is essential. Extensive collection reveals his enormous creativity and imagination as well as the revolutionary ideas that made him a genius among geniuses.
Book tickets now!
4) Museu Picasso
Housing the world’s most extensive and complete collections of the great Spanish artist’s masterpieces, this museum has a lot of value to offer. The museum is itself housed within five medieval Catalonian Palaces. Tickets can be booked onsite as well as via guided tours that will take you through some of the places he had lived, worked and drew inspiration from in his lifetime.
5) Casa Milà
Another of Gaudi’s work of artists is this Modernist-style building that goes beyond the narrow confines of standard art and geometry. Its rough undulating shape earns it its nickname “La Pedrera” (rough quary). Its interiors are well worth a visit and makes one wonder what was going on within Gaudi’s fantastic head as he conceptualized this monumental one-of-a-kind UNESCO World Heritage site.
6) Palau de la Música Catalana
Immerse yourself in the world of classic European music with a visit to this grandiose concert hall. Just like most other prominent structures in Barcelona, this hall is designed in the Catalan |
zi Adichie’s Americanah, seriously undermine any such notion.
A Nigerian who comes to the United States for college, Americanah’s protagonist Ifemelu struggles through the terrain of intimacy and work before deciding to return to Lagos; her old boyfriend, meanwhile, tries to make it in Britain as an undocumented immigrant and is eventually deported. “The genre of the novel, Americanah reminds us,” Kirsch argues, “has always thrived by chronicling upwardly mobile people, and the means of that mobility is seldom pure—just look at Balzac, or Henry James.” It is odd to take a lesson of upward mobility from Americanah, when the two main characters both end the novel back where they started, painfully aware of the possibilities missed.
Rather than view the global novel through a Western lens, it is important to ask what allows certain books to be perceived as global in the first place. What are the mechanisms of selection and rejection, of publishing and publicity? How much does the emergence of an anglophone global elite, its tastes largely in accord with those of New York and London, have to do with this process?
The novelists Kirsch surveys found a Western readership because they were driven by a sense of urgency that had deepened over a long period. Most of them (Pamuk, Murakami, Bolaño, Adichie, Ferrante) had to write a number of books before one broke through, in great part because they addressed issues that had all but disappeared from the mainstream Western novel, including the complexities of race, imperialism, and migration; the liberating possibilities of feminism, anarchism, or Islamism; the overwhelming loneliness of our late-capitalist lives; as well as the damage that can be caused by upward mobility. Bolaño emerged as concerns about inequality and youthful radicalism bloomed into the Occupy movement, Adichie against the backdrop of what would become Black Lives Matter, and Ferrante during a moment of a rejuvenated feminism, which can be seen in the International Women’s Strike.
The only writers Kirsch discusses who do not really seem to fit this pattern are the French Houellebecq and the Canadian Atwood. Both Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island are dystopias; they imagine a future where humanity “has been not just extinguished by its own environmental recklessness, but also superseded by a genetically engineered race of quasi-human creatures,” Kirsch writes. While these narratives are global in their scope, Houellebecq and Atwood portray a trajectory of decline, a narrative of the fall of the West that most of Kirsch’s other global novelists do not share. In Adichie, in Pamuk, in Bolaño, the global novel instead focuses on those who have never been part of the rise of the West, and who have often suffered from its hegemony.
Still, the presence of Houellebecq and Atwood in Kirsch’s book raises the question of why he includes no American writers. Is that because “global” is ultimately defined by whatever the United States is not? In fact, an American writer like Rachel Kushner, with The Flamethrowers, has an excellent claim to having written a global novel. On the surface a bildungsroman about Reno, a young American trying to make it in the art world of New York in the 1970s, Kushner’s novel portrays far more than individual mobility. As Reno rides around on a motorcycle manufactured by her boyfriend Sandro’s family, The Flamethrowers reveals the evasion, exploitation, and complicity that their lifestyle is built on.
Kushner shows us the striking workers in the Italian factory that makes the motorcycles, and the slave-labor-like conditions in the Brazilian plantations that produce the rubber for the tires, and the possibility for solidarity between Reno, of working-class origin, and the Italian workers who loathe her boyfriend’s family. The European and American characters are defined in direct relation to the Third World, the bourgeois characters in relation to the working class, the men to the women—connections that seem, in their humanity and insight across cultures, to offer fertile ground for a global novelist. To consider The Flamethrowers alongside Snow or 2666 would challenge the notion that a novel is global only if it depicts people in faraway places who confirm the West’s faith in upward mobility—a faith that now seems rather quaint, even in the West itself.A spill of molasses as a ship was being loaded in Honolulu this week has killed virtually all the fish in the harbor, according to published reports.
HawaiiNewsNow says scuba divers sent to document the damage from Monday\’s spill found no living sealife. \”There\’s nothing alive down there at all. Everything down there is dead,\” the report quoted Roger White of Cool Blue Scuba as saying.
The deputy director of Hawaii\’s Environmental Health Division called the molasses spill \”the worst environmental damage to sea life that I have come across,\” according to the report.
The spill was caused by a leak in a pipeline carrying the molasses to a ship owned by Matson Inc..
A spokesman for Matson told the Los Angeles Times that there\’s little that can be done. \”It’s sunk to the bottom of the harbor. Unlike oil, which can be cleaned from the surface, molasses sinks,\” Matson spokesman Jeff Hull told the paper.
The shipping company\’s shares were off 0.8% Thursday, in line with the Dow Jones Transportation Average, of which they\’re a member. Matson is up 12% for the year, lagging the 23% year-to-date gains for the transports. Activist-hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, through his Pershing Square Capital Management, owns about 0.5% of the stock after slashing his stake by over 2.8 million shares in the second quarter.
The spill occurred in the industrial harbor district, a few miles west of the popular Waikiki beach tourist area.
In 1919, a molasses tank explosion in Boston killed 21 people and sent an 8 to 15 foot high wave of the substance flowing through the city\’s North End.
See HawaiiNewsNow report here.
See Los Angeles Times report here.
— Tom Bemis
Follow The Tell @thetellblog
Follow Tom Bemis @TomBemisSoon, it will no longer be illegal to collect and re-use rain water in Colorado.
After dying on the House floor last year, the rain barrel bill is now on its way to being signed into law.
"Today is really exciting because it shows that our water laws and systems can be respected and still be adapted and flexible to add new tools and respond to a changing environment," said Theresa Conley, a water advocate with Conservation Colorado, a big supporter of the bill.
HB16-1105 was passed Friday morning by a majority of legislators on the Senate floor. The bill must be signed by Governor Hickenlooper before it takes effect on August 10.
Under the law, Colorado residents will be allowed to own up to two, 55-gallon rain barrels.
State Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, one of four lawmakers who opposed the bill on Friday, said the "saving grace" of this bill is a reporting requirement after 3 years, that would ensure that experts are studying the impact of rain barrel water usage.
Colorado's rain-barrel ban is little known and widely flouted. But the barrels violate Colorado water law, which says that people can use but not keep water that runs on or through their property.
"That's hard for people to understand when the state owns all the water and is charged in the constitution to distribute that water," Sen. Sonnenberg said.
Copyright 2016 KUSA– Lucha Underground sent out the following today, announcing that they have officially released Shawn Hernandez. You may remember that Hernandez was the center of controversy when he showed up on Impact while still under a contact to Lucha Underground. Lucha Underground enforced their contractual rights (Hernandez had told TNA that he was released and free to work for them), and TNA ended up having to scrap several segments from Impact that were already recorded. In the fallout, MVP was also released by TNA as he had suggested that the company bring in Hernandez to be part of the BDC faction…
‘LUCHA UNDERGROUND’ PARTS WAYS WITH SHAWN HERNANDEZ
Los Angeles, CA (September 25, 2015) – Lucha Underground, the Lucha Libre wrestling franchise from United Artists Media Group and FactoryMade Ventures, has released Shawn Hernandez from his contract and they have amicably parted ways.
“Lucha Underground” is produced by United Artists Media Group in association with FactoryMade Ventures for El Rey Network. Executive producers are Mark Burnett, Eric Van Wagenen (also showrunner) and Brian Edwards of United Artists Media Group; Dorian Roldán from Lucha Libre AAA; Alejandro Garcia and Antonio Cué Sánchez-Navarro; El Rey Network co-founder Robert Rodriguez; and FactoryMade Ventures and El Rey Network co-founders John Fogelman and Cristina Patwa. The series airs on El Rey Network and is distributed internationally by United Artists Media Group.Narendra Modi waves to supporters. (Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
"You campaign in poetry, but govern in prose" goes a well-known saying by Mario Cumo, the New York politician.
In India, leaders campaign in talk mode, but they prefer to govern in silent mode.
For years, former prime minister Manmohan Singh was bitterly attacked for being too silent, a trait that eventually became a metaphor for his ineffective leadership. Many called his 10-year rule "a decade of official silence."
But it was going to be vastly different with the new prime minister, Narendra Modi.
India's newly sworn-in Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with his Pakistani counterpart, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. (Reuters)
During his four-month-long campaign this year, Modi spoke breathlessly on almost every national and local issue. He gave stump speeches, blogged, tweeted, Facebooked. India's youths had finally found in the 63-year old Modi a leader fit for a generation of over-sharers and hyper-communicators.
Now journalists, political pundits and opposition politicians have begun asking why Modi has gone silent. What happened to the promise of a leader who weighed in on every issue that consumed the nation?
"Narendra Modi brought with him the promise of a leader who will not be a mute spectator," the Headlines Today channel said last month. "Is silence going to be the norm when it comes to complex issues like crimes against women?"
"Why has our current prime minister, who is a 24x7 communicator, suddenly fallen silent on matters that are making front-page news, have been headlined in the international press, and have worked the Twitterati up into a tizzy?" wrote Caravan magazine.
The Business Standard newspaper called it "Narendra Modi: Silent PM 2.0?"
Modi was silent when Indian construction workers were kidnapped by Islamist militants in Iraq; when a young Muslim techie was killed by a Hindu mob angry over a derogatory Facebook post; when Hindu nationalist leader Praveen Togadia gave an open "warning" to Muslims this week to fall in line; he has been silent on price rise; and he has been especially silent on the spate of rape incidents being reported across India.
Instead, he gives long speeches on his vision for the nation — when he inaugurates a train line or attends the launch of a space rocket.
Even as he encourages his colleagues in the government to open Twitter accounts to disseminate official news, he has put a gag on them. He has instructed them not to speak to reporters out of turn, to be wary of sting operations and not allow anyone into their offices with cellphones or cameras, or even pens.
He has also ended a political culture in which prime ministers took large contingents of journalists with them on foreign trips.
The result is "a virtual news drought for 24x7 media," complain local journalists.
"All the officers are under strict orders... not to have any connection with media," Kumar Ketkar, a political commentator, blogged Tuesday on NDTV.com, a 24x7 news Web site. Calling it a "Gestapo-style" vigil, he said, there is "constant surveillance of the offices to keep tab on who meets whom and to check on whether ministers are spending evenings at social parties."A report surfaced earlier this week that linked Columbus Crew SC to Venezuelan forward/winger Jhon Murillo currently at Benfica. Murillo has yet to make an appearance for Benfica and has been on loan to Portuguese side C.D. Tondela for the past two years. He returned from Tondela and was listed by Benfica.
Reports note that Cypriot side Omonia Nicosia and Portuguese club Estoril are interested in Murillo’s services. Crew SC’s undisclosed bid was rejected.
Kristian Dyer has more details on the reported bid. According to his league sources Crew SC submitted a bid in the $3 million range to in an attempt to land the player on full transfer. The transfer fee would count as part of his salary budget number and likely put him in the Designated Player bracket.
Interestingly, due to Murillo’s age his “budget charge” would be discounted under The Young Designated Player rule that MLS has in place.
Young Designated Player A Designated Player 23 years old or younger during the league year (age of player is determined by year - not date - of birth) will carry the following Young Designated Player Budget Charge: Ages 20 and younger: $150,000 Ages 21-23: $200,000 If such Designated Player joins the club after the opening of the Secondary Transfer Window, he will carry the Mid-Season Youth Designated Player Salary Budget Charge of $150,000 regardless of age.
The MLS transfer window opens up on July 10th and closes on August 9th. If Murillo is on the transfer list, Benfica will likely look to move him quickly before they open their training camp in earnest.A new PLOS Biology study investigated whether teaching genetics before evolution improved understanding of evolution in U.K. schools. To learn more, I interviewed the corresponding author, Laurence Hurst, professor of evolutionary genetics and director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath.
What sparked your interest in studying how evolution is taught in U.K. secondary schools?
LH: When I go into schools to speak about evolution I am always encouraged by the strong appetite and interest in the subject amongst the students. However, I repeatedly see a few issues. One is that evolution is being taught as a separate module and perhaps made to look rather distinct from all other subjects. Connections were often not being made. The second was that there appeared to be quite a few misconceptions. Many of these are easy to see: the language of evolution can be confusing, as we tend to use familiar terms in unfamiliar ways. I remember when I was young being confused by “survival of the fittest.” Was this an encouragement to go to the gym?…So this stimulated me to ask whether there were some simple changes that could be made that could improve understanding of evolution but not at a cost to the students’ understanding of other subjects.
You hypothesized that teaching genetics before evolution would improve student understanding of evolution. What was your rationale for this hypothesis? Why do you think that evolution might be taught before genetics in some classrooms?
LH: To answer the second question first, this relates to what I mentioned above. There appears to be a tendency to consider evolution as a separate and distinct subject and so teach it in isolation. In some cases we found teachers rather marginalize it, teach it last and prefer not to give it much attention. This seemed very odd to me. To my mind microevolution is simply a branch of genetics. If you understand DNA, you can understand mutation and the concept of the allele. It is then a very small leap to understanding that alleles change frequency and, bingo, you have arrived into population and evolutionary genetics. This logical order is also there in “On the Origin of Species” although Darwin, naturally, was rather fuzzy on the genetics. In addition, there had been a news piece in Science that mentioned in passing that understanding of evolution was correlated with understanding of genetics. Naturally there could be many explanations for this, but it laid a seed of curiosity in my head.
Aside from the logical ordering, another possible advantage of the genetics-first approach is a reduction in what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance, the idea that, in the clash of beliefs and ideas, understanding is the first victim. That short leap from allele to allele frequency change allows much of the groundwork for understanding evolutionary change to be done under the banner of uncontroversial genetics. When students then switch to evolution – which many told us they were anxious about studying – the effective degree of clash of ideas could be reduced.
Why do you think there is a weak correlation between understanding and acceptance of evolution? What were some of the factors that you found might increase a student’s acceptance of evolution?
LH: We were very struck by this result. Indeed, in our pilot survey the correlation between evolution acceptance and understanding was negative! In our experimental data set the correlation is positive but weak, both before and after teaching. Indeed, genetics understanding is a much better predictor of acceptance of evolution. In short, we found students who understood evolution very well but didn’t accept it and others who accepted it but didn’t understand it all that well. The qualitative data repeatedly pointed to a role for authority figures with both tacit approval by teachers and parents being important. But external figures, be these TV personalities such as David Attenborough and religious figures, were also important to some. Indeed, in one school the teacher reassured the class that the pope approved of evolution and students told us what a relief this was. For some schools, a simple word like that might help.
What struck us most, however, was that while many students accepted the scientific view of evolution (over 80 percent after teaching), few could provide the evidence when quizzed in focus groups. We wonder if the act of teaching the subject in a scientific context by trusted people who provide tacit approval (i.e., teachers), is actually more important than understanding per se. In the primary school context, a study we are currently in the middle of, our analysis to date suggests that teacher acceptance of evolution is the only class-level predictor of student improvement in understanding. This fits with the notion of tacit approval/disapproval from the teacher as being a key parameter. This is a worry for countries were many teachers reject the scientific view of evolution.
Were you surprised by anything in this study?
LH: We were surprised by how clear, strong and repeatable the results were. For example, analysis at the class level (rather than at the student level) finds that genetics-first is best despite the limited sample size (70-plus classes). The genetics-first approach works both for high- and foundation-ability students. Indeed, for the foundation-ability students, genetics-first was the only teaching order that resulted in an increased understanding of evolution. This was something we didn’t expect. That for the foundation students teaching evolution then genetics leads to no improvement in evolution understanding is concerning if schools don’t now adopt the genetics-first approach.
Were there any limitations to your study?
LH: Work like this is difficult on this sort of scale…Getting schools involved is so difficult given the pressures on their time. But a consequence of this is that the sample of schools may well be biased towards more ambitious and energetic ones. We also found problems in fully implementing the randomization. Some schools needed to order in supplies to teach one or other subject and so while chosen to teach in a given order couldn’t do so. Likewise, there were a few cases where a class had been selected to teach in a given order but taught in the reverse order. We thus faced problems that don’t normally face medical randomized control trials. Conversely, as the material had to be taught regardless, we didn’t have the more common problem of biased dropout.
How might we modify current curriculum to improve understanding of evolution, if at all?
LH: Simple: teach genetics first! The effect seems to be so robust, it is a cost free intervention and minimally disruptive. The magnitude of the effect, a 5 to 10 percent improvement for genetics first above evolution first, is for schools a big difference. It is what the Americans might call a “no brainer.”
I am however interested in whether an explicit lesson bridging genetics and evolution making the link really explicit might help. Becky has developed such a lesson plan but we need to do more preliminary work to see if teachers would be willing to incorporate this. I should add that in our trial we asked teachers to teach what they need to teach for the syllabus for their particular exam board – so we didn’t change any lessons, just the ordering.
I’d suggest two other possible changes. It seems clear that while concepts of evolution are going in well, the evidence for evolution is not. I could imagine many ways to correct this. The other change I’d love to test is whether teaching evolution by stealth improves acceptance (i.e., call it population genetics upfront and only later mention that population genetics is evolution). If acceptance is conditioned by approval from authority alone then this change should make no difference to acceptance but could improve understanding by removing any cognitive dissonance components. If, however, understanding of evolution could precede any cognitive dissonance, it might improve acceptance as well.
Reference: Mead R, Hejmadi M, Hurst LD (2017) Teaching genetics prior to teaching evolution improves evolution understanding but not acceptance. PLoS Biol 15(5): e2002255. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002255
Image Credit: Caroline Davis 2010, Flickr; Imogen Hurst.A A
ABERDEEN, Wash. -- The Aberdeen City Council will have to elect a new member now that certified November election results show a dead candidate won a council seat.
KXRO reports John Erak was elected five months after he died. The 81-year-old former state representative died in June after the filing period closed and his name could not be removed from ballots.
"It's called respect. They respected Mr. Erak," Aberdeen City Council member Kathi Hoder said after the election.
Hoder said she grew to admire the man when they served on council together a few years ago.
"They wanted to honor him, in a memorial kind of way, by voting him back in office," she said.
Challenger Alan Richrod was appointed to Erak's seat until the election. You might think the man who is losing would feel embarrassed, but Richrod says he's not.
"The story is, John and I were good friends, and we lived, straight line, less than a block from each other," Richrod said.
Aberdeen City Attorney Eric Nelson says the position held by Richrod becomes vacant immediately and the city council will have to pick a candidate to fill the position until the next election in 2015.
Mayor Bill Simpson encourages citizens to apply.There’s no doubt that BP’s brand value has been affected by the explosion of its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April. And as the damaged rig has been dumping thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf each day and causing massive environmental casualties, BP has been on a social media and advertising campaign to repair some of the damage.
Brand measurement firm General Sentiment’s Media Value Report has measured the damage made to the oil giant’s reputation from negative sentiment online. General Sentiment’s technology evaluates Twitter, Facebook and over 30 million sources of content to evaluate sentiment about a brand.
So how much is the damage to BP’s brand worth? General Sentiment says nearly $1 billion. Since June 1st, BP has lost more than $32 million a day in brand value.
To be exact, General Sentiment’s report contends that BP has lost $949,071,279 in total media value since April, with the media value cost of each gallon spilled in the Gulf at $6.66. So far, BP has released roughly 142,500,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf since April, says the brand measurement firm.
To put this in perspective, BP has lost much more than $1 billion in market value since the spill. Since April 21, BP’s market value has dropped from $184 billion to $96.5 billion, dropping by roughly $87.5 billion in a matter of two months.
You can download the report here.Imagine an Internet in which every possible creative work uploaded results in a copyright claim - because it's already been created. That's the nightmare scenario being painted by a Russian company which says it has a plan to use copyright and trolling to free humans from ever having to create digital content again.
Without copyright, people in the creative industries would have no incentive to keep on creating. In recent years this kind of statement has been regularly pumped out by entertainment companies in their defense of tougher intellectual property legislation.
Countering, advocates such as Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge frequently argue that copyright monopolies stifle creativity and hinder innovation.
But what would happen if rather than providing an incentive to create, the existence of copyright meant that no-one would ever need to create anything original online ever again? And if they did, they could be sued for it?
That’s the staggering notion being put forward by Qentis Corporation. The outfit, which claims a base in Russia, says that its business model is to use massive computing power to generate digital intellectual property on a never-seen-before scale and transfer the rights to its partners.
“Our clients are private high net-worth individuals (HNWI), investment funds and corporations that act as pure investors,” Qentis explains.
What Qentis are proposing is the bulk algorithmic creation of content – music, text, images etc – on such a large scale that in a few years its clients will own the rights to just about anything people might care to create and upload.
The worrying claim on the Qentis homepage
“Qentis aims to produce all possible combinations of text (and later on images and sound) and to copyright them,” Qentis’ Michael Marcovici told TorrentFreak.
“Concerning text we try this in chunks of 400 word articles in English, German and Spanish. That would mean that we will hold the copyright to any text produced from now on and that it becomes impossible for anyone to circumvent Qentis when writing a text.”
In terms of graphics, Qentis promotional material states that a subsidiary has already generated 3.23% of “all possible images” in the 1000×800 pixel format.
“We are now generating images at a much faster pace and expect to complete 10 percent of all possible images by the end of 2015. At current projections, we will by 2020 generate every possible image in the 1000×800 pixel resolution,” the company claims.
Of course, ‘creating’ this ‘content’ has a purpose. According to Qentis it effectively seeks to become the biggest copyright troll on the planet. The company says it will identify copyright infringements and help investors to pursue infringers. And, astonishingly, it claims it will free companies from having to rely on people to come up with creative content.
“It is only a matter of time before Qentis becomes the universal single source for all web content, freeing corporations from their expensive dependence on writers, musicians and artists,” says Qentis co-founder Howard Lafarge.
TF spoke with Rick Falkvinge about Qentis’ stated aims and needless to say he’s completely unimpressed.
“Interesting, and complete bullshit,” Rick said.
“They claim to have generated all possible texts in English that are up to 400 words in length, and therefore, any text below that length ‘infringes’. However, having the copyright monopoly on a text is solidly dependent on having had artistic skill gone into generating it. Merely mechanically generating all combinations does not, repeat NOT, reward a copyright monopoly.”
Having spent way more time on the Qentis website than we probably should, (and arriving at the conclusion that they’re either crazy, evil geniuses or masters of parody) we’re still left with an interesting concept.
The fact remains that there are plenty of huge, heavily pro-copyright corporations on the planet today who would happily embark on a Qentis-style operation of copyrighting all content before a human can create it, if indeed such a thing was possible. Rest assured, at that point the ‘artists’ would be a forgotten and inconvenient part of their business models.
“The mere concept that somebody thinks of generating all possible texts and then thinks they can sue humanity for coming up with one of these combinations through actual artistic talent shows how completely screwed up copyright monopoly law is,” Rick concludes.
Since Qentis claims to have come up with the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s ‘Applause’ before she did, TF pressed Qentis to give us more examples where their creations have successfully predicted the future. The company couldn’t immediately give us any, but said there were “many more” to be found.
We also asked about the mathematical implications of coming up with every available combination of text in a 400 word article, given there are one million words in the English language alone. How many generated articles would be a ‘miss’ in trying to come up with one ‘hit’?
“About the mathematics, this is mainly about working with n-grams, we don’t work iteratively with misses because that would produce as you mention a LOT of misses, probably only 1 out of few million would be readable,” the company’s Michael Marcovici told us.
“We do not include entities in the text as it does not matter and we concentrate on the structure of the text. Using known or predicted combinations is more economical, the main challenge is storage and not so much generating text.”
For those interested in reading just how bad things could get on the copyright front, given the chance, the fully comprehensive and quite incredible Qentis website can be found here. We’re not sure what their endgame is, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they have a secret underground base.
Everyone is invited to comment below, scholars of copyright and mathematics in particular.In his most recent article, AGAINST INDIVIDUAL IQ WORRIES, Scott ‘truth bombs’ everyone about IQ, with phrasing that departs from his typical nuanced tone, such as calling critics ‘IQ denialists’ and dismissing emotional IQ as a ‘silly theory’. This is an article that needed to be written, because there are a lot of misconceptions about IQ.
Scott writes, “I’m kind of annoyed I have to write this post. After investing so much work debunking IQ denialists, I feel like this is really – I don’t know – diluting the brand.”
It’s no so much that these people deny IQ exists, but rather they deny that: it is of predictive power for individual socioeconomic and national outcomes, that is varies among races, and that it can be reliably measured. The typical arguments are “even if some people are smarter than others, it doesn’t matter,” “social programs can close IQ gaps,” “IQ does not measure anything important,” “IQ tests are racist/biased,” or “a high IQ must be in lieu of a more important trait (such as honesty or creativity),” “I have a friend with a high IQ and he is a loser in life,” and last but not least “it only measures how well you do on IQ tests.”
Related: Beyond the Blank Slate: How Libs Turn High-IQ Into a Handicap:
But the left is resourceful. When pressed, many will concede that, yes some people are smarter than others and this intelligence may have a biological origin, but that’s where it ends. The left’s most effective strategy in downplaying the benefits and significance of IQ is turn high-IQ into handicap. Yes, being better now means you’re worse.
Going back to Scott’s article, the overarching thesis is that IQ is a better predictor in the aggregate than at the individual level. IQ cannot predict specifically how well or poorly someone will do: some average-IQ people become scientists; some geniuses become janitors, even if ‘on average’ scientists are 30 points smarter than janitors.
Unfortunately, Scott gets things wrong, too. He starts off by saying (I’m just going to blockquote the entire thing because it won’t make sense unless you read the entire section):
But every so often, I get comments/emails saying something like “Help! I just took an IQ test and learned that my IQ is x! This is much lower than I thought, and so obviously I will be a failure in everything I do in life. Can you direct me to the best cliff to jump off of?” So I want to clarify: IQ is very useful and powerful for research purposes. It’s not nearly as interesting for you personally. How can this be? Consider something like income inequality: kids from rich families are at an advantage in life; kids from poor families are at a disadvantage. From a research point of view, it’s really important to understand this is true. A scientific establishment in denial that having wealthy parents gave you a leg up in life would be an intellectual disgrace. Knowing that wealth runs in families is vital for even a minimal understanding of society, and anybody forced to deny that for political reasons would end up so hopelessly confused that they might as well just give up on having a coherent world-view. From an personal point of view, coming from a poor family probably isn’t great but shouldn’t be infinitely discouraging. It doesn’t suggest that some kid should think to herself “I come from a family that only makes $30,000 per year, guess that means I’m doomed to be a failure forever, might as well not even try”. A poor kid is certainly at a disadvantage relative to a rich kid, but probably she knew that already long before any scientist came around to tell her. If she took the scientific study of intergenerational income transmission as something more official and final than her general sense that life was hard – if she obsessively recorded every raise and bonus her parents got on the grounds that it determined her own hope for the future – she would be giving the science more weight than it deserves.
The mistake he is he is conflating IQ (which is biological and thus intrinsic to the individual) with parental wealth (which is not). Studies have shown that the high-IQ poor have higher levels of socioeconomic mobility than the less intelligent. And from the article Despite indoctrination, a college degree may still be the best path out of poverty
…67% of poor college grads are at least 50-percentile in wealth compared to 49% of rich high school dropouts. It’s even better when you compare poor high school dropouts vs. poor college graduates, which is why a college degree may still be worth the money and the best pathway out of poverty, especially if you major in STEM.
…and from IQ, Education, and Upward Mobility
Height at midlife, years of education and childhood IQ were significantly positively related to upward social mobility, while number of siblings had no significant effect. For each standard deviation increase in IQ score at the age 11, the chances of upward social mobility increases by 69% (with a 95% confidence). After controlling the effect of independent variables, only IQ at age 11 was significantly inversely related to the downward in social mobility. Which means that more years of education help a man to surpass his father’s social class, and that low IQ makes a man prone to fall behind his father’s social class.
One can change their socioeconomic standing; one cannot change their IQ.
Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously scored “only” 124 on an IQ test in school – still bright, but nowhere near what you would expect of a Nobelist. Some people point out that it might have been biased towards measuring verbal rather than math abilities – then again, Feynman’s autobiography (admittedly edited and stitched together by a ghostwriter) sold 500,000 copies and made the New York Times bestseller list. So either his tested IQ was off by at least 30 points (supposed chance of this happening: 1/505 million), or IQ isn’t real and all of the studies showing that it is are made up by lizardmen to confuse us. In either case, you should be less concerned if your own school IQ tests seem kind of low.
Feynman’s ‘low IQ’ is probably more urban legend than reality. No one knows the type of IQ test he took (which would be important in knowing how much the test was ‘verbal loaded’ vs. ‘math loaded’), or if this ever happened, because he has never produced official records. It’s possible he got an ‘average’ score on the verbal parts and maximum score on the quantitative, producing an ‘above average’ score of 125.
Of note:
This is absolutely consistent with population averages of thousands of IQ estimates still being valuable and useful research tools. It just means you shouldn’t use it on yourself. Statistics is what tells us that almost everybody feels stimulated on amphetamines. Reality is my patient who consistently goes to sleep every time she takes Adderall. Neither the statistics nor the lived experience are wrong – but if you use one when you need the other, you’re going to have a bad time.
In part 3, Scott shows a box plot of various professions with their predicted IQs.
I don’t know how better to demonstrate this idea of “statistically solid, individually shaky”. On a population level, we see that the average doctor is 30 IQ points higher than the average janitor, that college professors are overwhelmingly high-IQ, and we think yeah, this is about what we would hope for from a statistic measuring intelligence. But on an individual level, we see that below-average IQ people sometimes become scientists, professors, engineers, and almost anything else you could hope for.
But the problem is many of these job titles, especially for high-IQ professions, are non-specific. What work does a ‘miscellaneous engineer’, ‘computer occupation’, or a ‘creative occupation’ entail? A ‘computer job’ can be as simple as inputting data, to as complicated as coding, which the chart does not differentiate between. I’m sure the people on the lower end of the ‘computer occupation’ IQ range are not going to be programming Unix, for example. It also does not differentiate between wages.
And then you can either resist that with every breath you have – deny all the data, picket the labs where it’s studied, make up silly theories about “emotional intelligence” and “grit” and what have you. Or you can surrender to the darkness, at least have the comfort of knowing that you accept the grim reality as it is.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that EQ competes with IQ, but rather they are different categories, one being an intrinsic trait and the other being a skill. It’s not so much that EQ is useless or silly, but rather EQ is a skill, which, unlike IQ, can be taught, and one who posses such skills, all else being equal, is at an advantage over someone who lacks such skills. EQ is the ability to put oneself |
’s OK. The parser promises not to crash or hang on invalid syntax, but it doesn’t promise to return a usable syntax tree if an error is found. As soon as the parser reports an error, hadError gets set, and subsequent phases are skipped.
Finally, we can hook up our brand new parser to the main Lox class and try it out. We still don’t have an interpreter so, for now, we’ll parse to a syntax tree and then use the AstPrinter class from the last chapter to display it.
Delete the old code to print the scanned tokens and replace it with this:
List < Token > tokens = scanner. scanTokens (); lox/Lox.java
in run()
replace 5 lines Parser parser = new Parser ( tokens ); Expr expression = parser. parse (); // Stop if there was a syntax error. if ( hadError ) return ; System. out. println ( new AstPrinter (). print ( expression )); }
lox/Lox.java, in run(), replace 5 lines
Congratulations, you have crossed the threshold! That really is all there is to hand-writing a parser. We’ll extend the grammar in later chapters with assignment, statements, and other stuff, but none of that is any more complex than the binary operators we tackled here.
It is possible to define a grammar that’s more difficult than Lox’s to parse using recursive descent. Predictive parsing gets tricky when you may need to look ahead a large number of tokens to figure out what you’re sitting on. In practice, most languages are designed to avoid that. Even in cases where they aren’t, you can usually hack around it without too much pain. If you can parse C++ using recursive descent, you can parse anything.
Fire up the interpreter and type in some expressions. See how it handles precedence and associativity correctly? Not bad for less than 200 lines of code.
Challenges In C, a block is a statement form that allows you to pack a series of statements where a single one is expected. The comma operator is an analogous syntax for expressions. A comma-separated series of expressions can be given where a single expression is expected (except inside a function call’s argument list). At runtime, the comma operator evaluates the left operand and discards the result. Then it evaluates and returns the right operand. Add support for comma expressions. Give them the same precedence and associativity as in C. Write the grammar, and then implement the necessary parsing code. Likewise, add support for the C-style conditional or “ternary” operator?:. What precedence level is allowed between the? and :? Is the whole operator left-associative or right-associative? Add error productions to handle each binary operator appearing without a left-hand operand. In other words, detect a binary operator appearing at the beginning of an expression. Report that as an error, but also parse and discard a right-hand operand with the appropriate precedence.Story highlights Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu vows to defeat "wave of terror"
There's been a rise in violence and clashes in Jerusalem and the West Bank
Israel has ordered more police into Jerusalem and soldiers into the West Bank
(CNN) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Monday to take strong action and defeat what he called a "wave of terror." In a statement, Netanyahu said Israel is increasing its anti-terror operations with thousands of police in Jerusalem and more soldiers in the West Bank.
The move comes after a rise in violence over the past five days.
On Thursday, an Israeli couple were shot and killed in the West Bank in front of their four children, officials said. Five people were arrested Monday in the shooting, lsrael's Securities Authority spokesperson said in a statement.
Israel's Security Authority said those arrested were members of a cell affiliated with the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Nablus and admitted their involvement in the shooting.
On Saturday, a 19-year-old Palestinian attacked and killed two Israelis with a knife in Jerusalem's Old City, according to authorities.
Read MoreSenator Harry Reid bids farewell after 30 years
C-SPAN2 / AP
WASHINGTON — “It’s a long way from Searchlight to the United States Senate,” U.S. Senator Harry Reid said this morning, delivering his farewell address from the Senate floor and closing out more than three decades of representing Nevada in the nation’s capital.
In a winding, lengthy speech, Reid tied the threads of his life together, connecting his parents’ health and mental health concerns to fighting for access to health care in Congress and weaving throughout his story the one constant in his life — his wife, Landra.
With the attention of about 30 senators and more than 120 additional friends, family members and reporters in attendance, Reid talked about hard work, saying it’s the only thing that got him where he is today.
“The little boy of Searchlight has been able to be a part of a changing state of Nevada,” Reid said. “I’m grateful I’ve been a part of that change.”
Senators in attendance included Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey.
Throughout the address, Reid detailed some of his signature accomplishments, including helping President Barack Obama pass the Affordable Care Act. He said it would have been “wonderful” if the law had existed when he was growing up in Searchlight.
“We didn’t go to doctors. It was a rare, rare occasion,” Reid said. “There was no one to go to.”
Reid often shares the story of how he worked at a service station as a kid to save $250 to buy his mother teeth. He called it the “one thing I did in my life that I am so proud of.”
He also talked frankly about how his father struggled with mental health issues before committing suicide.
“I think everyone can understand just a little bit why I’ve been such an avid supporter of Obamacare, health care,” Reid said.
Among some of his other legislative accomplishments, Reid detailed working on the taxpayers’ bill of rights, tax incentives for solar and geothermal energy, and the Travel Promotion Act.
He recalled watching nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site from Searchlight as a kid — “I can remember seeing them. We were a long ways away in Searchlight. We would see that flash.” — and then later working to support the test site in Congress.
He touted Nellis Air Force Base as the “finest fighter training facility in the world” and noted that drones are flown on the other side of the world from Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs.
Reid promised not to get into “a long dissertation” about blocking the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, one of Reid’s chief, Nevada-specific accomplishments.
But to Republicans thinking of reviving the Yucca Mountain project, Reid said, “They better bring a checkbook with them,” promising it would cost the federal government $10 billion to $12 billion.
The senator noted efforts he has taken to preserve the “pristine” Nevada, creating Great Basin National Park and Tule Springs National Monument. He called Lake Tahoe a “stunningly beautiful place,” something he and Nevada Sen. Dean Heller have both worked to preserve.
Heller, delivering remarks from the floor after Reid’s speech to a nearly empty room, stressed those two areas on which he and Reid had been able to collaborate across the aisle — preserving Lake Tahoe and opposing Yucca Mountain.
He promised to continue those efforts as the new senior senator from Nevada.
“I totally expect that he (Reid) will operate as Nevada’s third senator,” Heller said jokingly in Reid’s absence.
Closer to home, Reid took a light jab at Nevada Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval, whom he appointed to a federal judgeship in the mid-2000s. Sandoval later left that lifetime appointment to run for governor against Reid’s son Rory in 2010.
“He was a good federal judge and things were going great until he ran against my son for governor,” Reid said. “I wish he hadn’t, because my son would now be governor.”
The 2010 election was a tough fight for both, with Rory Reid making his run at the gubernatorial seat and Harry Reid in the fight of his life to hold onto his Senate seat against Republican Sharron Angle.
Reid and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, have long sparred across the aisle. But today Reid called McConnell “my friend,” describing their relationship as that of lawyers on opposing sides.
“We’re advocates for a cause,” Reid said.
McConnell, delivering remarks from the floor, joked that he and Reid both “dreamed of a life in the majors” in baseball but instead ended up the heads of two “unruly franchises” in the Senate.
Reid thanked a long list of senators he has worked with over the years: Robert Byrd, George Mitchell, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Tom Daschle and Bill Frist.
He compared Sen. Dick Durbin to his “cousin Jeff,” who once grabbed someone’s nose and twisted it as hard as he could in an effort to defend Reid’s brother Larry in a Searchlight bar.
He said Sen. Chuck Schumer, the incoming Senate minority leader, “won’t be me, but he’ll do a good job.”
To his fellow senators, Reid said he hopes they do all they can to protect the Senate as an institution and to give it “the dignity it deserves” and that his colleagues are able to “temper the use of the filibuster.” He also said dark money in politics — campaign spending from undisclosed sources — are the cracks in the election system in the U.S., referencing the Leonard Cohen song “Anthem.”
To the press, he urged vigilance, saying journalists have “as much to do with your democracy as any branch of government.”
He also thanked his staff, of which there were almost 3,000 over his years in office. “I feel so strongly about my staff. They are my family,” Reid said. “I really, really do believe that.”
In closing, Reid thanked his wife, Landra, whom he met more than six decades ago and has five children and 19 grandchildren with. He quoted Britain’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who said, “The magic of first love is that it never ends.”
“I believe that. She’s my first love,” Reid said, choking up on the floor. “It will never end.”The Death Set’s ‘Michel Poiccard’: One of the best albums of 2011
Sorting through the massive amounts of musical goodness that flowed through my home wirelessly at 130 mbps in 2011, I would be remiss in not pulling The Death Set from the digitized stream to hold up like a glistening electronic baby in all its punkish glory for DM readers to behold.
Brief bio: founded by lead singer Johnny Siera and guitarist Beau Velasco (Black Panda) in the town of Gold Coast, Australia in 2005, The Death Set eventually ended up in Brooklyn after a period of time spent in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Their debut album Worldwide was released in 2008. The U.K. music magazine NME proclaimed them “the #1 biggest hope of the future.” But the future got heavy. The band’s name became sadly prophetic when Velasco died of a drug overdose in 2009.
Resurrection: Velasco’s death crushed Siera, but instead of throwing in the towel, Siera soldiered on and created one of 2011’s best records, Michel Poiccard (named after Belmondo’s character in Godard’s Breathless) - seventeen seering tracks in 36 minutes. Produced by XXXchange (Spank Rock, Kele, The Kills), the album is an onslaught of fast, thrashy, exhilarating mini-anthems that recall The Beastie Boys at their hardest-core, Buzzcocks, Minor Threat, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, The Skids and The Clash on Ritalin. Good solid punk rock with a dose of synthesizers, rhythm machines and hip hop samples.
The Death Set currently are Siera on vocals and Jahphet Landis playing drums and Daniel Walker on guitar and vocals.
Here’s “Chew It like a Gun Gum” from Michel Poiccard.
Video NSFW.A Basic Income of Fear
Paul Crider Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 23, 2017
Defenses of a universal basic income (UBI) often focus on the efficiency gains of replacing leaky, ad hoc social safety nets with the simpler UBI; the labor market lubrication that goes with workers knowing they’ll have an income if they choose to change jobs or start their own business; and how the program complements the “gig economy” by assuring that freelancers have a stable income along with their other less dependable income sources.
I don’t deny any of these, but my own thinking about a UBI takes a darker form. We need a UBI to ward off evil.
The “Liberalism of Fear” takes as the fundamental purpose of liberal society avoiding some “supreme evil.” Judith Shklar, who coined the phrase, suggested that evil “is cruelty and the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself.” Taking some liberty with what qualifies as a supreme evil, I believe a case can be made for a universal basic income — of fear.
A UBI obviously protects individuals against fear of deprivation, but standard welfare programs, whatever their inefficiencies, address this fear as well. A UBI by virtue of its universality addresses at least two social evils to which standard welfare programs are blunt or even counterproductive: oppressive relationships and the chaos caused by populist responses to economic dislocation.
Domestic Oppression
A person in an abusive domestic relationship often faces financial and psychological barriers to leaving that relationship, especially when there are children involved. If this person — let’s call them Morgan — has foregone paid work to raise children, then they usually have depleted personal finances. Even with alimony and child support, Morgan has either stale or undeveloped marketable skills and will struggle to find more than meager pay for unskilled labor. Facing a life of poverty and drudgery adds to the other already weighty psychological barriers to making radical life changes. Many in Morgan’s shoes will persuade themselves that their situation isn’t as bad as it sometimes feels. Or perhaps in thrall to the just world bias, they may internalize their abuse and believe they deserve it.
With a UBI, even if Morgan’s reserves have been frittered away by an abusive spouse, there’s always cash around the corner. Once Morgan finally escapes, they have some minimum monthly income that is truly their own. Traditional means-tested welfare offers some assistance, but at a cost: Morgan must fill out the proper forms, prove their neediness or worth to social workers, and police their conduct to make sure they abide by the paternalistic rules proscribing inappropriate purchases (cigarettes, steak) and mandating appropriate behaviors (looking for work).
Because it is universal, the stigma associated with living off the UBI during such times will be less than that of traditional welfare. To be sure, Morgan’s neighbors may think Morgan isn’t paying their fair share, but they will also know that Morgan didn’t actively seek out assistance and is merely taking advantage of the same UBI to which they have also access.
The UBI thus facilitates Morgan’s escape from an oppressive relationship.
Workplace Oppression
Consider Ashley, who for whatever reason is desperately clinging to a soul-crushing job. Perhaps there is only one major employer in a small town, or a major recession with steep unemployment has created an employer’s market. Ashley’s boss is abusive, though not in any legally actionable sense. The boss ridicules and demeans Ashley, uses abusive language just within the bounds of plausible deniability. Body language, tone, and countless difficult-to-describe aspects of the boss’s behavior combine to create a psychologically taxing work environment. Ashley is routinely sidelined for promotions and other perquisites in favor of the boss’s clear favorites.
Or perhaps Ashley is just another worker subject to the various indignities identified by the Crooked Timber philosophers Chris Bertram, Corey Robin, and Alex Gourevitch.
These indignities are not a regrettable but necessary feature of market society. They are petty tyranny pure and simple. With a UBI these sorts of degradations are much less likely to be suffered in silence, as the worker is able to subsist for a while on the UBI if the abuse is too much. The UBI affords them the time to find another more respectful employer, even if that involves going back to school or saving up funds for a relocation.
In the mythos of unreconstructed libertarians and conservatives, employees and employers meet each other on a level playing field and negotiate terms to mutual advantage. Either party can quit the relationship at any time if they become dissatisfied. In the real world, however, workers have families to feed, mortgages to pay, ailing parents to tend to, etc. For low skill workers who may be easily replaced, there is a gross disparity in power between the two parties as they face drastically different slates of viable options. While the boss’s threats are very real, the employee’s threats to leave lack any teeth.
A UBI puts steel in the worker’s resolve to work with dignity as a social equal to their employer. And it does this without the complicated coordination problems of collective bargaining and without union politics that employees may find distasteful or oppressive in a different way. Facing credible threats, even when they remain unuttered, employers will very likely back off their petty tyrannies for the same reason highly skilled and well-remunerated workers already don’t face similar treatment.
Social and Political Chaos
A friend of mine confided to me that she supports a UBI because she “doesn’t want bricks thrown through her window. Eventually, folks are going to realize it’s not the foreigners who are the villains. It’s me.”
My friend works in automation and understands very well that more economic dislocation has been caused by technological improvement than from global trade and increased immigration. These are the folks on the “destruction” side of “creative destruction.” I try to resist reducing voters I disagree with down to singular explanations, but at the margins voters who face uncertain and scary economic (lack of) prospects because of the relentless march of capitalist efficiency and innovation may be spurred to political activism that is ultimately dangerous, even to their own interests, broadly understood.
Voters who are jobless, suffering, and can’t easily move to where the new jobs are or who are too strapped by circumstances to retool their skills sets are unsurprisingly dissatisfied with “the system,” whether this is understood to be snobby coastal elitists, the bosses, holier-than-thou Hollywood progressives, or political correctness enforcers who insist that decent, struggling folks are really the “privileged” ones. This wing of the electorate is vulnerable, and they are justified in their dissatisfaction with their lot in the system, and the nameless, nebulous forces pushing them around, even if they’re not at all justified in their proposed solutions (far from it!). When in difficult times politicians ignore or dismiss these sentiments, or when only candidates who symbolize the “Establishment” are on offer to the voters, then the angry and disenchanted may opt for a chaos candidate.
I have frequently heard Donald Trump likened to a bull in a china shop. The problem is some of the fine china are the very norms and institutions of liberal democracy, whether this takes the form of assaulting the independence of the judiciary, attacking the legitimacy of the free press, discrediting the state’s treaty commitments in the international community, casting doubt on the fairness and validity of the democratic process, or the countless little violations of precedent norms that Trump keeps racking up (e.g., refusing to fully divest from his personal economic interests, threatening and ridiculing his political opponents, failing to disclose his tax returns, etc). The danger to American liberal democracy is clear and present.
The liberal order has provided the fertile soil for unprecedented gains in human well-being, understood as health, wealth, and real opportunities for individuals to explore and create their authentic selves. It must not be taken for granted. It is more fragile than we often realize and can be corroded or smashed by tribal authoritarian impulses abetted by social and economic discontents.
The losers from the necessarily always evolving economy — without dynamic change there can be little innovation and growth — must not be allowed a vandal’s veto. But the real hardships from topsy-turvy economic and social change warrant acknowledgment and assistance.
Panaceas are not on offer and a UBI is no exception. The losers from economic change must still adapt, but a UBI facilitates this without the paternalism, malformed incentives, or gaps of traditional welfare. Once again, the universality of the UBI makes an important difference in social perceptions. A UBI is not a handout and it’s not charity. There is no pity involved that can add to the sense of social marginalization that economically and culturally displaced citizens may feel. These citizens received their UBI by virtue of their membership in the polity when times were heady and their careers seemed secure. They remain entitled to the same UBI as the winds of change turn tornadic.
A UBI respects individuals as citizens even when they’re on hard times, and it ensures that “the system” never abandons them. This gives voters of all backgrounds a sense of political buy-in and lessens the appeal of chaos candidates.
The Deafness of Basic Income
If Lady Justice is blind, then the Basic Income is deaf. In an important sense, we don’t want to hear the particular plights of the poor and the displaced and the oppressed when we don’t have to. When we hear rival complaints from domestic disputants, or mutually antagonistic employers and employees, or hinterlanders and urbanites, we are forced to adjudicate between them. Our disagreements risk further polarizing an already dangerously polarized political discourse.
The poor will always be with us. And oppression will always plague us as a species prone to pecking orders. But a UBI of fear offers a chance of removing the circumstances of oppression and exploitation from a wide section of human interactions by simply handing out cash without listening to anyone’s reasons why they deserve it and their neighbor doesn’t.
And, just perhaps, a UBI may even diminish the sporadic spasms of burn-the-system-to-the-ground political nihilism. That is a chance worth taking.Fitbits are marketed as devices that can help track things such as your heart rate to better improve your lifestyle, but a new study commissioned by plaintiffs in a lawsuit shows that maybe they’re not as accurate as some would lead you to believe.
The results of a study conducted by researchers at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in which participants’ heart rates were simultaneously measured by a Fitbit on each wrist and a device called a BioHarness hooked up to a electrocardiogram, found that the PurePulse heart rate monitors on two Fitbit models - the Surge and Charge HR - can be off by up to 20 beats per minute. Additionally, there were inconsistencies between the two devices and at times, the device didn’t record a heart beat at all. Between the two devices, the study found a greater discrepancy with the Surge than with the Charge HR.
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Forty three adults were put through differing levels of activity throughout a 65-minute session, from jogging to jump-roping to full-out treadmill running. Results showed that the more intense the exercise, the greater the margin of error.
“The PurePulse Trackers do not accurately measure a user’s heart rate, particularly during moderate to high intensity exercise, and cannot be used to provide a meaningful estimate of a user’s heart rate,” the researchers wrote.
The study was used in an amended complaint in a class action lawsuit filed against the company by several Fitbit customers who claimed that some trackers didn’t accurately measure heart rates during exercise. This skews the results a bit due to bias, but it isn’t the first investigation to be done into Fitbit accuracy. WTHR, a news station in Indiana, manually recorded things such as steps taken and calories burned and found similar results when compared to the Fitbits participants were wearing. A 2014 article in the Berkeley Science Review also found that the more intense the exercise, the more the Fitbit was prone to error.
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Update: Fitbit issued a statement in response to the claims stated by the study and the lawsuit.
What the plaintiffs’ attorneys call a “study” is biased, baseless, and nothing more than an attempt to extract a payout from Fitbit. It lacks scientific rigor and is the product of flawed methodology. It was paid for by plaintiffs’ lawyers who are suing Fitbit, and was conducted with a consumer-grade electrocardiogram – not a true clinical device, as implied by the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Furthermore, there is no evidence the device used in the purported “study” was tested for accuracy. Fitbit’s research team rigorously researched and developed PurePulse technology for three years prior to introducing it to market and continues to conduct extensive internal studies to test the features of our products. Fitbit Charge HR is the #1 selling fitness tracker on the market, and is embraced by millions of consumers around the globe. Consumer Reports independently tested the heart rate accuracy of the Charge HR and Surge after the initial lawsuit was filed in January and gave both products an “excellent” rating. We stand behind our heart-rate monitoring technology and all our products, and continue to believe the plaintiffs’ allegations do not have any merit. We are vigorously defending against these claims, and will resist any attempts by the plaintiffs’ lawyers to leverage a settlement with misleading tactics and false claims of scientific evidence.”
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A source familiar with the Fitbit’s background commented additionally on the Zephyr BioHarness, which was used to measure heart rate in the study. She said there is “no validation that it’s any more accurate than our product.”
[CNN]When I want to subscribe myself for a newsletter, website, online application or want to sign in, I need to put in my password. This is the easiest way to protect websites/applications and it works, but what I really don’t understand is why passwords appear as dots in the textfield.
To me this is against the basics of user friendlyness because people need to see a clear result of their action, eg. a keystroke. This way you can’t know which dot represents which character (unless you start to count), so there is a possibility that you made a typo in the password. Of course this can be simply overcome with a second textfield which checks if both passwords are the same, but what happens if you copied the first password and paste it in the second textfield? Your subscription is send of for confirmation with the wrong password.
It’s been encouraged to make your passwords longer (8-16 characters) and to use combinations of different characters (abc – 123 –?!), otherwise the form will not be send away. These kind of demands make it even more difficult to avoid typos. Although I understand that you can’t put just anything in the textfield and you should think this over carefully, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done in a user friendly manner.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder why and when these dots appeared for the first time… I guess it was in the ’90 when only one person had a pc and had to share it with the rest of the village. Whenever the user switched the power on, the others were watching as well, out of curiosity. Back then they had to find a way to scramble the password while typing it into the textfield to keep it a secret. All stupidity aside, this could have been a nice story, no?
The obvious reason why we still set the password field as dots, is security… we didn’t want people to have a peek in the ’90 and we still don’t allow it now. The computers are getting smaller with the year and what started out as a computer for the entire village is now a small electronic device inside your pocket. The pc has never been more personal than now, making the peeking-over-your-shoulder story less likely.
The solution
The easiest solution would be to change the textfield to ‘text’ instead of ‘password’. As I can imagine that this solution is too much for many developpers I have another suggestion found on the website of dynamicdrive.com. For this solution you can keep your textfield as dots but you include a small button next to this textfield saying “switch to text”. With the help of javascript you can change the state of your textfield from ‘password’ to ‘text’, meaning from dots to normal text. This way you can check your password before submitting the form and you don’t need a second password field.
This solutions seems to work just fine but it has its flaws. First of all it requires an extra click from the user which can be annoying for those who go through forms with the tab key. Secondly, what if you checked your password by pushing the button and forgot to change it back to password mode?
For this reason I came up with another idea, no unnecessary clicks and easier to go through the form. The status of the text field is set to ‘password’, but once you enter it with the tab key or mouse click the status is changed to ‘text’ which makes your password readable. When you leave the text field, the status is changed back to ‘password’, making your password again unreadable. Unfortunately, after two days of coding I still didn’t get the result I was hoping for. After searching on the web I’ve found an example made by viget.com.
I would have liked to put the example in this post but it was conflicting with the current version of jquery.
I’ve tried the code in different browsers and it works in Internet Explorer (6,7 and 8), Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. Special thanks to the people of viget.com
UPDATE
I’ve been looking into free online mail applications and found mailchimp as a nice solution. Apparently mailchimp is using the second solution for the password-in-dots story. Have a look at the image below.
Mailchimp prompts the user to fill in their password only once. With the help of a little checkbox, you can quicly unveil the password to check it for possible typo’s.Two prisoners died in police custody since Saturday night in separate cases at Al-Zaytoon and Dar Al-Salam police stations.
The first case, the Interior Ministry said, died inside Al-Zaytoon police station’s detention centre due to circulatory failure. A preliminary report by the prosecution announced that the deceased was a narcotics user. An autopsy was ordered by the prosecution, to find out the exact details of the incident.
The second victim died in Dar Al-Salam police station, due to a “diabetic coma”, the Interior Ministry said.
On Saturday, a police officer and two of his aides were detained upon orders from the Prosecutor General’s office, pending investigations into torture allegations that led to the death of a suspect in their custody.
The victim’s relatives have filed a complaint against the police officer and two undercover agents, accusing them of assaulting the victim and causing his death, state-run newspaper Al-Ahram reported Friday.
On 23 April, a man named Khaled Samir died in the Shubra Al-Khaimah police station.
The El Nadeem Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence has documented hundreds of torture cases inside prisons in April. Since the beginning of the year, the number of deaths in police custody has been increasing.
Last month, after the death of two prisoners in the Old Cairo police station, the prosecution reviewed the situation. It found that the number of detainees in the cell was 380, whilst its capacity allows only 100 prisoners.
Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat organised a visit to detention centres at a number of police stations, where he observed several “violations”, such as the presence of insects and rubbish, state media reported.
The police stations included the Ain Shams, El-Marg, Shubra El-Kheima, and Matariya.
Matariya police station is controversially known on the political scene as the “slaughter house”, in reference to the abundance of torture cases against detainees who are pending investigations.
Over-crowdedness observed by the prosecution “can lead to the spread of diseases and the deaths of diabetes and blood pressure patients”, the prosecution said. The members of the prosecution said that the conditions of the cells were “inhumane”.
Last January, Human Rights Watch released a report strongly criticising Egyptian authorities for failing to improve detention conditions or to independently investigate reported detainees’ deaths as a result of physical torture inside prisons.How will it work? Smokers will be banished from footpath dining areas, pub courtyards and beer gardens when food is being served. But there are exceptions. Smoking will be allowed in restaurants and pubs with enough real estate to establish four-metre buffers between smokers and diners. Others can erect 2.1-metre-high cafe blinds.
Smoking will also be permitted at times when food is not being served, unless the venue owner decides to ban smoking entirely. Can I have a cigarette with my coffee?
Yes, provided food is not being served at the time (or within four metres) and the venue owner allows it. Smoking is also allowed if snacks, not meals, are being served. The government defines a snack as "pre-packaged shelf-stable food" that does not require any preparation prior to serving. That includes pre-packaged potato crisps, nuts and chocolate bars. Hot chips and pre-packaged sandwiches are not considered snacks. How will it be enforced?
Council inspectors will be watching for smokers still lighting up. However, a spokeswoman for Health Minister Jill Hennessy said the first priority of the inspectors would be "to make sure businesses understand the ban" and said fines would be issued "where necessary". Businesses also risk a fine for failing to display 'no smoking' signs. What do cafe and bar owners think? For smaller cafes and bars, and thriving dining precincts such as Lygon Street and Degraves Street that rely heavily on footpath trading, the bans are of particular concern.
Some businesses made the change long ago, but others say it goes against Melbourne's laneway culture. Degraves Espresso manager Sam Hilaa doesn't support the new laws but said his hands were tied and he would be banning smoking altogether. "Everyone smokes in our alleyway. It's really grungy and part of the character. We just have to get used to it, I guess." Alex Brosca, owner of Lygon Street restaurant Papa Gino's, said he found it more difficult accommodating smokers. "We have no qualms with it. We stopped smoking outside over a year ago," he said.
"We were breaking up fights when smoke was going into children's faces and it was causing all sorts of problems." The Imperial Hotel made their rooftop smoke-free when it opened in December 2015, calling it a popular and "exceptionally easy" decision. MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - JANUARY 19: The rooftop space at Imperial rooftop bar in the cbd on January 19, 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Wayne Taylor/Fairfax Media) Credit:Wayne Taylor Patrons hoping to light up a cigarette in the upstairs beer garden at Irish pub The Last Jar will be told to be butt out. For years, punters at the Melbourne CBD pub have crowded into the beer garden rain, hail or shine, for a cigarette with their pint of Guinness.
But the pub's manager Bryony Fitzgerald said all ashtrays will be removed from the outdoor area next month. Staff will also be heavily enforcing the new rules and anyone caught smoking risks being kicked out of the Elizabeth Street venue. Ms Fitzgerald feared the changes would force smokers to spill out onto the street, which she said "was not a good look" for business. "We're actually quite concerned about how we are going to monitor it because we are a busy venue and during peak times staff are run off their feet as it is... this is another thing they are going to have to do," Ms Fitzgerald said. "Our beer garden is packed in the middle of summer and despite the cold weather, it's always packed in winter too, so to ban smoking all together will literally kick our customers out on the streets."
Ms Fitzgerald criticised the state government's roll-out of the changes and said many patrons were unaware the new regulations were even coming into effect. "We're telling people about the changes when they come in, nobody seems to even know it's happening," she said. Bryony Fitzgerald, manager of the Last Jar, with a smoker in the beer garden. Credit:Joe Armao Don't we already have smoking bans? Victoria banned smoking indoors at pubs and restaurants in July 2007.
It was banned around schools, hospitals, courts and police stations in April. Victoria is the last state to impose the ban and lags well behind Queensland and Western Australia where smoking in outdoor dining areas was outlawed in 2006. NSW and South Australia barred smoking in outdoor dining areas last year. More recently, Queensland banned smoking within 10 metres of public picnic tables and barbecues, and within five metres of bus stops and taxi ranks. The Andrews government announced the legislation for Victoria in 2015, but gave businesses two years to prepare. Why are we doing this?
Well, smoking kills, obviously. Aside from being unpleasant, second-hand smoke can cause cancer and heart disease. It also increases the risk of miscarriage, and can cause asthma attacks. A 2014 Cancer Council survey found 73 per cent of Victorians disapprove of smoking in outdoor dining areas. Quit Victoria research shows 88 per cent of Victorians do not smoke daily.Satisfied Marilyn Manson has Rib Sewn Back On
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Industrial rock legend Marilyn Manson had a previously removed pair of his ribs successfully reattached late last night in an unprecedented medical procedure, deciding he’s gone without them “long enough,” according to reports from the Manson camp.
Rumors swirled for decades alleging Manson had his lowest two ribs removed in order to bend forward at an optimal angle to conduct what doctors refer to as “autofellatio.” Those rumors were finally confirmed following the surgery, as Manson’s publicist released a statement outlining the return of the ribs to the aging shock-rocker’s body.
“I think removing the ribs occurred to him around the time ‘I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)’ came out. He was in a weird place. Weirder than normal, I mean,” said longtime bandmate Twiggy Ramirez. “Think about it. You’re this ‘scary’ musician, and you’ve got all kinds of money and success. What are you gonna do? Buy a Bentley? Fuck that. You’re gonna have surgery so you can to go down on yourself. We all want that ability, and Marilyn was the only person brave enough to actually do it.”
Those close to Manson say the missing ribs have been hiding in plain sight for years, inside a mason jar atop a foyer shelf in the star’s Hollywood home. The ribs never drew attention, however, as that jar was reported to be “only the sixth-weirdest thing” on the shelf, which also contained a mustache comb reportedly owned by Adolph Hitler.
Related:
The bones, sources say, will be reinstalled by the man who took them out two decades ago: Dr. Jonathan Ali. The plastic |
on polls”, like The Economist’s, fails to appreciate the roller coaster French politics has been taken on over the past year. Just about every scenario which was plausible under the normal rules has been crushed. French voters are in a “dégagiste” mood. No preordained scenario will do.
The political system is struggling to adapt. Instead of reversing the decay of mainstream parties, the primary process has accelerated it. The divisions and contradictions of the centre-left have become so obvious that the incumbent president, François Hollande, couldn’t seek his party’s approval to run for a second term. Thinking it could not lose, the centre-right picked a radical candidate, François Fillon, whom it is now stuck with despite layer upon layer of embarrassing revelations.
The FN has been steadily growing over the past five years, even in parts of the electorate which have traditionally been hostile to it. It is therefore no surprise that Ms Le Pen is the most likely to reach the second round—by a long way. But the appearance of Emmanuel Macron, an independent, liberal candidate in the centre, has taken everyone by surprise.
Voters are more perplexed than excited by the reshaping of the country’s politics. French pollsters, who do have an excellent track record, are registering record levels of undecided voters and—crucially—stronger mobilisation for Ms Le Pen than for any other candidate.
Turnout will be key to the outcome. Pollsters generally estimate that turnout will be in line with or above historic averages. But voter frustration and resignation may instead result in low turnout, which will almost certainly benefit Ms Le Pen.
It is assumed that Mr Macron, the centrist, is the ideal candidate to unify the right and the left in a “Republican Front” against Ms Le Pen. Simulated second-round polls support this assumption. However, since Mr Fillon’s scandal has placed Mr Macron as the de facto favourite, voters have become increasingly frustrated, and see him as a front for the unpopular administration of Mr Hollande. This is especially true for centre-right voters, who feel robbed. One-third of them are prepared to vote for Ms Le Pen over Mr Macron. Even more will abstain. Left-wing voters are also suspicious of Mr Macron and his liberalising designs. Fewer voters in this group will transfer to Ms Le Pen than from the right, but the reassuring polls may introduce a sense of complacency about the risk presented by Ms Le Pen, and could lead many voters to abstain or spoil their ballots.
Mr Macron has an advantage over Ms Le Pen, but only a very slight one. We haven’t yet entered the peculiar atmosphere of the entre deux tours. Mr Macron has tried to position himself as an anti-establishment candidate, but his efforts have lacked credibility. Social-media users have consistently criticised Mr Macron as a pet of the mainstream media. On the left, social-media users associate him with unpopular policies during Mr Hollande’s term, such as liberalisation reforms that undermined the economic security of ordinary French voters. On the right, they frequently call attention to Mr Hollande’s soft and uninspiring economic reforms.
Mr Macron’s attempts to firm up voters’ support have had mixed results. Eurasia Group’s social-media analysis—which combines volume-based and linguistic sentiment analysis—finds that Mr Macron has not been able to communicate his economic policies in a coherent or compelling narrative, despite it being his original area of expertise. His proposals are not connecting with citizens: on balance, social-media users are either critical of or indifferent to them. Ms Le Pen, on the other hand, has had much more success in connecting to voters on her key issues.
Ms Le Pen will make a violent charge against Mr Macron as the establishment’s final, desperate attempt to keep the FN out of power. Mr Macron will be forced to defend the European Union, immigration and “openness”—things a majority of voters are now suspicious of. There is also the risk of embarrassing revelations, which Mr Macron has avoided until now. His biggest vulnerability is his past in mergers and acquisitions. Any email showing him to be insensitive to the fate of employees could be toxic.
A run-off between Ms Le Pen and Mr Fillon is generally accepted as riskier. We don’t necessarily agree, given that Mr Macron’s first-round voters would be much more willing to partake in a Republican Front than Mr Fillon’s would. Voting in favor of Mr Fillon’s onerous reform programme will be unbearable for most of the left, especially given what they now know about his own lifestyle. Still, Mr Fillon has adopted Ms Le Pen’s rhetoric of “economic patriotism”, and is similarly hawkish on internal security questions, thus limiting her voter niche.
Why Marine Le Pen has a 1% chance to win
By The Economist
NOT long ago it was seen as proof of numeracy, not heresy, to say that a candidate trailing in the polls by 15 percentage points or more was exceedingly unlikely to win an election. No one gave Walter Mondale a snowball’s chance in hell when he lagged Ronald Reagan in surveys by 18 points in 1984, and went on to lose by 18 points. No one argued that Germany’s Social Democrats had a prayer of knocking off Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in 2013, when polls put them 14 points down and they succumbed by 16. And no one bet on Jacques Chirac in France when he was a 15-point underdog to François Mitterrand in the first round of the 1988 presidential election. When the votes were cast, Mr Chirac cut his deficit to a mere 14 points.
As a result, we did not anticipate any controversy when we published the results of our French election forecast, which gives Marine Le Pen of the National Front a 1% chance of becoming the next president. To be sure, she is well-positioned to advance to the run-off, currently placing a close second in the polls. However, surveys of Ms Le Pen’s expected vote shares against her potential rivals for the second round on May 7th are downright brutal. Facing either the conservative François Fillon or the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, she trails by 15 percentage points. And against her most likely opponent, Emmanuel Macron, her chances look even grimmer: he leads her by a whopping 26 points. It doesn’t take a degree in statistics to determine that such margins are next to impossible to surmount. As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight recently noted, even a massive polling error in Ms Le Pen’s favour—as big as those in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential victory combined—would still leave her 12 points short.
Given these widely circulated polling numbers, we were surprised when Mr Bremmer announced that he regarded our conclusion as outlandish. We are extremely pleased to share Eurasia Group’s perspective with our readers directly. However, after digesting their analysis, we are sticking to our guns.
Our interpretation of the campaign differs from Eurasia Group’s on a few central points. First, Mr Bremmer and Mr Lichfield write that Ms Le Pen is “the most likely [candidate] to reach the second round”. Their firm’s final briefing on the election implied that she was guaranteed to advance to the run-off. In our view, such certainty seems complacent. Ms Le Pen’s polling numbers have actually been sinking of late. For the first time since January, she is now in a close but clear second place. Given the downward trend in her support—from around a 26% first-round voting intention earlier in the race to some 22% now—a qualitatively-minded analyst might even be tempted to speculate about the worrying implications for the National Front of such “negative momentum”. With just a narrow lead over Mr Fillon and Mr Mélenchon of two to three percentage points in The Economist’s polling average, it is entirely possible that one of them could dethrone her. We put the odds of her failing to make the final two at 35%.
A frequent argument advanced in defence of Ms Le Pen’s chances is that her supporters are more committed than are those of her opponents, and thus that she is likely to enjoy a turnout advantage on election day. Earlier in the campaign, there was some evidence to support this claim: at the start of February, only 44% of poll respondents who backed Mr Macron said they were certain about him. Today, however, the case appears much weaker. According to the final survey conducted by BVA, a French pollster, 73% of respondents planning to vote for Mr Macron in the first round now say their mind is made up.
Moreover, it is far from clear that the turnout battle is likely to favour Ms Le Pen, as Mr Bremmer and Mr Lichfield predict. Although her backers are still somewhat more solid than Mr Macron’s, they are no more loyal than Mr Fillon’s: for both of the right-wing candidates, 85% of their supporters say their decision is final. Mr Fillon may well be the most underestimated candidate in the race, as his rural, Catholic base is seen as highly reliable to show up to vote. And although Mr Macron’s support may remain soft in relative terms, his lead in stated voting intention is so enormous that Ms Le Pen has no hope to beat him on the strength of the enthusiasm gap alone. Even if every single National Front voter showed up to the polls but only 58% of Mr Macron’s did, he could still eke out a victory. In order to have a prayer against him, Ms Le Pen will have to persuade some of Mr Macron’s voters to switch sides—an extremely tall order, given the yawning ideological gap between the two candidates.
However, our disagreements extend beyond such fine-grained analysis. Eurasia Group’s assessment begins with the claim that “any model ‘entirely based on polls’ fails to appreciate the roller coaster French politics has been taken on over the past year”. Fair enough: there are indeed many relevant forms of information that polls do not necessarily capture. For example, they cannot incorporate the risk of another well-timed Russian electronic intervention. And as we noted in our briefing on the French election in this week’s print issue, this year’s campaign is structurally different from previous ones, because only one of the four leading candidates in the first round hails from one of the country’s traditional major parties. This added uncertainty could make polls unusually unreliable.
At the same time, just because polls can’t tell you everything doesn’t mean they don’t tell you anything. Given that Eurasia Group has published a quantitative prediction of Ms Le Pen’s chances at 40%, one might assume they had deployed a quantitative methodology to produce it. However, the assessment by Mr Bremmer and Mr Lichfield contains nary a mention of the ample polling figures available. The only data they cite—without providing specific numbers—is their evaluation of comparative enthusiasm for the candidates on social media, which they say favours Ms Le Pen over Mr Macron. That’s intriguing, and we would be eager to see statistical evidence based on past French elections showing that data regarding social-media platforms—which were already well-established during the 2012 presidential campaign—contributes additional, relevant information on top of polling and yields more accurate predictions.
That is a high bar to overcome, because the historical record of French pollsters is in fact impressively accurate. During the past six presidential elections, the average prediction of run-off polls taken just before the first round has missed the actual second-round result by a mere three percentage points. In 2012, pre-first-round surveys gave François Hollande around 54% of the run-off vote against Nicolas Sarkozy; he wound up getting 52%. Five years earlier, they foresaw Mr Sarkozy’s 53% to 47% victory over Ségolène Royal to within a single percentage point. And of course, run-off polls in 2002 had Jacques Chirac crushing Ms Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie by 78% to 22%; Mr Chirac actually received 82%.
Pundits will never run out of bromides, and the sound bite of the season is that a victory for Ms Le Pen represents an inevitable third coming of the global right-wing populist wave following Brexit and Mr Trump. However, French voters are telling pollsters by the hundreds of thousands that they plan to reject Ms Le Pen. Predicting that at least 15% and possibly 25% of them are likely to change their minds within the next two weeks is an extraordinary claim. It should require extraordinary evidence.Here goes my 200th book report since joining Goodreads.
And my introduction to the fiction of John Fante is Ask the Dust, his 1939 novel considered by some scholars and educators to be one of the best works of fiction set in the Great Depression and the best set in Los Angeles. Superlatives like those could work against the book's vitality, which is palpable. Fante's narrator--destitute twenty year old boy Arturo Bandini struggling against hunger, wanting and creative resistance--lacks the worldl
Here goes my 200th book report since joining Goodreads.
And my introduction to the fiction of John Fante is Ask the Dust, his 1939 novel considered by some scholars and educators to be one of the best works of fiction set in the Great Depression and the best set in Los Angeles. Superlatives like those could work against the book's vitality, which is palpable. Fante's narrator--destitute twenty year old boy Arturo Bandini struggling against hunger, wanting and creative resistance--lacks the worldliness of John Steinbeck's Depression-era men and would've done well to read The Grapes of Wrath and grow up. His story is as bare as a cupboard, but Fante's language and the atmosphere he conjures are breathtaking.
I was passing the doorman of the Biltmore, and I hated him at once, with his yellow braids and six feet of height and all that dignity, and now a black automobile drove to the curb, and a man got out. He looked rich, and then a woman got out, and she was beautiful, her fur was silver fox, and she was a song across the sidewalk and inside the swinging doors, and I thought oh boy for a little of that, just a day and night of that, and she was a dream as I walked along, her perfume still in the wet morning air.
Then a great deal of time passed as I stood in front of a pipe shop and looked, and the whole world faded except that window and I stood and smoked them all, and saw myself a great author with that natty Italian briar, and a cane, stepping out of a big black car, and she was there too, proud as hell of me, the lady in the silver fox fur. We registered and then we had cocktails and then we danced awhile, and then we had another cocktail and I recited some lines of Sanskrit, and the world was so wonderful, because every two minutes some gorgeous one gazed at me, the great author, and nothing would do but I had to autograph her menu, and the silver fox girl was very jealous.
In reality, Arturo (or Arthur, depending on how prejudiced the person he's introducing himself to is towards Italians) is five months off the bus from Boulder, Colorado, chasing dreams of becoming the Great Writer he knows himself to be. He checks in to a room in the Alta Loma Hotel in Bunker Hill, in the center of downtown Los Angeles, with little more than one-hundred fifty dollars in his pocket and big dreams in his head. Arturo carried two suitcases, one full of copies of a literary magazine edited by his hero J.C. Hackmuth, who has published a short story Arturo wrote titled The Little Dog Laughed. No one in the hotel seems to care, too busy eroding by sun, hunger or dust.
Down to his last nickel, Arturo makes his way to Spring Street and a bar called the Columbia Buffet. He becomes fixated on a Mexican waitress named Camilla Lopez who serves him the worst cup of coffee he's ever tasted. Their romance hardly blossoms along the lines of mutual respect; Arturo projects his own self-loathing onto Camilla, who in return is often angry that the vigorous writer cannot be the man she loves, bartender Sammy Wiggins, who longs to publish western stories but is ailing from tuberculosis. Arturo is pursued by a desperate older woman named Vera Rivkin who becomes the inspiration for his first novel. Wanting to celebrate his success with Camilla, fate steps in.
So this is where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, an apartment in Los Angeles. She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this. It was so, ever in my imagination, ever a part of my scheming and thinking about her. This was her home, her ruin, her scattered dream.
The writing in Ask the Dust is so intoxicating, so filled with ardor and longing--whether it's righteous or completely misplaced by our boy narrator--that I couldn't help but fall under its spell. With little more than his imagination and a typewriter, Fante sketches Depression-era Los Angeles as vividly as the three greatest L.A. movies--Chinatown (1974), Blade Runner (1982) and L.A. Confidential (1997)--were able to do with an army of visual artists. Fante also knows the tempests brewing under the skin of both the aspiring artist and the amorous, socially awkward male--often one and the same--and conveys the life and times of both demographics memorably.
Ask the Dust comes up short of complete satisfaction due to a couple of things. There's the length, which I'd peg at 50,000 words, nearly novella length. This is accounting for the threadbare nature of the story, the unwillingness of Fante/Bandini to really explore Camilla, Sammy, Vera, or anyone else in Los Angeles. This is a book about a boy's angst first and a city second, with characters further down the list. There's also disconnection between Arutro and Camilla where a novelist like Steinbeck might've developed a connection. The target demographic for Fante might be budding (male) authors or those with an interest in historic Los Angeles. These are my demographics.
One of the novel's fans was Robert Towne, the Academy Award winning screenwriter of Chinatown who called Ask the Dust the greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles. In 2006, a long-simmering film version adapted and directed by Towne was released. Starring Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, Salma Hayek as Camilla and Idina Menzel as Vera, it suffered a fate similar to Billy Bob Thornton's 1999 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses as a sober love story mismatched with idealistic imagery. It is in Fante's book where his descriptions thrive. I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face.“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Steve Bannon said. | Getty Trump aide Bannon calls media the 'opposition party'
Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist, railed against the media in an interview, calling them the "opposition party" and advising the press corps to "keep its mouth shut."
Bannon, formerly an executive at Breitbart, a conservative, alt-right news outlet, said in an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday evening that the media had been “humiliated” by Trump’s election.
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“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Bannon said. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
He criticized The New York Times and The Washington Post by name in the interview, and said the mainstream media have “no power” as a result of the election.
“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.”Gaza is Bleeding – Again!
Gaza is bleeding again! More than 159 killed, the majority of the casualties are women and children, about 400 injured and many of those in transition from life to death. Beginning from the death and abduction of three settlers, followed by revenge killing of a Palestinian and then rockets fired by Hamas into the Israeli settlements and finally the knee-jerk reaction of Israel resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries. Contrary to Israeli claims, according to the UN, 77% of the dead are civilians, not Hamas members.
So far, Israel has made around 750 aerial hits in the last three days in the densely populated Gaza strip. They claim that Hamas has fired over 400 rockets but surprisingly no Israeli has been killed so far, nine injured and several treated for “shock.” You would expect a better aim from a battle-hardened organization like Hamas. Well, what can you say? War is as much about superiority in propaganda as it is about locking horns in the actual battlefield. As of now, Israeli troops have entered Gaza and are ready for a ground assault. So far, about 4000 residents of Gaza have fled in the face of an impending assault. “All our ground forces are ready; we have been training for this. We will exploit our ability the moment a decision is made to do so,” said a senior Israeli military official.
But why is it happening again? The biggest reason is that Palestinians refuse to relinquish their claim for a Palestinian state. So, as long as there is resistance from Palestinians, death and destruction will be forced upon their homes by Israel.
Aside from the war of words, there is an enormous human cost that residents of Gaza are paying:
“A group of young men, their homes without electricity, had gone to watch the World Cup semi-final between Argentina and the Netherlands at a small beach cafe – a basic place offering little more than a canopy and a generator – when they were hit with an Israeli missile.”
“It was 1.25 am. I was in the living room drinking coffee with my wife. The three children were in the bedroom. I can’t tell you if it was two missiles or three,” he said, his face pale and drawn, still stunned that his family had survived a strike that killed eight of his neighbors, including four women.”
Are We Feeling their Pain?
We, Pakistanis, have always had an affinity with Palestinians and we have supported the Palestinian cause since the creation of Pakistan. However, this time there seems to be not many ripples caused in Pakistan following the Gaza crisis. Maybe it’s because it’s Ramadan, people are more involved with the motions of this blessed month, concentrating on various aspects of their Ramadan routine and of course, preparing for Eid.
What’s expected from us is to at least make some noise, right? Mainstream media including the newspapers and electronic media outlets are the primary organs for making noise. But the coverage of this crisis is scant. It is the media’s responsibility to inform people about what’s going on. If they can engage the nation in the movements and activities of Veena Malik, they can surely raise concern and support for Gaza crisis.
While foreign publications are doing extensive coverage of the crisis, most of the Pakistani newspapers and TV channels – save a couple – ran one or two stories on various inner pages. As usual, there is lip service from our government in the form of canned statements condemning the brutal acts of Israel.
“Pakistan is deeply concerned at the recent escalation of violence and loss of lives in Gaza. Pakistan condemns Israeli aggression and supports the international community’s efforts in bringing about a cessation of unilateral Israeli strikes killing Palestinians, including women and children.”
In the past, for example during the Gaza crisis of 2012, there was considerable activism observed among the civil society. Various religious and political parties staged demonstrations and rallies in support of the Palestinian people. A group of Pakistani hackers attacked several Israeli brand websites and took control of them. A group of students in Lahore expressed solidarity in the form of a rally, where a banner carried this message:
“When you go to sleep at night 1.6 million people in Palestine stay awake to stay alive. Join our peaceful demonstration in Lahore, Pakistan to voice your protest against the brutal killings and a violation of humanity.”
As reported in The Express Tribune, According to Rasul Baksh Rais, a professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences,
“the vacuum in coverage of international events by the Pakistani media – electronic media in particular – reflects a lack of integrity, professionalism and training by media organizations. With respect to the Gaza attacks in particular, Rais stated that it is a major news story in terms of peace in the Middle East and human suffering but the Pakistani media predictably remains focused on its internal issues such as policing political actions and parties.”
Are we getting so encumbered by our own problems that we have stopped caring enough about the plight of our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world? Going about with my daily life, I often feel that way. How about you?
photo credit: Falcon EyE via photopin ccFree trade: Tony Abbott warns Labor against'short-term xenophobic politics' over China deal
Updated
Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the Chinese free trade agreement is too important for Labor to undermine it with what he has called short-term, xenophobic politics.
Labor and the unions have been highly critical of the deal, arguing the removal of certain skills assessments for Chinese tradesmen seeking work in Australia puts safety at risk.
"These free trade agreements are too important for our country, they're too important for our businesses and too important for our children to be sacrificed at the altar of short-term xenophobic politics," Mr Abbott said.
Mr Abbott said Labor should not discard its historical links with Asia.
"It was, after all, Gough Whitlam who signed the first trade agreement with China 42 years ago last Friday," he said.
"Likewise it was a vision for deep engagement with the region that drove Bob Hawke and Paul Keating."
Treasurer Joe Hockey agrees.
"It is hugely important for Australia to have a free trade agreement with China, they are our biggest trading partner," he said.
"They have made a huge, very significant, positive contribution to the Australian economy over the last few years, when the rest of the world has clapped out.
"I say emphatically to Bill Shorten, please Mr Shorten, stand up to the unions, do not give in to the xenophobic demands of the CFMEU, the union that is helping to hold you up in the Labor Party.
"Do not give in to them and simply try and roll the free trade agreement with China, because ultimately that will cost Australians jobs."
Opposition spokeswoman Penny Wong said Labor will continue to scrutinise the deal and the Coalition should "stop playing the race card".
"Labor's concerns about the agreement are about jobs and the inclusion of an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism," she said.
"There's no place for racism in the debate over the China-Australia free trade agreement."
Michael O'Connor from the CFMEU said the Coalition is just trying to avoid scrutiny of a bad deal.
"We're a union that fights racism everywhere we go — we fight racism here and we fight racism abroad," he said.
"In fact I'd back our record on fighting xenophobia and fighting racism against the Liberal Party's any day."
Topics: trade, international-aid-and-trade, business-economics-and-finance, australia, china
First postedGRAND RAPIDS, MI - A former Michigan Technological University student has settled his lawsuit against the school over an alleged internet threat against blacks.
Details of the settlement were not released.
Matthew Schultz's Nov. 12, 2015, online post triggered an uproar at the Upper Peninsula school.
"Gonna shoot all black people......A smile tomorrow," he wrote, in a post on Yik Yak, a social-media app.
It was followed by a smiley-face emoji.
The post came down within five minutes, but another former student, who took a screen shot and altered it to say only, "Gonna shoot all black people," sent it to the university.
Schultz said he provided the school with his original post but said school officials ignored it to show a tough stance on racial issues.
He was kicked out of school and arrested.
'Poster boy for white hatred:' Michigan Tech misled students about racial threats, suit says Matthew Schultz, a third-year student, says he was expelled after administrators blamed him for a racist post that had been altered by someone else.
"This case tells a troubling tale that even after MTU realized Plaintiff's social media post was significantly altered, they refused to back down, and perpetuated false public information for their own purposes. It calls into mind the political saw: 'It's not the crime, it's the cover-up,'" attorneys Steve Pence and Nicholas Roumel wrote.
The university said it took an appropriate response given school shootings reported across the country.
Michigan Tech defends expulsion for controversial post to'shoot' blacks The expelled student has filed a federal lawsuit against Michigan Technological University, saying his Internet post had been altered to make it sound sinister.
"Given the horrific instances of gun violence that have occurred on university campuses across the country in recent years, the intense reaction that (Schultz's) post provoked is not surprising," the school's attorney, Michael Cavanaugh, wrote in court documents.
"Indeed, reasonable recipients of the post viewed Plaintiff's message as making two distinct statements: 'Gonna shoot all black people' and that the anonymous poster would have "A smile tomorrow' (perhaps after shooting black people today)," Cavanaugh wrote.
Schultz was a third-year mechanical-engineering student at Michigan Tech.
He said the school provided information that he was responsible for the altered post.
"Throughout the coming days, MTU officials continued to fan the flames of racial conflict, always using Matthew as a poster boy for white hatred...," Pence wrote.
Criminal charges against him were ultimately dropped.
The agreement to settle, filed Tuesday, June 13, awaits the approval of U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist.AT THE FIRST SESSION
Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring),
SECTION 1. Concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2017.
(a) Declaration.—Congress declares that this resolution is the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2017 and that this resolution sets forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2018 through 2026.
(b) Table of contents.—The table of contents for this concurrent resolution is as follows:
SEC. 1101. Recommended levels and amounts.
The following budgetary levels are appropriate for each of fiscal years 2017 through 2026:
(1) FEDERAL REVENUES.—For purposes of the enforcement of this resolution:
(A) The recommended levels of Federal revenues are as follows:
Fiscal year 2017: $2,682,088,000,000. Fiscal year 2018: $2,787,834,000,000. Fiscal year 2019: $2,884,637,000,000. Fiscal year 2020: $3,012,645,000,000. Fiscal year 2021: $3,131,369,000,000. Fiscal year 2022: $3,262,718,000,000. Fiscal year 2023: $3,402,888,000,000. Fiscal year 2024: $3,556,097,000,000. Fiscal year 2025: $3,727,756,000,000. Fiscal year 2026: $3,903,628,000,000.
(B) The amounts by which the aggregate levels of Federal revenues should be changed are as follows:
Fiscal year 2017: $0. Fiscal year 2018: $0. Fiscal year 2019: $0. Fiscal year 2020: $0. Fiscal year 2021: $0. Fiscal year 2022: $0. Fiscal year 2023: $0. Fiscal year 2024: $0. Fiscal year 2025: $0. Fiscal year 2026: $0.
(2) NEW BUDGET AUTHORITY.—For purposes of the enforcement of this resolution, the appropriate levels of total new budget authority are as follows:
Fiscal year 2017: $3,308,000,000,000. Fiscal year 2018: $3,350,010,000,000. Fiscal year 2019: $3,590,479,000,000. Fiscal year 2020: $3,779,449,000,000. Fiscal year 2021: $3,947,834,000,000. Fiscal year 2022: $4,187,893,000,000. Fiscal year 2023: $4,336,952,000,000. Fiscal year 2024: $4,473,818,000,000. Fiscal year 2025: $4,726,484,000,000. Fiscal year 2026: $4,961,154,000,000.
(3) BUDGET OUTLAYS.—For purposes of the enforcement of this resolution, the appropriate levels of total budget outlays are as follows:
Fiscal year 2017: $3,264,662,000,000. Fiscal year 2018: $3,329,394,000,000. Fiscal year 2019: $3,558,237,000,000. Fiscal year 2020: $3,741,304,000,000. Fiscal year 2021: $3,916,533,000,000. Fiscal year 2022: $4,159,803,000,000. Fiscal year 2023: $4,295,742,000,000. Fiscal year 2024: $4,419,330,000,000. Fiscal year 2025: $4,673,813,000,000. Fiscal year 2026: $4,912,205,000,000.
(4) DEFICITS.—For purposes of the enforcement of this resolution, the amounts of the deficits are as follows:
Fiscal year 2017: $582,574,000,000. Fiscal year 2018: $541,560,000,000. Fiscal year 2019: $673,600,000,000. Fiscal year 2020: $728,659,000,000. Fiscal year 2021: $785,164,000,000. Fiscal year 2022: $897,085,000,000. Fiscal year 2023: $892,854,000,000. Fiscal year 2024: $863,233,000,000. Fiscal year 2025: $946,057,000,000. Fiscal year 2026: $1,008,577,000,000.
(5) PUBLIC DEBT.—Pursuant to section 301(a)(5) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C. 632(a)(5)), the appropriate levels of the public debt are as follows:
Fiscal year 2017: $20,034,788,000,000. Fiscal year 2018: $20,784,183,000,000. Fiscal year 2019: $21,625,729,000,000. Fiscal year 2020: $22,504,763,000,000. Fiscal year 2021: $23,440,271,000,000. Fiscal year 2022: $24,509,421,000,000. Fiscal year 2023: $25,605,527,000,000. Fiscal year 2024: $26,701,273,000,000. Fiscal year 2025: $27,869,175,000,000. Fiscal year 2026: $29,126,158,000,000.
(6) DEBT HELD BY THE PUBLIC.—The appropriate levels of debt held by the public are as follows:
Fiscal year 2017: $14,593,316,000,000. Fiscal year 2018: $15,198,740,000,000. Fiscal year 2019: $15,955,144,000,000. Fiscal year 2020: $16,791,740,000,000. Fiscal year 2021: $17,713,599,000,000. Fiscal year 2022: $18,787,230,000,000. Fiscal year 2023: $19,901,290,000,000. Fiscal year 2024: $21,033,163,000,000. Fiscal year 2025: $22,301,661,000,000. Fiscal year 2026: $23,691,844,000,000.
SEC. 1102. Major functional categories.
Congress determines and declares that the appropriate levels of new budget authority and outlays for fiscal years 2017 through 2026 for each major functional category are:
(1) National Defense (050):
Fiscal year 2017:
(A) New budget authority, $623,910,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $603,716,000,000.
Fiscal year 2018:
(A) New budget authority, $618,347,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $601,646,000,000.
Fiscal year 2019:
(A) New budget authority, $632,742,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $617,943,000,000.
Fiscal year 2020:
(A) New budget authority, $648,198,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $632,435,000,000.
Fiscal year 2021:
(A) New budget authority, $663,703,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $646,853,000,000.
Fiscal year 2022:
(A) New budget authority, $679,968,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $666,926,000,000.
Fiscal year 2023:
(A) New budget authority, $696,578,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $678,139,000,000.
Fiscal year 2024:
(A) New budget authority, $713,664,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $689,531,000,000.
Fiscal year 2025:
(A) New budget authority, $731,228,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $711,423,000,000.
Fiscal year 2026:
(A) New budget authority, $750,069,000,000.
(B) Outlays, $729,616,000,000.
(2) International Affairs (150):
Fiscal year 2017:
(A) New budget |
These are most likely remnants of outliers – the eroded remains of what was once a continuous high plateau. Originally, it may have consisted of sedimentary deposits that were carried into the basin by the wind and subsequently altered by the influence of water.
The Atlantis basin likely owes its existence to an asteroid impact that took place in the early history of Mars. Now, the circular profile of what could be the crater rim is barely detectable. There are several other large basins in Sirenum Terra – most likely created by asteroid impacts as well.
The newly-released video tour, created by scientists at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, takes us above a well-preserved crater bearing traces of sediment at the base and showing visible fissures.
Then, we fly over a straight section of a valley of tectonic origin, with rifts on both sides, before continuing across a plain with light-colored sedimentation and a number of flow fronts consisting of solidified, low-viscosity lava.
We are then taken across a large, ‘chaotic area’ with a number of light-colored mesas, before entering a mountainous region, up to 1.24 miles (2 km) in height.
It is possible that standing water once filled the Atlantis basin and the adjoining depressions, which include several impact craters dating back 3 to 4 billion years: Eridania Lake. It could even have covered an area of one million square miles, making it roughly half the size of the Mediterranean.
Ma’adim Vallis – a roughly 435-mile (700 km) outflow channel though to have carried water northwards from the lake to form a deeper-lying expanse in Gusev crater – opens up northwest of Eridania: the antique name for Po Mountain and the Po Valley in Italy. It was there, in the 103-mile (166 km) Gusev crater, where NASA’s rover Spirit landed in January 2004.A group of prominent Australian Football League (AFL) players will pledge to never use homophobic language on the field and will urge people to confront other fans when they use homophobic slurs
The Australian Football League will take further steps to make homophobia unacceptable in the sport after backing the No To Homophobia campaign in August last year.
Now the players themselves are stepping forward with the AFL Players Association set to launch its own campaign to coincide with the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) on May 17.
‘We want to make sure that any person who is involved in football whether they’re a player, an official or a supporter, feels very comfortable to be themselves in their workplace or at the game,’ AFL Players Association chief Matt Finnis told Fairfax newspapers, comparing the situation to where the code had been with racism 20 years ago.
‘Twenty years ago last month [indigenous footballer] Nicky Winmar lifted his jumper and took a stand and you’d like to think that not withstanding the isolated issues we experience from time to time, the volume of outwardly racist language has diminished as a result of that leadership that was shown.’
Winmar famously lifted his shirt during a game to show his pride in his complexion after being abused by racist fans.
As part of the campaign a group of prominent players will make a public pledge not to use homophobic language and will encourage people to challenge other fans if they catch them shouting homophobic abuse.
Players named as taking part include Essendon captain Jobe Watson and Collingwood players Scott Pendlebury and Luke Ball.
Those players will be joined by Richmond’s Daniel Jackson, Carlton’s Brock McLean, Kangaroos vice-captain Drew Petrie and Hawthorn’s Matt Spangher in making video messages highlighting the effects that homophobic language can have on people and players will also be encouraged to use their social media to share the message.
McLean has previously called for homophobic fans to be banned and players who engage in homophobic sledging to face fines.
The code’s management are considering what other steps they can take to help tackle homophobia in the sport.
‘A specific ‘pride’ or ‘diversity’ match remains under consideration in the future and the AFL continues to consult and work with relevant groups on its overall policy approach and other initiatives related to inclusion and tolerance,’ AFL corporate affairs manager James Tonkin told Fairfax.Versions and update info:
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Who doesnt want pink Bunny slippers and a matching bathrobe to run around the wasteland in? I know I do! So I made em! Come in both male and female versions. It requires CBBE. They can be found on the Bunny Raiders in the Charlestown laundry southeast of Bunker Hill(Check Image section).For Bodyslide files open Bodyslide then click the Outfit Studio button. Now select File and New Project. Click Next and then tick the From File checkbox in the Outfit/Mesh section and then the Browse button. Browse to \meshes\Jets\Slippers\ and select one of the nifs. Click the Open button then the Finish button. Next select the Slider menue and Conform All. Move a slider to see if the shape changes, if it does you can go ahead and save the project(without reference shape) and use Bodyslide or you can go ahead and adjust it with the sliders in Outfit Studio and export nif. When saving the project or the nif it will ask you to choose the cloth data, choose the original file. There you now have the Bodyslide files or the adjusted.nif. Enjoy.No I will not be making the Bodyslide files because I wont ever use them, if you want them you have the tools to make them yourself. Thanks.V1.0 Initial release.Requires: FO4 and CBBE May be incompatible with anything that changes the same location.Use NMM or...Manual:1. Unzip/unrar to any location.2. Copy contents into your Data folder.Requires permission to use.Requires credits to use.Requires a link to the original mod in the description.Requires sending me a link to the mod it is used in after it is uploaded.Now ya scrolled too far!NEW DELHI: A three-judge Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra on Friday disagreed with the court's July 27 judgment which diluted the rigour of Section 498A of Indian Penal Code which warrants immediate arrest of a husband and his relatives in a dowry-linked complaint of cruelty.In the July 27 judgment, a bench of Justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and U U Lalit had cited data from the National Crime Records Bureau which indicated widespread misuse of Section 498A by women to get husbands and their relatives arrested and harassed for years. But on Friday, the SC decided that abuse of Section 498A should not amount to curtailing the ambit of the law.The two-judge bench had ordered setting up of family welfare committees in every district which would examine the veracity of each complaint under Section 498A. It had said no arrest would be made till the committee gave a report endorsing prima facie authenticity of the complaint.The earlier order had said there would be a designated police officer to probe Section 498A complaints and advised trial courts not to insist on personal appearance of all family members of the husband, especially those living elsewhere, and permit appearance through video conferencing.In a case relating to protection of persons from arrest by police without warrant, as it happens in Section 498A complaints, the three-judge bench of Justices Misra, A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud went far beyond the scope of the petition and said, "At this stage, we are obligated to say that we are not in agreement with the judgment in Rajesh Sharma vs UP case (pronounced on July 27). Abuse of Section 498A (by women) would not make this court curtail the ambit and scope of the section enacted to protect women from cruelty in matrimonial homes."The bench faulted the exercise undertaken by the two-judge bench in laying down elaborate guidelines as an exercise reserved solely for the legislature. The CJI-led bench said, "Prima facie, we feel the guidelines laid down may be falling in the legislative domain."It issued notice to the Centre and appointed senior advocate V Shekhar as amicus curiae while posting detailed deliberations for October 29.The two-judge bench of Justices Goel and Lalit had extracted extensive data from NCRB to come to the conclusion that there was widespread misuse of the stringent anti-dowry provision under Section 498A of IPC. It extracted NCRB statistics for years 2005, 2012 and 2013. "According to Report of Crime in India, 2013, the NCRB pointed out that of 4,66,079 cases that were pending in the start of 2013, only 7,258 were convicted while 38,165 were acquitted and 8,218 were withdrawn. The conviction rate of cases registered under Section 498A IPC was also a staggering low at 15.6%," it said.Section 498A was inserted in the IPC in 1983 with the object of punishing cruelty at the hands of husband or his relatives against a wife, particularly when such cruelty had the potential to result in suicide or murder of a woman. Justices Goel and Lalit had also realised that laying down guidelines could be part of a legislative exercise, yet they went ahead with it saying the courts could not be silent when innocents were being harassed."We are conscious of the object for which the provision was brought into the statute. At the same time, violation of human rights of innocents cannot be brushed aside. Certain safeguards against uncalled for arrest or insensitive investigation have been addressed by this court," they had said.Competition in the airline sector is expected to move from the domestic airspace into international skies. SpiceJet has already sounded the bugle by announcing that it plans a direct Delhi-London flight at a total fare of Rs 30,000 (including return fare) which can go down to Rs 20,000. Current fares start from Rs 44,000 and move up to Rs 90,000.
In an interview Ajay Singh, Chairman and Managing Director of SpiceJet, said: “As people become rich, it is easier for them to take a flight abroad, provided the fares are low. Imagine the demand a fare of Rs 10,000-15,000 would have for a Delhi-London flight.”
With this kind of pricing SpiceJet is all set to start a price war in the international travel sector, one that has been the most profitable for Indian airline companies. SpiceJet, as was the case when it started its domestic operations, seems to have its game plan in place.
The airline intends to continue with the same low-cost, no-frill model that it does in domestic operations. In order to increase its yield the airline plans to increase the number of seats by refurbishing the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft. Against the conventional 256 seats that other airline uses, SpiceJet plans to make the aircraft an all-economy one by increasing the number of seats to 350.
Further, the airline is cutting costs by separately pricing each additional service like meals, on-board Wi-Fi, seat selection, priority boarding and privileged check-in. Rather than flying to Heathrow, where airport charges are high the company intends to use the Gatwick airport.
SpiceJet will also be taking the aircraft on a wet lease, which allows them to pay by the number of hours it has actually operated the aircraft. In a wet lease the lessor provides the aircraft along with the cockpit and cabin crew and pays for its maintenance and insurance. In short, SpiceJet is putting in place a low cost model to operate on international skies.
Whether this model will be cheaper than the conventional one will depend on the negotiation skills of SpiceJet, especially when it comes to the most critical cost of wet leasing the aircraft. By doing so SpiceJet will save the cost of maintaining an international crew.
International routes are preferred by Indian airline companies as they are able to refuel their aircraft abroad where cost of fuel is lower. Cost of Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) in India is the highest in the world as a number of taxes are bundled into it. This situation is expected to continue in future since ATF has been kept outside the purview of GST.
But will the cost-cutting measures taken by SpiceJet be enough is a question that will be answered only after the launch of its airline service.
The company has been trying hard to make a dent in the international market. Though it operates in only six destinations, its market share based on passengers carried has moved from 6.1 percent in April 2015 to 8.1 percent presently, among Indian companies operating international services. SpiceJet has the second highest growth rate in the international market after Jet Airways.
Though Available Seat Kilometer (ASK) for SpiceJet has grown at a slower pace than Jet Airways, its revenue passenger kilometer (RPK) has posted a higher growth highlighting the higher revenue and margins the company generates. Further, passenger load factor for SpiceJet is the best-in-class in both the domestic and international segment.
SpiceJet with its predatory pricing can shake up the industry and grab market share the way it did in domestic industry. Low-cost carriers have been growing at a 60 percent CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) in the international market as compared to a 4 percent growth for Full Service carrier as per data available in SpiceJet’s annual report. SpiceJet intends to tap this high growth market by introducing services at prices which will be hard for a full service airline to match.
SpiceJet’s growth will be at the cost of Air India and Jet Airways who between them control three-fourths of the market. Jet Airways, because of its association with Etihad, will be in a position to withstand the shock, but Air India will be pushed deeper into red. And if Air India resorts to price war to protect its turf the way it did in domestic market, the entire sector will be impacted.
SpiceJet stock reacted negatively to the news falling by nearly 6.56 percent as analyst feel that this move by the company will impact its medium-term financials. Jet Airways, however, took it on the chin with its share price falling by 8.14 as it is the biggest loser in the listed space, post SpiceJet’s plan of starting a price war in the international travel market.United States District Judge Claudia Wilken dismissed patent infringement claims leveled against Ubisoft's Uplay platform, according to a document filed last month in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Digital Reg of Texas LLC's suit alleged that Ubisoft, Flash creator Adobe Systems and Norton Antivirus creator Symantec Corporation violated aspects of six patents that cover "regulating" access to, "tracking" access after distribution, "delivering" and "securing" or encrypting content covered by digital rights management (DRM) technology that restricts access to copyrighted material. Ubisoft was accused of violating the tracking and delivering aspects of the patents.
The developer of Assassin's Creed games, Watch Dogs and more asked for and received summary judgement of non-infringement for "several reasons," each covering the individual patents, according to the filed document. For example, Valve, which owns and operates the Steam digital distribution platform, was previously named in the suit but licensed the patents for use on Steam. The Court held that Ubisoft is "immune from an infringement suit" because its use of a third-party platform to perform a patented action is covered by Valve's previous Settlement Agreement.
Check out Polygon's E3 2014 interview with Assassin's Creed Unity's developers for more on the next installment in the franchise.Old Peter’s company has a legend. It has been passed down through generations of programmers and staff through an oral tradition. Oh, from time to time, someone would be inspired to record the tale for posterity, but inevitably, the hard copy was recycled, the digital copy was lost.
It was 1982, and the German tech industry was booming. Old Peter’s company manufactured a line of 8-bit computers that were targeted towards businesses. Their targets were generally larger companies and government organizations- like Frequenzhof Busgesellschaft.
Frequenzhof Busgesellschaft - the bus company of Frequenzhof - served a bustling metropolis in the heart of Germany. They had a growing ridership and a growing need to automate their accounting processes. They bought one cabinet-sized 8-bit microcomputer and if they liked it, planned to buy another. With the addition of tape drives and other accessories, the Busgesellschaft was going to be a very valuable client.
So when the director of the bus company called support, people jumped to solve their problem. Unfortunately, it was easier said than done:
“When we use your computer to run our weekly batch process, all of our radios stop working. We cannot communicate with our drivers! This is unacceptable!”
The technician tried to clarify the problem. “I’m sorry, but… if you run an accounting job, the radios stop working? Our computer doesn’t have anything to do with your radios!”
“And yet, when we turn on your computer, the radios stop working! We think it must be interference.”
“That… that really can’t be.” A computer, of course, does throw off some electromagnetic fields- anything using electrical current did. But to kill a voice radio network? That seemed implausible.
The technician gathered more details, and then escalated. Management didn’t want to lose future sales, and got defensive about their system. It relatively well shielded, and the frequencies it generated- all harmonics of the 1MHz chip running in the system, or of the 50Hz mains power- were nowhere near common voice frequencies.
Over the next few months, a series of radio and electronics technicians examined the situation. They tested a computer right as it came off the assembly line, proving that it didn’t radiate any significant EM noise, especially not at the bands the radios used (≈ 26MHz - 27MHz). The company, eager to keep their customer happy, replaced the “defective” computer with a fresh one, confident that this would solve the problem.
It didn’t.
Frequenzhof Busgesellschaft grew increasingly concerned. This computer was an expensive capital asset, and they couldn’t use it without cutting communications with their drivers- what if there were an accident or an emergency? Fingers were pointed, blame was doled out, and the Busgesellschaft threatened to take their business elsewhere.
The computer company begged for one last opportunity to send in a technician, because obviously there was something extremely unusual going on. “This shouldn’t be happening,” they agreed, “but work with us to fix it.” So they sent Fritz out to the customer site.
Fritz was an expert in radio systems. Rumor had it that, before he entered the private sector, he had been working in signals intelligence, spying on the Russians. Whether or not there was any truth to the rumor, he was considered one of the best in his field. If he couldn’t solve the problem, no one could solve the problem.
When Fritz’s car pulled up to the bus company’s building, he had a suspicion as to what might be wrong. When he entered the computer room, and saw the computer was positioned against an exterior wall, he knew what was wrong. This was, after all, 1982. In Germany. Frequenzhof Busgesellschaft was housed in a late 1960s slab of brutalist concrete. Hidden inside of that concrete was structural rebar. The computer’s tiny EMF resonated with the rebar grid, creating a chain of harmonics that laid static over the radio system, killing communication.
Fritz’s solution was as elegant as his diagnosis: relocate the computer to the middle of the room, far enough away from the rebar that it couldn’t couple with it. They followed his instructions, and it worked perfectly- even when they did get around to adding that second computer.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Drivers' chances of getting caught running red lights or speeding through green ones will increase beginning Feb. 6.
Five more red light cameras installed throughout the city earlier this month will begin issuing warnings Thursday, and full tickets Feb. 6, according to a release from the city.
The latest round of installations comes after legislation passed in May increased the city's fixed camera sites from 24 to 49. The cameras have drawn the ire of some state lawmakers, who introduced a bill to abolish them last summer. The bill passed the House of Representatives in June, but has been sitting in the Senate's State Government Oversight and Reform Committee since.
The cameras generated more than $6 million for the city of Cleveland in 2012.
• Appellate court rules Cleveland traffic cameras unconstitutional
So where are the new cameras? According to the release, at the intersections of:
Orange Avenue and E. 30 th St.
St. Kinsman Road and E. 93 rd St.
St. Pearl Road and Denison Avenue
Puritas Avenue and W. 150 th St.
St. St. Clair Avenue and E. 55th St.
But those aren't the only chance the city has to discreetly nab drivers trying to bend the traffic laws. The same legislation passed in May also expanded the city's use of portable camera units from six to 15.
According to a Jan. 21 post to the city's blog, the most recent locations of the portable speed cameras were:
3219 Detroit Ave.
6793 Franklin Ave.
1580 W. 25th St.
9270 Denison Ave.
5301 Lorain Ave.
17700 Block of Euclid Ave.
7200 Block of Bessermer Ave.
2300 St.Clair Ave.
888 E.140th St.
2641 North Moreland Blvd.
3241 W.65 St.
2300 Clark Ave.
2400 Block of Orange Ave.
8500 Block of Hough Ave.
The cameras have also garnered some embarrassing news coverage for the city. In September, the city had to wipe out tickets issued by two of the portable cameras after it failed to install proper signs warning drivers of their presence. And in December, an unknown suspect set a camera on fire.
Also last month, the city had to remove a red light camera because it was accidentally installed in neighboring Parma.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Wednesday that chapters in 23 states have filed over 255 open records requests pertaining to the militarization of local police departments around the country since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in what the group is calling its most concentrated effort yet to assess the growth of America’s police state.
“The American people deserve to know how much our local police are using military weapons and tactics for everyday policing,” Allie Bohm, ACLU advocacy and policy strategist, said in an advisory. “The militarization of local police is a threat to Americans’ right to live without fear of military-style intervention in their daily lives, and we need to make sure these resources and tactics are deployed only with rigorous oversight and strong legal protections.”
Information requests filed Wednesday focus on several areas of police training and equipment, including how many special weapons and tactics teams are operating and how many times they’ve been deployed, the weapons they used, any civilian casualties caused by SWAT operations and where their training and funding is coming from.
The ACLU is also seeking information on the use of drone aircraft by local law enforcement, along with GPS tracking systems, any military weapons obtained from the federal government and so-called “shock cuffs” that can be programmed to deliver electric shocks or even sedative injections to restrained detainees.
“Equipping state and local law enforcement with military weapons and vehicles, military tactical training, and actual military assistance to conduct traditional law enforcement erodes civil liberties and encourages increasingly aggressive policing, particularly in poor neighborhoods and communities of color,” ACLU Center for Justice attorney Kara Dansky added. “We’ve seen examples of this in several localities, but we don’t know the dimensions of the problem.”
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Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.By AnnaLea Crowe
When customers choose to do business with you, it’s because they’re impressed with the product or service that you offer. But what keeps them coming back for more — or pushes them away — is the customer experience they end up having with you. Eighty-two percent of consumers in the U.S. stated that they stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer experience. Even if you’re selling a top-of-the-line product or service, your company will not succeed if you don’t show that you appreciate the people who give you their business. Here are some tried-and-true tips to keep your customer retention high.
1. Be a superhero. Wow your customers with one of these customer-care tips:
• Greet customers by name. This is a nice personal touch to show that you recognize a customer as a person, and that they’re not just another sale.
• Celebrate birthdays. Try offering a special discount a customer’s special day rolls around to show that you care.
• Select an employee or a customer of the month. This gesture shows that you recognize hard work and great service, and you appreciate it when it’s done right.
• Businesses that thrive on tourism should make an effort to appreciate and understand the cultures and backgrounds of their customers. Try customizing your tours or packages to specify what different customers may want or expect.
2. Get social. You’re going to hear this tip over and over again, so get used to it. Find out where your customers are hanging out on social media and start listening to them. Engaging with them on Facebook or Twitter is one of the best ways to get feedback. Consider one of these tips:
• Talk to your customers on social media — and try not to sound impersonal. Taco Bell is an example of a company that’s doing this right. Named one of Time magazine’s 13 Sassiest Brands on Twitter, Taco Bell is known for tweeting witty one-liners and relevant pop culture references. When it’s obvious that a business is engaging on social media and is not a robot, customers tend to feel more connected to the brand as a whole.
• Give your customers sneak previews about upcoming sales and promotions. Loyal customers like to feel like they’re insiders who are the first to know about events before others do, so indulge them. Make them feel like they’re VIPs and they will more likely stay with you long term.
• Do not ignore customer comments on social media. Making it a practice to always respond to customers will help you build strong, long-lasting relationships. In return, you’ll likely see more word-of-mouth recommendations, and who doesn’t want that?
3. Fix any issues that come up. Even if your product or service is top notch, there is always room for improvement. Take the time to investigate your processes and look for ways to improve your customer service. Ignoring issues will not earn you a good reputation among your customers, and angry customers can do serious damage if they spread the word about a negative experience. Also, if you acknowledge problems immediately rather than sweep them under the rug, you will earn more respect.
4. Mind your manners. According to a Gallup study, customers were nine times more likely to be engaged when a brand service was “courteous, willing and helpful” versus “speedy.” Ways to be courteous include:
• Always say “thank you.” Burberry sends personal email follow-ups to existing customers to thank them and to see if they’re enjoying their purchases. A simple follow-up phone call or email reminds your customers that you remember them and care about their level of satisfaction.
• Apologize when necessary. Ninety-two percent of consumers say they would go back to a company after a negative experience if they received an apology. Doing this shows that you put a lot of value in the expression “the customer is always right” and you’ll do whatever it takes to keep customers happy.Live updates: Wild weather hits Victoria
Melbourne is in the midst of a commuter crisis with major roads, train and tram lines and routes out of the city closed due to high winds, traffic accidents, flooding and strewn debris.
The evening commute is expected to be a heavy, slow affair in all directions as fallen trees have contributed to the suspension of five train lines - Hurtsbridge, Stony Point, Belgrave, Cranbourne and Pakenham.
Trains are not running between Bayswater and Belgrave due to a fallen tree at Upper Ferntree Gully; another fallen tree near Macleod has suspended the Hurtsbridge line between Heidelberg and Eltham in both directions; and trains aren't running on the Stony Point line between Stony Point and Frankston because of a fallen tree at Tyabb.
Emergency workers are frantically trying to clear the lines in time for peak hour and replacement buses are replacing trains.Bitcoin, a virtual currency, was recognized by the US Department of Justice as a “legal means of exchange” last week, and the number of companies accepting it in payment continues to grow. The most recent additions to the Bitcoin club include Virgin Galactic and Europe’s University of Nicosia.
A number of smaller companies also accept Bitcoins for products and services, as does Etsy, GadgetsDirect, WordPress, Reddit and NameCheap.
And, just in time for the holidays, Bitcoin Black Friday is a site that gathers together holiday deals and discounts for people who shop using Bitcoin.
Read more about the Department of Justice report here and here.
Read the Virgin Galactic’s announcement.
Read the University of Nicosia announcement.
Pros and Cons
The value of Bitcoins lies completely within its network of users. The more business accept Bitcoin, and the more people trade it, the more value the currency has.
If the network of users grows faster than the supply of BitCoins — which is constrained by the mathematical algorithm used to generate them — then the value of the Bitcoins increases.
It is completely independent of government fiscal policy, national debt loads, and other traditional measures of the value of a currency.
But this independence from governments and dependence on the user network is both a strength of Bitcoin and its major weakness.
As MySpace and Friendster have learned, social networks are fragile. A new, cool platform comes along and everyone just switches over. Just think of the kids fleeing Facebook now because their grandparents are on it.
A Bitcoin network is just as fragile. Without a government mandating that people have to use this currency, there is no penalties or costs for businesses and customers who decide to switch to something else.
If a newer and cooler virtual currency comes along — I’m going to call it BieberCoin for the sake of this argument — businesses who have already figured out the logistics of accepting Bitcoin can easily add BieberCoin to their payment platforms. Teenage girls will flock to BieberCoins in droves, driving up its price, and investors hungry for the next bit thing will sell their mature Bitcoins and buy the young, growing BieberCoins. But as the Bitcoins get sold, their value will start to drop, inspiring others to liquidate their Bitcoins before they drop further. As prices drop, businesses will become reluctant to accept Bitcoins so as to avoid getting stuck with a virtual currency that’s losing value. Media attention on the rise of BieberCoins and the fall of Bitcoins will speed up this process, until the people still holding Bitcoins are left with nothing except a string of numbers in a digital wallet.
My advice? Don’t keep more money in any virtual currency — whether Bitcoin, Litecoin, Feathercoin, Ripple, or Linden Dollars — than you can afford to lose.
And if BieberCoin does come out, be sure to buy it early. And maybe you can be the next guy who accidentally turned a $27 Bitcoin investment into $1 million.At Chrome Dev Summit 2014 there was a whole host of topics and brand spanking new API's covered, but its not all about the new and shiny.
If you are a new Web Developer or even an experienced developer about to embark on exploring new APIs, chances are you'll follow these three steps: learn, build and iterate.
Matt Gaunt covers the ongoing efforts to address these problems from the Chrome Developer Platform team.
Learn.
Web Fundamentals is a set of use case led documentation covering a range of topics. The core goal is get developers from little or no knowledge, to implementing best practices as quickly as possible.
One of the main goals of Web Fundamentals is to ensure that if you are new to a topic, the guidance reduces "choice paralysis" as much as possible. Addy Osmani covers this perfectly over at Pastry Box.
If you do spot any issues with the site or it's content or you'd like Web Fundamentals to cover a particular topic, then please do let us know by submitting feedback on Github.
Build.
To help you kick off a new web project we created Web Starter Kit. It has everything you need:
A solid build process
Boilerplate HTML
Styleguide
The Build Process
For those of you who are new to build processes, the easiest way to think of a build process is to view it as a program which takes a set of files and performs certain tasks on them and outputs new versions in a different location. The tasks optimize the files to improve load times, check for possible errors or handle tasks that can be automated.
In Web Starter Kit we have the following processes:
We minify and concatenate CSS and JavaScript so that the browser can fetch the file quickly, the JavaScript is also run through JSHint to check for JavaScript best practices and common coding mistakes. Images are minified with imagemin and you can get huge reductions in file size by using this. We also have a process to create the styleguides CSS.
Boilerplate for Multi-Device HTML
The first set of HTML you write for a new page is pretty bog standard and chances are you'll have some way of quickly getting hold a stock HTML file that works well across multiple devices and screen sizes.
In Web Starter Kit we wanted to add in support for any features which blurred the lines between the platform and your site, so we've added support for add to home screen and splash screens for Android, Windows Phone, iOS and Opera Coast.
Styleguide
The final piece of Web Starter Kit is it's Styleguide.
This gives any new project a great set of default styles and components that encourages style driven development. You can alter existing styles to elements and add your own.
In the next version of WSK, due for release early next year, we are working hard to simplify how the styleguide fits together and switching to a Material Design look and feel. Matt showed an early mock of what this may look like at Chrome Dev Summit and you can see an example below.
Iterate.
Once you've started to put your new knowledge into practice, you'll want to use DevTools to debug, improve and maintain your work.
There are some huge new features landing in DevTools and Matt takes a look at the following new features.
Device Mode
Device mode is a new section in DevTools which allows you to quickly see how your site works across different mobile devices, while viewing the media queries in your CSS.
One of the great features of Device Mode is the ability to throttle the network speeds, allowing you simulate the experience of a user on a GPRS, EDGE, 3G, DSL or Wifi connection.
Paint Profiler
If you've ever opened up the timeline tab and hit the record button, you've probably seen some paint events happen in the waterfall. Normally this would be a black box with no way for you to know why the browser had done, or what it was doing.
Paint profiler no gives you more information on what exactly the browser is doing during that paint.
Invalidation Tracking
DevTools now gives a reason why a paint or layout occurred whenever it can, this is useful for anyone learning about the timeline, the browser behaviors and allows you to optimize your code to prevent performance issues.
Flame Chart View
This is a very different way of viewing the information available in the timeline. This makes it much easier to see how tasks overlap and what browser behavior happened as a result of other tasks.
Frame Viewer
While in Flame Chart view, you can select a specific frame and within this, you'll be able to explore which elements in the page had been promoted to a composite layer as well as why they've been promoted.
Learn. Build. Iterate.
These are some of the efforts from the Chrome team to help developers get up to speed with web development, so be sure to check out Web Fundamentals, Web Starter Kit and the new features in Chrome DevTools.Should design portfolios be straightforward and focused on the work, or should they be a piece of art that showcases the designer’s capabilities and vision? Is this even a binary question in the first place?
Browsing through my feeds the other day I come across the following discussion:
If you are not familiar with the portfolio shared in the discussion above, here’s a screencast to give you a bit more context and the link so you can test it yourself:
Have you seen this portfolio recently?
You can probably guess what followed: a long, heated discussion about usability versus creativity, form versus function, performance versus beauty, contrast versus legibility, republican versus democrat, mine versus yours.
But that’s what happens with most discussions online: they quickly become about polarization, and people thinking in a pretty binary fashion about what they consider to be correct or incorrect. Don’t get me wrong: the participants of the discussion are not to blame at all. The reality is that short-form online discussions like the one above can only go so deep in terms of understanding all the complexities of a design decision.
Halfway through reading all the comments in that thread, my eyes start to space out. I couldn’t avoid stepping back and asking myself “but hey, what is the real role of a design portfolio in the first place?”. Until the people engaging in that discussion align on what a portfolio’s objectives are, they won’t have any fruitful conclusions coming out of it.
So let’s do here one of the things I enjoy the most: to break down problems into smaller pieces, until they become more manageable to solve or answer.
Question 1: what is the role of a designer’s portfolio?
First step is to understand all the possible angles to defining the role of a portfolio:
Is it to show the final output of the projects the designer has worked on? If this is the case, the design of the portfolio itself should be as simple as possible, focused on the content rather than the form. Expect big, full-bleed images beautifully crafted to create visual impact. That’s what platforms like cargocollective, behance and squarespace focus on.
If this is the case, the design of the portfolio itself should be as simple as possible, focused on the content rather than the form. Expect big, full-bleed images beautifully crafted to create visual impact. That’s what platforms like cargocollective, behance and squarespace focus on. Is it to demonstrate the designer’s thought process? In this case, expect project pages with much more writing, behind-the-scenes deliverables and long-form explanation.
In this case, expect project pages with much more writing, behind-the-scenes deliverables and long-form explanation. Is it to be a piece of art in itself, that showcases the designer’s vision? In these cases the portfolio itself is the way the designer has found to demonstrate their design skills and vision, without all the constraints that projects sponsored by clients usually have. It shows to the world their vision on what good design is, in its purest form. In the example shown above, narrowdesign |
on the SNES).
Matt: What!? It really isn’t just a 3d version of Link to the past; it’s more. The stories are different, the settings and the characters are also different. Ocarina of Time moved the Zelda franchise forward and created the mould for all the games in the series. The story was more deep and created character depth, and the sound track created the perfect atmosphere. The point you made above is that Zelda doesn’t have the multiplayer experience. I totally agree with you. However OoT was born in an era when multiplayer wasn’t needlessly tacked onto games to make them more marketable. Now Goldeneye doesn’t have this problem (it has a good single player and a brilliant multiplayer). The reason that OoT is better is because its single player is so engrossing and well made that it makes up for the lack of multiplayer. Also OoT is still very much playable and still as fun as the day it was made. Goldeneye isn’t though. It hasn’t exactly aged well. The maps seem small nowadays (because they are) and this makes it just makes it that little bit less fun. Furthermore the N64 did excel at multiplayer, but that doesn’t mean the best game has to go to a multiplayer game. That is very short sighted Ian. There were also a good few single player games on the N64; Majora’s Mask, Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64, Shadow of the Empire, Pokemon Snap, and Mario 64 among other. Any way I’m handing it back to you. Also see how I didn’t attack you for not liking Zelda? That’s because I’m a grown up…
Ian: I love how you used Perfect Dark as an example of a great single player game when it’s the spiritual sequel to GoldenEye (and everyone played it for multiplayer as well), but lets get back on track. Ok, small maps on GoldenEye. This is because the game only supported 4 players, if you have large maps they feel deserted, one of the reasons the multiplayer is so damn good is that its fast and frantic. Next, I totally agree that it hasn’t aged well. The thing is though, videogames more than any other entertainment forms are rooted in the time that they are released. They’re based on technology; it’s why often sequels are better than the originals, something that rarely happens in films and books, and at the time GoldenEye was an absolute masterpiece. This is where the debate gets tricky. I can still play GoldenEye, despite its obvious age, because it takes me back to playing multiplayer when I was younger with my cousin. All the levels and sounds that the guns make fill me with a massive sense of nostalgia that bring a smile to my face, and isn’t that what games are all about? With Ocarina, because I never played it when it was released, I can see how it’s aged as well but without the nostalgia. I played the remade version for the Nintendo 3DS and the one thought that came into my head was “this game is overhyped”. That’s not to say the game is bad, but because it’s had years of people saying it’s the best game ever made it can’t help but disappoint. Now I’m perfectly willing to concede that in it’s day it may have been a revelation but it just didn’t do anything for me (and that’s not me saying this just for a blog, Matt will admit that when I played it I didn’t enjoy it. Even bought it with my own money). Whereas with GoldenEye, sure it shows its age, but shooting your friends in the face is timeless, and GoldenEye is the genesis of it on home consoles. Ocarina is like listening to The Beatles; you hear they’re the best band in the world then you pop Yellow Submarine on. Oh.
Jack: Ok just reading the opening statements from Matt and Ian I can tell I’m going to upset someone whatever I chose as it’s apparent both love the games they are arguing for. Ian is right I am not a gamer, I don’t personally have a best game of all time, I simply haven’t played enough to come to a proper conclusion. Both games are obviously good otherwise they wouldn’t be the subjects of this debate and both seem completely different. On the one hand OoT is a single player immersive experience where as Goldeneye’s selling point is the multi player aspect.
Goldeneye is undoubtedly the game that I personally would prefer to play as its more social and as Ian puts it you can sit round with a few beers and shoot your friends in the face. Also the small maps make it more simplistic and easier to follow which helps me, as I’m not very good when games get complex.
I don’t think Ian’s argument about the overhypedness of OoT holds much weight as its not the games fault that people have talked about it in such high tones that it can’t live up. This week I’m going to give the GHOF title to Ocarina of Time, the multi player thing for me depends entirely on the people you are playing with. If they’re boring then so is the game. In that sense whilst Goldeneye is probably more fun to play, OoT is more consistent in its delivery as a quality game.
AdvertisementsPalestinian health ministry in Gaza reports two deaths over the weekend from wounds sustained in clashes with Israeli troops
The Palestinian health ministry in the Gaza Strip has said two men have died from wounds sustained in earlier clashes with Israeli troops along the border with Israel.
By Bethlehem’s Manger Square, Palestinians lament Trump’s season of ill-will Read more
It identified them as Mohammed Dahdouh, 20, who died on Sunday, and Sharif Shalash, 28, who died on Saturday.
Their deaths raise to 12 the number of Palestinians killed in violence in Gaza and the West Bank since Donald Trump announced the unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on 6 December.
Most of the deaths have occurred in Gaza, where protesters have been clashing with Israeli forces along the border fence. Forces have used teargas and live fire to disperse the crowds.
Among the dead were two Hamas militants killed in an Israeli airstrike that was carried out in response to rocket fire from Gaza.Tammy ‘Sunny‘ Sytch is opening up about her ’90s affair with Shawn Michaels in the new book she just released — based on this excerpt, it’s clear she ain’t holding anything back.
Riverdale Ave Books sent Pro Wrestling Sheet an excerpt from “A Star Shattered: The Rise & Fall & Rise of Wrestling Diva Tammy ‘Sunny’ Sytch” in which the ex-wrestling star writes about her first kiss with HBK … and she claims it led to much more.
Tammy says they were instructed to kiss once cameras stopped rolling — following Michaels’ match with her significant other Chris Candido — and she loved it more than the crowd.
Things allegedly escalated further the next week though, and Sunny goes into far too much detail about Shawn approaching her in a flirtatious manner. Lets just say it involves Tammy using the words erection, moist and empty locker room.
The book can be purchased at RiverdaleAveBooks.com — as well as Amazon and iTunes — and in case you’ve been living under a rock this week, Sunny also released an XXX video with Vivid where she’s sporting her Hall of Fame ring … a photo of which can be seen HERE.
Check out the full book excerpt and let us know what you think in the comments.Feature Articles - Spain During the First World War
The larger of two countries on the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe, Spain was staunchly neutral in the years leading up to the Great War and remained so throughout.
It was considered one of the most important neutral countries in Europe by 1915 as it was a significant source of goods for France, the other allies, and South America.
Spain's economy had been slowly evolving from an agriculture-based system to one centred around industry for roughly forty years prior to 1914. World War One greatly benefited Spanish industry and exporting. The two areas most affected by the war were Valencian citrus production and steel manufacturing.
Further, Spain's gold reserves more than tripled as the war raged, and as a result, the government paid down a significant portion of its national debt. During the war there was a great deal of internal political strife among the various political parties and labour unions which resulted in a series of major workers' strikes. The increasing frequency and hostility created by this unrest forced several prime ministers and their cabinets to resign, and those who did not quit were voted out of office.
As a neutral country, Spain saw no direct military action in the war. It did, however, intern a small German force in its northwest African colony of Spanish Guinea in November 1915 and intervene in embattled areas to aid prisoners of war. The Spanish crown, under Alfonso XIII, contributed a great deal to improving the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants throughout the conflict. At his own expense, Alfonso maintained a staff of forty who helped him serve as an intermediary between prisoners and their families. His efforts led to the end of reprisals against French POWs in Germany.
Thanks in large part to his intervention, Germany commuted eight death sentences held by women and twenty held by men. Alfonso also took up the case of the civil population of Lille, which had been devastated by the German Army during its invasion of Belgium.
What's more, Spain's king vigorously protested the German Navy's use of submarines. By war's end, Spain had lost 140,000 tons of shipping to the U-boats. Even though committed to neutrality, Spain played a valuable role in easing the suffering caused by World War One.
Article contributed by William P. McEvoy
References:
Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Payne, Stanley G. A History of Spain and Portugal: In Two Volumes. (2). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973.
Petrie, Sir Charles. The History of Spain: Part II From the Death of Phillip II to 1945. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952.
Pierson, Peter. The History of Spain. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.Every generation assumes, in its youth, that it is immortal and omnipotent. And every generation of children ignores the advice of its parents, believing that their circumastances are so new and different that the lessons of their parent’s lives simply wouldn’t apply. On the surface, this seems to be true in computer field, too: Why would today’s young Java programmer believe there is anything to be learned from experiences of a mainframe COBOL programmer? Ironically, this attitude of generational arrogance is part of the basis for my optimism for the American software industry. If today’s generation of software developers followed in the footsteps of their elders and used the same kind of technology and practices, they would be subject to the same kind of crushing competitive pressures that the older generation is facing around the world. But they don’t – they prefer, instead, to leapfrog over the older technologies and plunge into something new. And in most cases, the older generation encourages them to do so; even if we’re trapped in our old paradigms and technologies, we have enough sense to encourage our children to try something newer.
– Ed Yourdon, “Past, Present and Future”, in Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, Yourdon Press, 1996
At every stage in my professional life I met and got to know people I consider mentors and role models. Some were pioneering technologists who pushed the boundaries of the software industry. Others were professors, coworkers and leaders. Each person I admire and respect in a different way to this day. I would like to talk about one in particular who has been crucial to my growth as a professional and a human being.
When I was in college in the late 1990s I came upon two books: “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer” and “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer” by Ed Yourdon. The first book spelled doom and gloom for the American Programmers who were going to get replaced by cheaper counterparts in India, Russia, Philippines, etc. The second book revisited some of the predictions based on the changes that the software industry has undergone in the years between the books. Both books were incredibly thought provoking. To this day they occupy a prominent spot on the bookshelf in my home.
Computers are remarkable devices that only humans, as species of this planet, could conjure up. Software development is the most cognitively complex task humanity has ever set out to pursue. In computer science and software engineering we work with things that we ourselves build. If a computer fails, one can say that it failed because the engineer who built it did not know what they were doing.
Building on the work of Aristotle, Alexander of Aprodisias developed a notion of a stochastic art:
Given materials, tools, and other conditions, carpentry, e.g., can produce houses by following a series of steps each of which is effective in a determinate way. However, medicine does not always cure and certainly does not cure with the reliability that carpentry produces houses. Even though medicine tries everything in its power, chance can intervene so that it does not achieve its goal, the curing of the patient. When carpentry, by contrast, tries everything in its power, it achieves its goal. Failure here is the result not of chance but of error in executing the technê, as Alexander says in Quaestiones (Quaestio 2.16, 10-25). To mark the difference between these two kinds of technê, Alexander says that the task (ergon) of medicine is to try everything possible to achieve its goal (telos); but achieving its goal is not (totally) within the power of medicine. He calls stochastic, then, the sorts of technê whose task is to try everything possible to achieve their goal, the realization of the goal being subject to chance.
In software, everything is in the power of the engineer to produce a quality product. Software either works and serves the needs of the users or it does not. In photography, however, we deal with things not of our own making. Many software engineers gravitate towards photography as a way to settle the mind, to unwind, and to work with things and events we have no control over. The desire to be in the moment without being able to “debug” and retry is uniquely human.
As I entered the professional world of software engineering I too developed a hobby in photography. Sometime in 2005 I was looking through Flickr groups for ideas and techniques and came upon Ed Yourdon’s Flickr account. The same computer scientist whom I admired in college turned out to also be a prolific street photographer.
As a photographer he was no William Klein or Brandon Stanton, but he added his own unique flair to photography. Photography was like a diary for him. By following Ed on Flickr one not only got to know his beloved New York City but also Ed as a person. His NYC street photos such as these inspired my own attempts at street photography.
Thanks to social media I became friends with Ed and got to know him closer. As we both developed our hobbies we exchanged ideas. Checking up on his photography became part of my morning routine. He commented on my photos and gave me tips. He accepted my ideas and tried new techniques. As inductees into the Computer Science Hall of Fame go, he was open, kind and friendly.
Moses Ben Maimon (aka Maimonides) lived over 800 years ago. With his studies and writings he influenced thinkers of his time and his work is studied the world over even today. We remember him today because of the things he wrote, and what was written by others about him.
What Ed was striving to accomplish throughout his professional career and his hobbies was to make the world a better place and to leave a footprint. He published dozens of books and hundreds of articles explaining complex topics to the rest of us. He posted thousands of photos to his Flickr account. It is nearly impossible to search for an NYC street photo on Flickr and not stumble upon Ed Yourdon’s pictures. His photos, which he gave away via creative commons, have been used in thousands of blog posts and articles.
In the past few years, when someone asked me that cliche interview question “Oleg, where do you see yourself in the future?” I would respond “Do you know Ed Yourdon? I want to be like him!” On occasion he would drop me an email encouraging me to develop professionally. It was by following his example and tips that I’ve improved my writing and became a contributing blogger at “Computerworld”.
He posted to his Flickr account almost daily. It was rare for him to take more than a few days away from photographing and posting. His last post was on December 24th, 2015. After a few of weeks of not seeing updates or hearing from him I suspected something was wrong. On Thursday morning, January 21st, I saw this in my Flickr notifications:
Sadly, Ed Yourdon died on January 20, 2016 as a result of complications from a blood infection. Photography was one of his great passions in life. He greatly enjoyed the camaraderie he found via Flickr.
Ed Yourdon is a Maimonides of our generation. His work in computer science and software engineering shaped our industry at a time when it needed structure. His photography gave us a glimpse into his life and his values. The world is in a better place now because of Ed. He will be greatly missed.
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedAccording to a new study conducted by German astronomers Dr Valeri Hambaryan and Dr Ralph Neuhauser, an intense blast of high-energy radiation that struck our planet in the 8th century may have been caused by a nearby short gamma-ray burst, emitted by two merging stellar remnants – black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs.
In 2012, cosmic-ray physicist Prof Fusa Miyake from Nagoya University in Japan announced the detection of high levels of the isotope carbon-14 and beryllium-10 in tree rings formed in 775 CE, suggesting that a burst of radiation struck the Earth in the year 774 or 775.
Carbon-14 and beryllium-10 form when radiation from space collides with nitrogen atoms, which then decay to these heavier forms of carbon and beryllium. The earlier research ruled out the nearby explosion of a massive star as nothing was recorded in observations at the time and no remnant has been found.
Prof Miyake also considered whether a solar flare could have been responsible, but these are not powerful enough to cause the observed excess of carbon-14. Large flares are likely to be accompanied by ejections of material from the Sun’s corona, leading to vivid displays of the northern and southern lights, but again no historical records suggest these took place.
Following this announcement, researchers pointed to an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that describes a ‘red crucifix’ seen after sunset and suggested this might be a supernova. But this dates from 776, too late to account for the carbon-14 data and still does not explain why no remnant has been detected.
In a paper, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (arXiv.org version), the astronomers provide a new explanation consistent with both the carbon-14 measurements and the absence of any recorded events in the sky. They suggest that two compact stellar remnants – black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs – collided and merged together. When this happens, some energy is released in the form of gamma rays, the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes visible light.
In these mergers, the burst of gamma rays is intense but short, typically lasting less than two seconds. These events are seen in other galaxies many times each year but, in contrast to long duration bursts, without any corresponding visible light. If this is the explanation for the 774 / 775 radiation burst, then the merging stars could not be closer than about 3,000 light years, or it would have led to the extinction of some terrestrial life. Based on the carbon-14 measurements, the astronomers believe the gamma-ray burst originated in a system between 3,000 and 12,000 light years from the Sun.
If they are right, then this would explain why no records exist of a supernova or auroral display. Other work suggests that some visible light is emitted during short gamma-ray bursts that could be seen in a relatively nearby event. This might only be seen for a few days and be easily missed, but nonetheless it may be worthwhile for historians to look again through contemporary texts.
“If the gamma ray burst had been much closer to the Earth it would have caused significant harm to the biosphere. But even thousands of light years away, a similar event today could cause havoc with the sensitive electronic systems that advanced societies have come to depend on. The challenge now is to establish how rare such carbon-14 spikes are i.e. how often such radiation bursts hit the Earth. In the last 3,000 years, the maximum age of trees alive today, only one such event appears to have taken place,” said Dr Neuhauser of the University of Jena’s Astrophysics Institute.
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Bibliographic information: V. V. Hambaryan and R. Neuhäuser. A Galactic short gamma-ray burst as cause for the 14C peak in AD 774/5. MNRAS, published online January 20, 2013; doi: 10.1093/mnras/sts378A kinker is “an acrobat or other performer in a circus.” The evidence for this word is mostly from the first half of the 20th century in American English, and context gives us a few clues about how the word was used: it seems to have referred to any performer except clowns (who were sometimes called Joeys), and especially performers who had no featured act of their own.
In his novel about circus life during this period, Thomas Duncan gives the word a clear explanation in the context of show business more generally:
In vaudeville acrobats were pariahs who were assigned the shabbiest dressing rooms, who were just tolerated by the gag men and ignored by the top liners. It was very different in the circus. They called you a kinker in the circus but they respected you as an aristocrat.
—Thomas W. Duncan, Gus the Great, 1947
Although the origin of kinker is obscure, it seems to derive from kink, which came to English from the Dutch word meaning “twist” or “twirl.”
To learn more about this artwork, click here.Twigg Cycles, we are proud to be the premier dealers of Honda Yamaha and Indian Motorcycle® for Hagerstown, Martinsburg, Chambersburg, Winchester and the entire Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia and Tri-State area. We proudly offer new and used UTVs and personal watercraft, and we service what we sell.In addition, we have thousands of Parts and Accessories for ATVs, motorcycles, scooters, side by sides, and personal watercraft. If we don't have what you need in-store, we will get it for you. Along with all the OEM product we access to get you the best from MSR, Biker's Choice, Answer Racing, Fly Racing, Fox, Speed and Strength, and more. Looking for a great deal? Visit our Featured Products page to find the best we have to offer at great prices.The Twigg Cycles Service Team is composed of highly skilled technicians who have an average of 19 years' experience in the powersports industry. Our knowledgeable service advisers have more than 8 years of experience in the field. Our service department has been the recipient of awards from the manufacturers we carry including Suzuki Super Service, and Yamaha Pro, for recognition of our high standards of customer service.Our phone number is (301) 739-2773. Give us a call or send an email to sales@twiggcycles.com. We're waiting. Always Rev Up Life!Spread the love
There is a complex set of factors for determining if a person is transgender. While science hasn’t nailed down the exact physiological and neurological markers to determine what makes a person have gender distress, there is no doubt that it exists. If individuals identify with a different gender than they were born, it is no one’s right to prevent them from remedying it. That being said, should young children who feel they may be in gender distress be given sex change drugs — by the government?
Regardless of how you feel in regard to the question above, the fact is that it is happening. More than 800 children in the United Kingdom — some as young as 10 — are now being given these controversial sex change drugs.
Britain’s National Health Service is prescribing children powerful hormone injections which halt the development of sex organs, breasts, and body hair. These drugs are meant to keep children in a prepubescent state so they can be easier to operate on when they become adults.
It is safe to assume that children can know that they identify with a different sex than they were born. However, it is also safe to assume that some children may be mistaking these feelings for something else and could change their minds several times before becoming a physical adult.
The Daily Mail reported on a transgender girl who says that had she not been given these hormone injections, she would have killed herself.
Teenager Llyr Jones has been taking puberty-blocking drugs for the past six months. The 17-year-old told how she was desperate to be prescribed the injections to end the agony she was going through as her body began to change into that of an adult man. Llyr, from Aberystwyth in Mid-Wales, said if the physical transformations that came with puberty had been allowed to continue, she would have been pushed to take her own life. ‘In all honesty, if I hadn’t been allowed to be on the blockers and start my transition, I’m sure I wouldn’t be here now,’ she said.
Jones was in gender distress and these drugs could’ve very well saved her life. However, she is almost twice as old as some of the other children being given these same drugs.
As the Mail reports, more than 600 young people are undergoing treatment at the Gender Identity Development Service clinic at University College Hospital in London, and a further 200 at a clinic in Leeds. The MoS has been told that 230 of those 800 are under the age of 14.
For some reason, in 2014, the government removed the age limit for hormone therapy, which was 16. Now, doctors can give these drugs to third and fourth graders and have even considered its use in children as young as 9.
In Britain, the government thinks people aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions on many fronts. For example, they think people should have to wait until they are 18 before they can drink or smoke. However, that same government will give children life changing medication if they claim to identify with a different gender. As professor of psychiatry Paul McHugh writes:
We frequently hear from neuroscientists that the adolescent brain is too immature to make reliably rational decisions. But we are supposed to expect emotionally troubled adolescents to make decisions about their gender identities and about serious medical treatments at the age of 12 or younger.
As the Mail notes, Mary Douglas, a spokeswoman for Grassroots Conservatives campaign group, said: “Adolescence is the age when you’re in a turmoil because you’re trying to work out who you are and gender is a big part of that.
“So to introduce such powerful medication into that is unwise.
“This drastic notion that we should change our gender should be a last resort. Caution needs to be the watchword for everyone engaged in this, including doctors.”
“These kids are not old enough to make life-changing decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. It’s unethical to pursue this line of treatment with children who cannot possibly understand what they’re doing,” Stephanie Davies-Arai, of Transgender Trend, a parent group concerned about the rise of children identifying as the opposite sex said.
However, Professor Gary Butler, the lead clinician for the gender identity service in London and Leeds, disagrees. He says that these drugs can help transgender children who may have distress from puberty.
But puberty itself, even for non-transgenders, is distressing. Some of these children may be misguided and not be transgender at all, but they are given these powerful drugs anyway.
Also, as McHugh points out, “most children who identify as the opposite sex will eventually come to identify as their biological sex.”
Until much more is known about gender dysphoria, and until controlled clinical trials of puberty-suppression are carried out, this intervention should be considered experimental. Regardless of the good intentions of the physicians and parents, to expose young people to such treatments is to endanger them.6 Simple Growth Hacks that Helped us Reach 200K Users Without Spending a Penny on Ads
Tomáš Ondrejka Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 8, 2016
Somebody once said: “Paying for ads is like paying for sex.” You’ll get the outcome but it will cost you tons of money. Especially if you are a small startup like Kickresume. In our niche, ads are expensive as hell and only the biggest brands can afford them. That’s why we decided not to pay for ads and find a better, cheaper and more effective way to get new users and customers.
During the last year, we tested hundreds of marketing ideas, social networks, tools and growth hacks to find out which one is the most effective in acquiring new users.
Below is the list of 6 most successful growth hacks that worked well for us and helped us to reach first 200 000 users. These worked for us but they don’t need to work for your startup. Keep trying and testing!
1. Share your content on Google+ Communities (Collections) & Facebook Groups
Is there anyone who uses Google+ on a regular basis? That’s the question we were asking for months! So we decided to test it and the results were great. When you’re creating a great content you should definitely post it to targeted G+ Communities. You can also create G+ Collections containing all your interesting content.
Publishing on G+ can drive traffic to your website and can also get you a better position in Google search (but psst, Google don’t want you to know this).
Do you use Facebook groups? If not, you should start as soon as possible. First, you will need to access targeted groups in your niche (simply pick groups where your customers are). But don’t start spamming all the groups after you’re authorized to post. There is a great article about Facebook Groups by SumoMe.
The best way to drive huge traffic to your website is creating quality content on your blog and starting a discussion with group members. We got thousands of visits to our Kickresume Blog and helped many visitors to solve their problems through discussion.
2. Post on Reddit (be careful with this one)
As you surely know, Reddit is a community of intelligent trendsetters who would destroy and ban you if they spot a spam. That’s why you should be very careful — do not spam and self promote.
Remember: the best ad is one that doesn't look like an ad. When you have a useful article, infographic or tips, feel free to post it in a targeted subreddit. In just a few minutes you'll see if Redditors love you (upvotes) or hate you (downvotes). If you share a really great content, you'll get more upvotes and your post will shoot up. The power of Reddit is that it can drive thousands of visitors in a couple of minutes from posting.
3. Spying your competitors with Alexa
Alexa rank is one of my favorite tools. Even in a free version, you can get much useful information that can help your business grow. A great hack is to search for your competitors and find out their best referrals.
On Alexa, you can find media outlets that wrote about your competitors and contact them to write a story about your startup. Or you can find interesting app directories where you can register your app. Last but not least — you’ll find plenty of useful metrics about your competitors.
4. Help your future users - answer questions on Quora or Yahoo Answers
The Internet is a place where people go looking for information. If they cannot find this information or need professional feedback, they usually ask questions. Here is your chance. As a professional in your field, build your startup’s brand by answering questions all over the internet. Great websites to drive traffic are Quora and Yahoo Answers. But don’t spam! Write only useful answers.
5. Upload your app to Chrome Store
In my opinion, Chrome Store is one of the most underestimated app marketplaces. It is really simple to upload and list your app if you have a desktop version. You don’t even need to develop it for Chrome, they will simply redirect users to your website (it will take your developer no more than 1 hour to prepare a “Chrome app’’). Chrome Store is one of our most effective referrals with the best conversion rate. They helped us make thousands of dollars by this time.
6. Set up a referral program
Referral program is a great way to spread word-of-mouth and onboard new users with the help of your existing users. People simply love to get money or premium features for inviting their friends. We set up a referral program with Tapfiliate in 3 days and the results are great so far. Don’t forget to create two-sided referral program (provision for referral + discount for referred friends) to get the best results.
You can also follow me on Twitter and I’ll share more great articles on growth hacking and startups with you.We previously reported that documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux was not only making a film on Scientology, but had been notified by the church that they were making one on him too.
All a little odd, but not to be unexpected given the reaction to the HBO produced, Alex Gibney doc, Going Clear.
Theroux's feature length doc for the BBC will see the light of day towards the end of the year, and the gifted Theroux has said that it's very different to Going Clear. Given his more personable approach to his subjects, this was probably a given.
Now, Scientology have decided to push the positive a bit more and have apparently sent Theroux a bunch of testimonials of under fire leader, David Miscavige.
Scientology has sent me a massive folder of testimonials about CoS leader David Miscavige. pic.twitter.com/Psmw7LNmtP — Louis Theroux (@louistheroux) April 27, 2015
LOOK! Everyone here thinks he's sound, sooooooo... please go away.
We are huge fans of Theroux, and while Going Clear was a fascinating watch, we're more intrigued by his take on the controversial religion.Denmark 2016 Three weeks rolling around my mother's homeland, with perhaps a touch of Sweden
By Dannica Switzer
#866 - posted Sunday February 24, 2019 by Neil Gunton I guess you could call me a Europhile; I really like Europe, and I really like biking there. I love the history, the cobblestones and castles, the bakeries, and that distances between points of interest are not large. And I love the cycling infrastructure. It's easy, and I feel safe traveling by bike.
I'm lucky at this stage of my life (in the midst of medical residency, oddly enough) to have the time to travel, so I'm heading back to Europe with my bike this fall. I managed to string together three weeks off this September, thanks to 2 weeks of vacation and 5 days-in-lieu from working statutory holidays. I wasn't entirely sure where I wanted to go, but my Mom's family coming from Denmark, Denmark being flatish with fabled cycling infrastructure, and Aeroplan having flights to Copenhagen for ridiculously few reward points, made Denmark the easy choice. I think the weather should still be alright in September... - read this journalTHE BRISBANE Lions have a good case to receive a priority pick this season, AFL CEO Gill McLachlan says.
Responding to a question on Twitter on Wednesday, McLachlan indicated the Lions would get a good hearing on the priority pick after winning just seven games in two seasons.
The club has won one of two finals it has played since 2004 and has not finished higher than 12th since 2009.
"This club [the Lions] has had a tough year and I think they have got a legitimate claim this year. The Commission will decide," McLachlan said.
As AFL.com.au confirmed on Wednesday, the club is certain to lodge an application for a priority pick for the AFL Commission to consider on Monday before the Grand Final.
No club has been awarded a priority pick since the criteria was changed in 2012.
The Lions sacked coach Justin Leppitsch on Monday and are looking for a senior head of the football department.
The AFL is assisting the club work its way back into a competitive position.
"We are working with the management of the Brisbane Lions. It's never as bad as it seems. It's never as good either," McLachlan said.What is the difference between a great character and a placeholder? Why is one warrior or wizard better than the other? They might serve exactly the same purpose in the novel, but one is clearly superior. Your grey-bearded magic user with the impractical hat just can’t compare with the scarred conjuror addicted to demon blood. One is a well developed protagonist, while the other is a cardboard cut-out from any generic fantasy novel.
It’s not difficult to see which is the archetype and which is the stereotype, but there are many authors who don’t know the difference between the terms. An archetype is a recurring character type that corresponds to a specific purpose in the story. They can be thought of as a model for a character when constructing an individual and deciding how they act. They may be the mentor for the hero, the adversary/shadow that must be defeated, or a lesser known type like the trickster who can provide comic relief. These archetypes have been studied by various writers such as Campbell, Vogler and Booker, who have detailed the common traits and patterns of various archetypes, though there is room for a great deal of variation.
Stereotypes are oversimplified characters cobbled together from clichés and generic traits. They are usually the answer to a perceived need in the story, with little thought given to making them original and developing them into well rounded characters. Instead, authors will replicate traits they’ve seen in other fiction, resulting in just another stock character.
Archetypes are broad definitions and any character you create will normally fall under one or more archetypes no matter what your intentions. Falling into a stereotype is something to be avoided as it will cause the narrative to feel flat and derivative, it will break the immersion of the piece and hammer home to the reader that they are looking at a work of fiction. Unfortunately it can be very easy to cross the line, especially for |
Icap bought Plus Markets a few months ago. I sincerely hope he can revitalise it. Meanwhile, the London Stock Exchange must massively up its game at AIM, by doing whatever it takes - cutting red tape, fees and selling it hard to new entrants.
- Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital PartnersFrom the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region.
Published in Quadrant June 2002; a footnoted edition of this essay is available at The Sydney Line here
From the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region. This was a fact recorded at the time not only in anthropological textbooks and articles but also in popular books about the Australian Aborigines. There was even an award-winning children’s book tracing their origins. The more famous photographs of the Australian pygmies were reproduced in both the academic and the popular literature.
At the time, there was controversy about their origins but not over the fact of their existence. In 1962, the first volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia recorded their presence on its first two pages and repeated the then influential anthropological theory about their origins and their place in the waves of migration of hunter-gatherer peoples from Asia who populated the Australian continent in the millennia before the British arrived in 1788.
Yet, since then, the Australian pygmies have been totally obliterated from public memory. To test just how complete this process has been, over recent months we have questioned a wide range of friends and acquaintances. Although most were well-educated and well-read people, none had ever heard of the pygmies, not even when we used some of their other, once-familiar alternative names such as “Negritos” and “Barrineans”. A few friends scoffed at the notion and demanded some evidence. They wouldn’t believe us until we emailed them the photographs.
The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia (1994), published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, today does its best to disguise these people. It lists some of their tribes, including the Djabuganjdji, Mbarbaram (Barbaram) and Yidinjdji (Indindji), but does not mention a word about their stature. Only its entry “Rainforest Region” records the existence of “small, curly-haired people with languages which have distinctive features”, but the accompanying photograph of Yidinjdji tribesmen taken in 1893 does not give any scale or point of comparison to show that these adult males were only about 140 centimeters (four feet six inches) tall.
Joseph Birdsell, height 186 centimetres (six feet one inch), with twenty-four-year-old male of the Kongkandji tribe, height 140 centimetres (four feet six inches). The photograph was taken at Mona Mona Mission, near Kuranda, North Queensland, in 1938.
Both the major introductory textbooks to Australian prehistory, Josephine Flood’s Archaeology of the Dreamtime, and John Mulvaney’s and Johan Kamminga’s Prehistory of Australia, still provide brief discussions of the academic debate about these people’s origins. Both describe them, respectively, as having “small stature and spirally curled hair” and as a “short, slightly-built people with dark skin and woolly hair”, but both decline to include photographs like those published here, which immediately convey just how dramatically different from other Aborigines they are. Similarly, the latest edition of Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s standard text in anthropology, The World of the First Australians, briefly discusses people from northeast Queensland who “might have negrito affinities” but does not mention their height. They dismiss any question of their difference as “purely statistical”.
No one today with a lay interest in Aboriginal anthropology, and few of those doing introductory courses in the subject, would ever find out that Australia had a pygmy people. What, then, has been going on? Why would these people have been expunged from popular memory? How did the Australian pygmies become extinct within the public consciousness?
There have been two main reasons. We explain them in detail below but, briefly, they were: first, a vitriolic debate within the academic discipline of anthropology in which the view prevailed that there was nothing remarkable about these people; second, the emergence in the 1960s of the radical Aboriginal political movement, which found the existence of a pygmy people an inconvenient counter-example to one of its central doctrines. As a result, these indigenous Australians have been subject to an airbrushing from history that makes even that of the old Bolshevik leadership of the USSR in the 1930s look mild by comparison.
Aboriginal encampment in rainforest behind Cairns, 1890. This is the photograph (attributed to A. Atkinson) found by Norman Tindale in 1938, which sent him and Joseph Birdsell in search of the people depicted. He identified the location by the wild banana leaves on the roof of the hut.
The first extended contact between Europeans and Australian pygmies occurred in the 1890s at Yarrabah, an Anglican church mission to Aborigines established in 1892 at Cape Grafton, just south of Cairns. The three main tribes in the region were the Kongkandji (Gungganydji), Indindji and Barbaram, whose territories covered, respectively, the coastal area around Cape Grafton, the eastern slopes of the Atherton Tableland from Lake Barrine south to Gordonvale, and the Great Dividing Range behind Cairns. All of them shared the same very short physical stature, as well as similar languages and culture.
In the mission’s first five years, about 150 Kongkandji periodically visited to receive rations but only a small number remained there permanently. After the Queensland Government passed its Aboriginal Protection Act in 1897, which forced Aborigines to be legally confined to reserves and missions, Yarrabah grew to a settlement of 150 residents drawn not only from the three local tribes but also from people all over North Queensland who bore no physical or cultural resemblance to the Cape Grafton Aborigines. Outside the mission, however, no one paid these people any special attention until an Adelaide researcher came across them in the late 1930s.
In 1938, Norman Tindale, an entomologist and anthropologist at the South Australian Museum, was going through a package of old photographs of Aborigines from the Warburton Mission sent him by a friend in Western Australia. One of the photographs of a group of men and women was labeled “Aborigines of north-west Australia”. The Warburton Mission was on the edge of the Gibson Desert, but the background of the photograph was clearly tropical jungle. It showed a wet weather hut thatched with what Tindale, a keen naturalist, recognized as the broad leaves of the wild banana tree. He could also tell that, if these were banana leaves, the people by comparison were very small. He made some enquiries and soon found that the only remaining stands of this plant were in the tropical rainforests on the eastern slopes of the Atherton Tableland in North Queensland.
At the time, Tindale and the American academic, Joseph Birdsell, were engaged in the most extensive project ever mounted in Australian physical anthropology to measure a large sample of Aborigines according to their weight, stature and a number of other bodily characteristics. They found the prospect of discovering a group in the Queensland rainforests so at variance with the norm, irresistible.
They also knew that, since the nineteenth century, there had been a number of theories about the origins of the Aborigines and the migration of ancient peoples to the Australian continent. In 1927, in his book, Environment and Race, the controversial Sydney geographer, Griffith Taylor, had speculated that several waves of Aboriginal migrants had swept before them an even older “Negrito” race. Maybe these rainforest people held the key to the story.
As soon as they could, Tindale and Birdsell drove from Adelaide to Cairns in search of the people in the photograph. They eventually found six hundred of them from twelve different tribal groups living on and around two missions, Yarrabah at Cape Grafton and Mona Mona at Kuranda on the Atherton Tableland. Some of them had only come in from the rainforest within the previous six years and spoke only their native tongue. They said there was still one family living a completely nomadic, hunter-gatherer life in the mountains behind Cardwell.
Tindale and Birdsell examined and measured 52 adults and children at Cape Grafton and 95 at Kuranda. Most adult males were between 140 and 150 centimeters tall (four feet six inches to five feet). The women were shorter by 15 to 30 centimeters (six to twelve inches). Tindale and Birdsell concluded they were not just small but were radically unlike any other Aborigines in Australia. They named them Barrineans, after nearby Lake Barrine. Tindale later said:
Their small size, tightly curled hair, child-like faces, peculiarities in their tooth dimensions and their blood groupings showed that they were different from other Australian Aborigines and had a strong strain of Negrito in them. Their faces bore unmistakable resemblances to those of the now extinct Tasmanians, as shown by photographs and plaster casts of the last of those people.
By 1963, when Tindale wrote these words in his book, Aboriginal Australians, the Barrinean pygmies were no longer an unknown people consigned to the oblivion of distant mission stations. Nor were they mere physical curiosities. They had become the centerpiece of what was then a widely influential explanation of the origins of human settlement on this continent. Their existence was offered as powerful confirmation of what was known as the “trihybrid theory” of hunter-gatherer migration to Australia. This theory had been primarily developed by Birdsell, who came to do fieldwork in Australia for a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University. He originally announced it in 1941 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Over subsequent decades, both he and Tindale worked on the theory, drawing connections between the Australian Aborigines’ physical differences and a growing body of evidence about Pleistocene era hunter-gatherer migrations across Asia, archaeological findings of skulls and stone tools in Australia, and data about Aboriginal genes and blood types. The trihybrid theory that eventually emerged went as follows.
There were three major waves of migration of quite different ancient people who came to the Australian continent from southeast Asia. More than 40,000 years ago, when sea levels were much lower and Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania comprised one landmass, called Sahul, the first to arrive were a slightly-built people of pygmoid stature with dark skin and very frizzy hair. They were Negritos (named after the Spanish “little negro”), and they provided the initial population for the whole of this Greater Australia. About 20,000 years ago, a second type of people arrived from Asia. These newcomers, called Murrayians, were comparatively lightly skinned, wavy-haired, stocky in build, with a lot of body hair. They drove the Negritos before them until the latter retreated to the highlands of New Guinea, the rainforests of North Queensland and to then ice-capped Tasmania. The Murrayians became the dominant population on the east coast of Australia, and the open grasslands and parklands of the south and west of the continent. Then, about 15,000 years ago, a third wave of hunter-gatherers arrived. They were comparatively tall, straight-haired and dark skinned, with very little body hair. Named Carpentarians, they colonised northern and central Australia.
Now, anyone who even casually dips into the literature on Aboriginal prehistory will find it a field where the evidence is thin on the ground but the air is thick with speculation. The trihybrid theory, however, was a comparative exception to this rule. Its authors found they could deploy a wide body of evidence in its support. They offered four different kinds of confirmation.
The first was their own project in physical anthropology. In two ventures into the field in 1938-39 and 1952-54, Tindale and Birdsell conducted by far the biggest survey of Aboriginal physiological characteristics ever undertaken, then or since. In their first expedition, sponsored by Harvard and Adelaide universities and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, they took measurements, blood samples and interviews with about 900 full-blood and 1500 mixed-blood Aborigines. With their wives as secretaries and research assistants, they drove to almost every Aboriginal settlement, reserve, mission and camp in eastern, southern and south-western Australia. In the second expedition, the same team surveyed another 2000 people in north-western Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
They constructed a database of multiple variables, including weight, stature, sitting height, shoulder breadth, tooth form and size, skin colour, and details such as baldness and beard abundance at certain ages. They compared variables among regional groups and found there were statistically significant measurements confirming their three different physiological types.
Both authors also published separate genetic studies of the Aborigines, based on blood types and family genealogies. This material was collected before the discovery of DNA and so retains the limitations of its time, being confined to an analysis of the O, A, B blood groups, the M, N blood types and the Rh series.
Their second type of support came from the remnant populations from whom the three Australian types were supposedly derived. Birdsell argued that, between the Bay of Bengal and the Melanesian islands, there was an arc of isolated peoples still in existence who all shared Negrito characteristics. They included the pygmy peoples of the Andaman Islands off the west coast of Burma, the Semang of the central mountains of the Malay Peninsula, the Aeta of the rainforests of several of the larger Philippine islands, a number of Negrito tribes, including the Tapiro and the Timorini, in the New Guinea highlands, the people of the Varzimberg Mountains of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain, and some tribes in the interior of northern New Caledonia.
These were all remnants, Birdsell argued, of a chain of migration by ancient Negritos across south Asia to the Pacific. He speculated that the chain had begun in Africa with an ancestral population of Negrito pygmies but the only connection he could make between the African and Oceanic Negritos was a propensity for women to develop steatopygia, a genetic condition that causes an excess of fat deposits on the buttocks and upper thighs. The second and third waves of migrant people, the authors argued, were also connected to remnants of ancient populations still living in Asia. The Murrayians, Birdsell said, had come from an Asian people whose other vestiges were the Ainu of Hokkaido in northern Japan and Sakhalin Island. Similarly, the Carpentarians bore similar physical characteristics to the Vedda people of south India and Sri Lanka.
The third type of evidence they offered was archaeological. Tindale and Birdsell claimed that excavations of ancient skulls and stone tools confirmed their thesis. They said the bones from Australia’s two most famous ancient burial sites, Lake Mungo and Kow Swamp, supported their ideas. Most archaeologists who support a “one people” model of Aboriginal origins find it hard to explain how the more “gracile” people found at Lake Mungo are much older (more than 25,000 years old) than the more “robust” skulls found at Kow Swamp (10,000-13,000 years old). Theories about evolution within the one population would expect the reverse. Tindale and Birdsell, however, said this pattern not only showed that Australia was populated by more than one type of people but it also fitted their particular thesis. The gracile or small-boned skeletons were probably those of the smaller, more slender Negritos, while the robust skulls were most likely Murrayian people. These claims, however, were no more than speculation since neither author ever made a study of the excavations from either site.
Their observations about stone tools, however, were a different matter. Tindale collected hand axes, cutting and chopping tools, spear points and other stone flakes from a number of sites in South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia and classified them according to time (he was one of the first in Australia to see the potential of carbon dating), place and culture. He classified large ancient stone tools from some sites as part of “Kartan Culture”. Similar-sized but slightly younger tools, which were more finely worked and sharper, he labeled “Tartangan Culture”. He argued both Kartan and Tartangan tools were produced by Negritos and were evidence of at least two distinct waves of Negrito migration to Australia.
The Murrayians, Tindale claimed, had a culture that developed much finer stone tools. In fact, he said the evidence indicated there were three separate types of Murrayian culture, which he named Pirrian, Mudukian and Murundian. All three phases were reflected by innovations in their stone implements. The Carpentarians, in turn, had their own distinctive culture, which was reflected in much more sophisticated stone tools and far more deadly stone and wooden weapons. In short, the three different types of ancient migrants had not only distinct physiologies but also their own identifiable cultures.
The fourth support for the trihybrid thesis was invoked by Birdsell in the way the whole case fitted the ideas of Sewall Wright, one of the major figures in twentieth century neo-Darwinian biology. Birdsell regarded his own academic field less as anthropology and more as the study of “microevolution”, or how genetic change at the level of the small group affected larger populations or species. The main point of his Australian fieldwork was to provide empirical confirmation for Wright’s “shifting balance” theory of evolution, first proposed in 1931.
Wright argued that random genetic mutations could often have permanent effects on populations even though they might not offer any adaptive advantage for the population as a whole. Once they became established within a small group, random genetic novelties could eventually be transmitted to a much larger parent population through small but persistent degrees of interbreeding. Hence evolutionary change could occur in ways other than the Darwinian process of natural selection. There had been some experimental laboratory support among insect populations to show that this was one successful path to evolutionary change but Birdsell thought his empirical data from the Aborigines confirmed it too.
Birdsell not only sought to establish that three distinct groups of hunter-gathers had populated Australia but also wanted to study their subsequent pattern of evolution, which he thought his anatomical measurements could detect. He believed he had corroborated Wright’s theory and that it, in turn, substantiated his own work. In 1978, in his massive work, Evolution and Genetics of Populations, Wright himself concurred with Birdsell’s conclusion.
The “one people” thesis of Aboriginal origins
In the nineteenth century, most Europeans who looked at the Australian Aborigines thought they were a homogenous people, except for the Tasmanians, who were regarded by most who saw them as distinctly Melanesian in appearance. Until Tindale and Birdsell’s trihybrid theory came along, most twentieth century academic anthropologists accepted a largely homogenous model on the mainland too. In particular, a group of anthropologists and anatomists at the University of Sydney espoused this position and defended it strongly.
The principal advocates of the Sydney position were Stan Larnach and N. W. G. Macintosh, both of the university’s Department of Anatomy. They believed that all the Aborigines who occupied Greater Australia came from a small single breeding unit. “Three women and two or three men may have initiated the peopling of Australia,” Larnach wrote in 1974 in an oft-cited paper. They probably arrived here by chance after being blown off course, he said, or they may have been seeking refuge. He acknowledged that additional small landings of the same people may have boosted the population but insisted that only one group was sufficient to fully populate the empty continent within two or three thousand years of their first arrival. Hence, he argued, all modern Aborigines were descendants of this original group.
When Tindale told the Sydney anthropologists in the late 1930s that he had found pygmy people in North Queensland, they dismissed his speculations about their separate origins as nothing but a particular, local evolution. Tindale and Birdsell, as representatives of a minor museum in Adelaide, found themselves treated as outsiders tilting at an academic establishment that would not budge. One of their collaborators, John Greenway, called the Sydney school “the tail that wags the anthropology dog in Australia”, for Tindale soon found that its rejection of his ideas determined the academic consensus around the country.
Beyond university anthropologists, however, the trihybrid thesis was much better accepted, as Manning Clark demonstrated when he used it to open his historical magnum opus in 1962. “Before the work of Tindale,” Clark wrote, “writers attempting to explain origins were forced back on intelligent guesses.”
In the 1950s and 60s, the authors were sought out by publishers to write some of the first books about Aborigines for popular audiences. One of these works, Aboriginal Australians, was written by Tindale and H. A. Lindsay in 1963. Tindale also produced two books for schoolchildren. In 1955, he and Lindsay wrote The First Walkabout, a story about a family of Negrito pygmies migrating to Australia, which won the award as best Australian book of the year for children in 1956. In a glossary at the end of the book, the authors informed their readers: “A few survivors of these tribes live near Kuranda today.” Later, in 1971, Tindale and his daughter Beryl wrote an illustrated children’s book, The Australian Aborigines, which also incorporated their ideas.
At the same time, however, a political movement was gathering force that would later swamp the trihybrid thesis and dissuade any converts it had won. In the late 1960s, Aboriginal activists and their white supporters began to build a political movement among all Australian Aboriginal people. Previous attempts to achieve this had failed because Aborigines were divided by geography, culture and, in some places, by language, and few felt they had much in common.
The Sixties movement adopted the anti-imperialist rhetoric then prevalent in southeast Asia and Africa. British colonialism had caused indigenous oppression and dispossession, they argued, so all Aborigines should come together to reject the hegemony of white Australia. Although this was primarily a movement of radical urban blacks trying to create a constituency among dispersed Aborigines in rural areas, the appeal galvanized considerable support, especially among white sympathizers.
Their appeal to pan-Aboriginalism, the notion that all Australian indigenous people had a common political interest, was always dependent on the idea that they were one people. (The only exception allowed was that of the Torres Strait Islanders, who were later defined as a separate entity.) Their politics were based on the claim that they were the original owners of the continent who had been dispossessed by the British. They did not want to allow there might be a hierarchy of claims for arrival, and thus ownership, among Aborigines themselves. So anyone who argued against the “one people” thesis would be seen as betraying the pan-Aboriginal movement and undermining Aboriginal political aspirations.
Moreover, the moral appeal of the activists’ case would have been weakened by the notion that there had been several waves of Aboriginal migrants, each of whom had violently dispossessed the other. Rather than a story of aggressive white imperialists disrupting an arcadian Aboriginal people living in harmony with one another and their environment, the long term history of Australian habitation would have resembled more that of humanity at large where the stronger have pushed aside the weaker, irrespective of the colour of either side. Hence, instead of a simple moral tale of goodies and baddies, the history of this continent would have reflected more the hard reality of the human condition everywhere.
For the past thirty years, there have been few in mainstream political or intellectual life with the stomach to make these points. As a result, the activists’ case about Aboriginal origins has been accepted, largely without dissent. Few authors, and certainly none writing for schoolchildren, have dared to even suggest that Aborigines had anything but one common source. This is why today the educated but non-specialist public has no inkling that there were ever pygmies in Australia. Knowledge of their existence would pose an obvious question mark over the central doctrine of Aboriginal politics. Hence, for public consumption, politics have made the topic taboo.
Among academic anthropologists and prehistorians, there has been a consensus since the Sixties that has largely agreed with this view. Over this period, the trihybrid thesis has still been discussed in the major anthropological textbooks, but only to be dismissed. Josephine Flood’s Archaeology of the Dreamtime devotes two paragraphs Birdsell’s ideas and announces: “There is no evidence to support the identification of a Negritic element in Australia.” Hence, among anthropologists, she says: “There has been a general rejection of the three-wave theory.” John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga, in Prehistory of Australia, take an even stronger line. There is little evidence, they say, to support Birdsell’s theories, which are “in any case irrelevant to present-day issues in recent human evolution”. They warn off non-specialists from even discussing the notion. “It is unfortunate that general authors still recount the tri-hybrid racial theory despite the evidence to the contrary.”
Even though we have suggested there are political reasons why Aboriginal activists and their supporters would not want this thesis accepted, we want to emphasise that we are not saying that this is the only reason, or even the principal reason, why academic anthropologists have followed suit. The history of the academic debate quite clearly shows that many anthropologists believed in the homogeneity of Aboriginal origins from the 1930s to the 1950s, that is, long before the political movement arose in the Sixties. A number of them simply continued to stick to their guns on this issue, irrespective of the political debate. Rather, our case is that the rise of Aboriginal political activism cast the trihybrid thesis into a particular political corner. It appeared a thesis that would give support to anyone opposed to pan-Aboriginalism and could thus be used against Aboriginal political aspirations. This added one more reason why those engaged in Aboriginal studies felt it should be buried.
The real problem with the mainstream anthropological case is not so much that it is political but that it is so dubious. For despite the self-assured tones in which Flood, Mulvaney and Kamminga write off Tindale and Birdsell, the evidence they and their colleagues cite hardly warrants such a confident dismissal. They make their case with four types of evidence:
Craniology: The measurement and comparison of both fossil and more recent skulls undermines the trihybrid thesis, Mulvaney and Kamminga claim. They cite the Sydney anatomists Macintosh and Larnach who in the 1970s made craniometric measurements of eastern Australian skulls, including some from the Cairns rainforest people, but could not distinguish the latter from other Aborigines. Josephine Flood cites the same studies: “Analysis of recent skeletal material from northern Queensland did not produce any evidence of a Negritic component among the rainforest Aborigines.” In Tasmania, Flood observes, skeletal remains from King Island, West Point and Mount Cameron West show no differences between prehistoric Tasmanian Aborigines and contemporary mainlanders.
Not only is there no evidence of distinct Negrito crania, but even the apparent dissimilarities between the gracile skulls found at Lake Mungo and the robust variety found at Kow Swamp turn out to be not so different after all. Phillip Habgood of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney claimed in an influential 1986 article that Australian fossil skulls display an “Australianness” that is unique to them. That is, “the ‘gracile’ and robust’ groups are more similar to each other, overall, than they are to any other anatomically modern Homo Sapiens crania from around the world.”
Genetics: Mulvaney and Kamminga argue that neither Birdsell nor his opponents can use genetic evidence as supports for their thesis because it is inconclusive. “Fifty years of blood genetic research,” they argue, “has failed to provide any clue to Aboriginal origins.” Josephine Flood, however, is more certain that genetic research actually counts against the trihybrid thesis. “Recent genetic studies,” she writes, “have shown that pygmy groups are not racially distinct, but simply represent local modification in physique in relation to their neighbours.”
Linguistics: According to Mulvaney and Kamminga, there are not only no craniometric differences between Tindale and Birdsell’s Negritos and other Aborigines but nor has any linguistic evidence for their separate origin ever been found. “Apart from Torres Strait languages,” they report, “no ancestral links with languages overseas have been demonstrated.”
Human evolution: The critics argue that the small stature, the frizzy hair and other apparent Negrito characteristics that Tindale and Birdsell observed in North Queensland can be readily explained not by separate origins but by local evolution. Although Josephine Flood admits that Australian Aborigines are among the world’s most physically varying population, this is not evidence of multiple origins, she says. Instead, she endorses Phillip Habgood’s explanation that: “Morphological variation displayed by the late Pleistocene skeletal material developed as a result of mutation, genetic selection and drift (the accidental loss of lineages) as the first migrants moved out into a diversity of environments and climates.” That is, the Australian Aborigines had one common origin but evolved differently when separated from other, larger populations. Flood makes a similar point about Tasmania: “The differences observed between Tasmanian and mainland Aborigines in historic times are now considered to result from genetic change in a small, isolated population.”
In other words, the Tasmanians didn’t have their frizzy hair and Melanesian looks when they arrived there, but these features evolved during the eight-to-ten thousand years that Tasmania has been separated from the mainland. Similarly, the tribes around Cairns were not short, slender, frizzy-haired and of Negrito appearance when they first came to the district. These characteristics evolved naturally over the period they lived in the rainforests.
Before discussing these points, we should point out that the trihybrid theory does not claim its three waves of immigrants always remained separate peoples. As the ‘hybrid’ of its title was designed to emphasise, there was a good deal of interbreeding over the millennia. In Tasmania, before the sea rose to cut it off from the mainland, the theory holds that the Negritos and the Murrayians interbred fairly extensively. Birdsell wrote:
The Tasmanians represent a dihybrid race whose predominant genetic element is not Negrito, but on the contrary represents the Murrayian Australian type from the south-eastern portion of that continent. The Oceanic Negritic element is clearly present but … a comparison with the Andamanese indicates that the Negritic element in the Tasmanians must have been the minority contribution.
On the other hand, he did believe that, while there had also been interbreeding in North Queensland, the Aborigines he found in the Cairns district were relatively more authentic examples of the original Negrito people. This means that any debate about morphological differences, or outward appearance, should be in terms of statistical tendencies rather than clear-cut distinctions. With this in mind, let us put some objections to the case outlined above.
Problems for the orthodox position
Craniology: The research that is most widely regarded as having demolished the idea that the rainforest people from Cairns are Negritos was published in 1970 by Larnach and Macintosh. It was a study of 116 skulls of Queensland Aborigines held by the Australian Museum. Twelve of them came from the Cairns districts where Birdsell had found the pygmy people. The anatomists listed all the characteristics of these skulls and then performed a number of statistical tests on the results. They found they could not distinguish the skulls from Cairns from those of Aborigines from elsewhere in Queensland. They concluded:
On the basis of craniology alone, it does seem that the very existence of Negritos in Australia is, to say the least, open to very serious doubt, and so far no prehistoric skulls have been discovered that would qualify this statement … These results fail to support Birdsell’s theory of the trihybrid origin of Australian Aborigines.
While it is certainly true that their results fail to support Birdsell’s theory, it is equally true, however, that they do little to actually refute it. Given that this is a debate about statistical tendencies, a comparison of 12 skulls within a total population of 116 is hardly a major study and goes nowhere near matching the sample size from which Birdsell drew. His data included not only thirteen skulls from the Cairns district but also live measurements from 147 Aborigines there. As well as thirty head and face measurements, Tindale and Birdsell’s studies in 1938-39 and 1952-54 included weight, stature and twenty other body indices and metrics. The total population to which he compared this data comprised 3008 full-blooded Aborigines from all major regions of Australia.
Birdsell maintained right up to his last book in 1993, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia, that his own analysis of these measurements confirmed his thesis. It is only by pretending this huge amount of data does not exist, and by confining their evidence to their own measurements, that Larnach and Macintosh can be thought to have decided the issue.
In any case, skull measurement is not exactly a precise science. It involves a high degree of interpretation. Over the years, people looking at the same sets of skulls have often interpreted them in accordance with the latest anthropological fashions. Macintosh admitted he had done this himself. In the 1960s, he said none of Australia’s fossil skulls showed any Tasmanian traits and none of the Tasmanian skulls had any connection with Melanesia. In the 1970s, however, after two other researchers argued that Tasmanian skulls were closer to those of the Tolai people of New Britain than they were to mainland Aborigines, Macintosh changed his mind and agreed with them. At the same time, he acknowledged that the Keilor skull from Victoria showed some particular Tasmanian characteristics.
Despite these uncertainties, by the mid-1970s, skull measurements were being used even more confidently to support the “one people” thesis. Its supporters argued that, despite the great variations in Australian fossil skulls, they could all be interpreted within the one framework. The gracile and robust skulls from Lake Mungo and Kow Swamp, they claimed, should not be regarded as evidence of two different types of people but rather as different points on one broad scale of difference within a single population. This was a remarkable conclusion, since there have been some dissenting anthropologists who have argued the Kow Swamp skulls are so radically different from the Australian norm that they are less like Homo sapiens and actually more like the earlier hominid, Homo erectus.
The “one people” theorists, however, have no trouble in accommodating such extremes within their own model. Macintosh and Larnach told an Australian Institute of Aboriginal studies symposium in 1974:
How should we interpret this mélange of gracile, intermediate and rugged items? To us, there is only one answer: a practically unchanging population over a period of 25,000 years and exhibiting a wide range of variability.
This approach, it is worth noting, makes the “one people” thesis virtually unfalsifiable, since it permits no evidence, no matter how disparate, to challenge itself. In real science, of course, unfalsifiable hypotheses should be ruled out of court immediately.
Genetics: The Sydney school has long been convinced that genetic studies also support the notion of an homogenous population. Larnach wrote in 1974 that, as a result of new genetic research: “We therefore have no hesitation in omitting Negritos as ancestors of the Australian Aborigines.” The work he cited was a then new study of Aboriginal blood groups by R. T. Simmons of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. Simmons had reviewed various surveys of blood samples taken from Aborigines on Cape York, the Gulf of Carpentaria and Arnhem Land between 1926 and 1971 and compared their gene frequencies. Among these surveys were those done by Tindale and Birdsell at the Yarrabah and Mona Mona missions in 1938-39.
Simmons found there were some blood group gene frequency patterns at certain Cape York localities that were unique. However, rather than use these as evidence of a unique population history, he said they could all be explained by known factors such as admixture with other races and by breeding from very small gene pools. Otherwise: “Our findings do not suggest that the Aborigines of the Cape York area are basically different from those found in other parts of Australia, but are more admixed.” Simmons added that his findings supported the “one people” model. “In three decades of blood group research, we have found no blood group genetic evidence which would suggest that the unmixed Aborigines are not a homogenous people.”
For good measure, he paid particular attention to the question of any possible Australian connections to Africa. Repudiating the “Out of Africa” theory of human origins, Simmons said he thought that the Australian data indicated that the Aborigines actually evolved earlier than African Negroes. There was no blood group evidence, he said, to indicate the African Negroes or Negritos had any connection to the Australian Aborigines.
May I state here and now that our extensive blood grouping surveys conducted in Australia, Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia over three decades have produced no genetic evidence that the Negro ever entered the Pacific. The term Oceanic Negro in relation to Melanesians is then purely descriptive … The extensive data now available on blood group gene frequencies make it appear unlikely that African, Asian and Oceanic pygmy groups are related. Blood group studies indicate that Papuan pygmies or Negritos differ widely from pygmy groups in other parts of the world, but that they are closely akin to neighbouring Papuans. Similar relationships have been found for other Negrito populations and their taller neighbours. The so-called Negrito or pygmy peoples outside Africa should then be called pygmy, and not Negrito as a descriptive term.
Despite the confidence of his tone, however, Simmons’s conclusions were not as definitive |
forced the dismissal of charges against 28 defendants. It also exposed weaknesses in the handling of drug evidence in the FBI’s Washington field office.
Lowry faces up to seven years in federal prison, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Philadelphia, which is handling the case. He was charged in a criminal information, which can only be filed with a defendant’s consent and typically indicates that a plea deal has been reached. A court date has not been set, and his attorney declined to say whether prosecutors have agreed to a sentence.
The case represents a stunning turn for the Maryland resident, who graduated near the top of his class at the University of Maryland, earned a graduate degree while working full time for the FBI and tried to follow his father’s distinguished career in law enforcement. He was found six months ago, seemingly incoherent, on a lot near Southeast Washington’s Navy Yard with open bags of heroin in his agency car.
His attorney, Robert C. Bonsib, said Lowry became addicted to powerful pain medication wrongly prescribed to treat potentially debilitating ulcerative colitis, and he turned to heroin to self-medicate when his doctor disappeared and he ran out of medicine to control his pain.
“Matt Lowry is devastated by the consequences of his conduct, particularly as it has affected the drug investigations that he, his fellow law enforcement officers, and prosecutors had spent so much time developing and pursuing,” Bonsib said in a statement. He added that it “is contrary to everything he trained himself for and believes in.”
Bonsib said that Lowry plans to plead guilty to all 64 criminal counts and that his client spent hours with prosecutors retracing his steps through every case he worked or stole from in order to help authorities understand the impact on prosecutions.
“Mr. Lowry fully disclosed to investigators the items of evidence with which he tampered,” Bonsib said. The former agent spent three months in outpatient drug treatment.
Lowry was charged in U.S. District Court in the District, although local prosecutors recused themselves because of a conflict and dealt only with the impact the thefts had on other criminal cases. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania took the lead in investigating Lowry. His faces 20 counts of obstruction of justice, 18 counts of falsification of records, 13 counts of conversion of property and 13 counts of possession of heroin.
The case broke open at the end of September, when Lowry left work after a difficult day and an argument with his wife and never made it home. His father called friends at the FBI, who scoured the District and eventually reached Lowry by phone. He had run out of gas in his FBI-assigned Chevrolet Impala on a lot near the Navy Yard. The agents described him as incoherent.
Friends had noticed Lowry’s erratic behavior, but knew that he had a new baby at home and was having trouble in his marriage. They took Lowry to a fellow agent’s apartment that night.
But the next day, agents were cleaning out the trash in the car when they found the drugs. Inside were evidence bags, full of heroin, that had been cut open. The case became public a month later as prosecutors began notifying defense attorneys about possible misconduct.
Photographs from FBI evidence files of heroin found in the car assigned to FBI agent Matthew Lowry. Prosecutors dropped drug cases against 28 defendants in four cases based on evidence now deemed tainted. (U.S. District Court)
The Washington Post obtained more than 600 pages of internal documents, memos and transcripts of interviews with Lowry’s fellow agents that detail how he managed to obtain the drugs and the personal events leading to his downfall.
In those documents, Lowry described how he took advantage of procedures that allowed a single agent to sign out drugs for lab analysis and did not track whether the packages reached their purported destination. As a result, Lowry was able to store drug evidence in his car, sometimes for as long as a year, with no questions asked. Lowry described how he forged signatures of agents on forms and evidence seals, repackaged drugs in bags and used store-bought laxatives to replaced heroin he had taken to avoid discrepancies in package weight.
Lowry, who started working at the FBI as a civilian in 2003 and became an agent in 2009, earning a leadership award from the academy, had been assigned to what is called the Cross Border Task Force. He mostly took drugs from cases he worked.
Many of the 28 defendants whose cases were dismissed had already pleaded guilty and had been sent to prison, some for up to 10 years or more. Within two months, all of them had been freed and sent home with the convictions erased. Those charges had been filed based solely or substantially on drug evidence that Lowry stole from.
Bonsib said Lowry at first had received sound treatment for his colitis, but his doctor left private practice. A new doctor changed course and prescribed pain medication, which Bonsib said alleviated the symptoms but did not address the underlying illness. Bonsib said Lowry “was not properly advised of the highly addictive characteristics of the pain medications he was receiving.” Bonsib added, “Mr. Lowry subsequently became dependent on them.”
He said that doctor then left, leaving Lowry without medical care. He said Lowry tried to “go cold turkey,” but his “addiction was overpowering and the pain from the ulcerative colitis was unbearable. This is how Mr. Lowry turned to self-medication by the use of the drugs in this case.”
The documents obtained by The Post show how Lowry first used heroin taken from a drug case dubbed “Midnight Hustle.”
Bonsib said Lowry spent three months in outpatient drug rehabilitation and is being treated by a specialist. “Mr. Lowry recognizes the need to continue to attend counseling and drug treatment in order to avoid a relapse.
“Matt Lowry now faces the next step in his life and he knows that this phase will be tough and a struggle,” Bonsib added.Suburban Legends are an American ska punk band[1] that formed in Huntington Beach, California, in 1998 and later based themselves in nearby Santa Ana. After building a fanbase in the Orange County ska scene through its numerous regular performances at the Disneyland Resort, a series of lineup changes in 2005 introduced elements of funk and disco into the group's style.
Since 2009, the band has gradually returned to its ska roots, and has also recorded cover versions of songs from Disney films and television series.
History [ edit ]
Formation and first EP (1998-2002) [ edit ]
Influenced by artists such as Reel Big Fish, Michael Jackson and Oingo Boingo, the band was formed in 1998 as The No Tones, consisting of vocalist Tim Maurer, guitarist Josh Landers, bassist Justin Meacham, drummer Fred Johnson, trumpet players Vince Walker and Aaron Bertram, and trombonists Ryan Dallas Cook and Brian Robertson. A few months after forming, Landers was replaced by Brent Feige and Johnson by Jimmy Sullivan and the band changed their name to Bomb Squad, under which name they released an EP, now known as the Bomb Squad EP.
In 1999 the band changed their name to Suburban Legends. Guitarist Brent Feige left the band shortly before the release of the first demo album, Origin Edition, for which they recruited guitarist Brian Klemm. The album was self-pressed and even though Brian Klemm was already in the band, Vince Walker recorded the guitar parts for the demo album.
In late 1999, vocalist Tim Maurer and drummer Jimmy Sullivan left the band, the latter to form the band Pinkly Smooth. The former was replaced by Chris Batstone, the latter by Derek Lee Rock. A few months later, bassist Justin Meacham left the band as well and was soon replaced by former lead vocalist Tim Maurer's brother, Chris Maurer. Sullivan and Meacham would later perform together as members of metal band Avenged Sevenfold, under the respective pseudonyms "The Rev" and "Justin Sane".
In 2001, the band released their first, self-titled, EP, Suburban Legends, on We The People Records, featuring some re-recorded songs from Origin Edition. This was the band's only release with Chris Batstone on vocals, as he left the band in early 2002.
Rump Shaker and Disney (2002-2005) [ edit ]
In early 2002 previous vocalist Tim Maurer rejoined the band on vocals, and the band re-recorded the vocals for their EP, and re-released it independently as Suburban Legends (Tim Remix). During the year, the band played close to 1000 shows at Downtown Disney.[2] They also performed on many occasions for the X Games Xperience promotion at Disney California Adventure Park in 2003.
In 2003, the band recorded and released their first actual album, Rump Shaker, followed by a year of heavy touring. The band released their first live DVD in 2004 titled Season One. At the end of the year trumpet player Vince Walker and bassist Chris Maurer left the band, the former to go to college and the latter to get married. While Maurer was replaced by Mikey Hachey, Walker wasn't replaced and the band continued with only one trumpet player. In May 2005, trumpet player Aaron Bertram left the band to get married as well, and was replaced by Luis Beza.
In late 2005, former trumpet player Vince Walker rejoined the band for the 2005 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, after which vocalist Tim Maurer left the band once again. The band went on a pause until further notice.
Death of Dallas Cook and new formation (2005-2006) [ edit ]
At 12:25 AM on October 19, 2005, trombone player Dallas Cook was killed in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident on the Costa Mesa Freeway.[3] A few days after the incident, a large group of Suburban Legends' fans and Dallas' friends and family gathered nearby the ESPN Zone at Disneyland Resort's Downtown Disney, where the band played their many performances in the early 2000s, to share their memories of Cook. On November 29, 2005, the band performed a benefit show for the Dallas Cook Memorial Fund, which was as set up in Cook's honor to donate money to the Huntington Beach High School instrumental music program. The performance also featured former members Tim Maurer, Chris Maurer and Aaron Bertram returning for one final show, and trumpet player Vince Walker permanently switching to the vocalist position.
In 2006 the band recruited trombonist Phillip Inzerillo to replace Dallas Cook. They released their first EP with Vince Walker on vocals, Dance Like Nobody's Watching, which showed the band's shift in style towards disco rock. The band promoted the EP by appearing on G4's Attack of the Show! on April 18, 2006.
On July 19, 2006, while they were on tour and in St. Louis, Missouri, Phillip Inzerillo woke up to notice the band's tour van was on fire. The fire destroyed the front driver's side of the van. The band's tour money had also been missing from the van. It is suspected that the fire and robbery was caused by an arsonist.
At the end of the year, trombonist Phillip Inzerillo left the band without official announcement, and wasn't replaced. Around this time keyboardist Dallas Kruse started performing with the band, despite never being listed as an official member.
New musical direction (2007-2009) [ edit ]
In 2007 the band released a Japan-only album, an extended version of their EP release, titled Dance Like Nobody's Watching: Tokyo Nights, containing several new and re-recorded songs. In early July 2007, the band started releasing videos on their YouTube account documenting progress recording new material in the studio. Later that year, the band released their first full album with Vince Walker on vocals, Infectious. The album continued the shift in style started with Dance Like Nobody's Watching, with ska being traded in for a pop-rock sound with disco and funk elements.
On November 11, 2007, the band was robbed again, while supporting Streetlight Manifesto on their Somewhere in the Between Tour. This time, Suburban Legends' van was stolen along with approximately $80,000 worth of all their equipment and instruments. Fans were first alerted of this when Dallas Kruse posted a MySpace bulletin reading:
" You all know just HOW MUCH suburban legends have been through throughout the years!.... lets all gather to HELP THEM through this! I just got a call from my dear friend MIKEY, bassist for Suburban Legends. They are on tour in Philly and woke up to head down to the van and trailer from the hotel room and the van and trailer were stolen. Every piece of equipment and merchandise the band owns is gone. Drum sets, horns, clothing, basses, guitars, amps, etc. The value of the equipment alone is appx 40k. The value of the trailer alone is 30k. Estimated value of everything is probably close to 80k (in my estimation) including the van, trailer and gear. They are troopers and going to try and rent another van, rent gear and finish the tour. This is devastating. Most, if not ALL of you know just how dear and sincere these guys are and how close I am with them. Is there ANYTHING we can do to help them? My idea was to find someone with money who would be able to immediately front them an investment for gear and work out terms for the band to pay that person back. Or does someone here have connections to a car dealership? Instruments? SOMETHING!?! Please help! if you have some help or ideas, PLEASE, lets help the guys out!"
Another MySpace bulletin which was posted on November 13, said that the van was recovered in a neighborhood in Philadelphia, apparently after somebody saw the news story on the van theft and gave information of its whereabouts. When the van was recovered, it only required minor repairs. However, the contents of the van and trailer were missing. While insurance issues were still being resolved, the band apologized to the fans for any shows they missed and stated that they would be back on the road again.
The song "Fire" from their 2008 album, Let's Be Friends, was about the van fire and robberies.
The band's second DVD Poisonous Candy Factory was released in March 2008. Similar to Season One, it featured live sets containing songs from Rump Shaker through to new, unreleased material, music videos and extra videos from the band.
Shortly after this release, the band headed back into the studio and recorded their third official album, Let's Be Friends, released on July 10, 2008, while touring with Less Than Jake, Goldfinger, and Big D and the Kids Table on the Shout It Loud Tour 2. This album mixed elements of previous albums, featuring a return to ska on some songs as well as a continued focus on a pop-rock sound.
In the winter of 2008, they toured with The Aquabats on the Hooray for the Holidays Tour.[4] In February 2009, they appeared along with The Aquabats' MC Bat Commander on MC Lars' new song, "This Gigantic Robot Kills", from Lars' new album of the same name. MC Lars describes that "this song is about bringing ska back. It's about this kid who builds this giant robot" who "as he destroys Orange County, he leaves behind a trail of Less Than Jake CDs, a field of Aquabat limited edition vinyls, and a stack of CDs by Suburban Legends."[5] They also performed at Miley Cyrus' 16th Birthday Party celebration.[6]
Shortly after, trumpet player Luis Beza left the band.
In 2009 the band appeared as a full ska band on the 2009 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, with a new ska song titled "Open Your Eyes". The performance featured former member Aaron Bertram on trumpet once again, and guest musicians Byron Panopio and Justin Lewis, on trumpet and trombone respectively. The three continued to perform with the band on the subsequent tour and Disney shows, along with touring trumpet player Chris Lucca. At the end of 2009 Panopio and Lewis, as well as long-time collaborator Dallas Kruse, stopped performing with the band.
Day Job era (2010-present) [ edit ]
In 2009 the band had announced they were planning to release a full ska record once again, and in late 2010 the band released a seven-track EP as a preview, Going on Tour EP. This was followed by the departure of bassist Mikey Hachey, even though he continues to collaborate with the band on some occasions. He was soon replaced by Brad Polidori.
On January 1, 2011, the band's song, "You," from their 2003 album, Rump Shaker, was performed by the Western Carolina University Pride of the Mountains Marching Band in the 2011 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California. The band chose to perform the song in honor of the late Ryan Dallas Cook.
In July 2011, it was announced that Suburban Legends was cast as the house band for Pick-a-Split, a retro-themed bowling game show pilot hosted by Neil Hamburger.
During November 2011, Connecticut's Asbestos Records and Chicago, IL's Underground Communiqué Records launched a fundraiser together on Kickstarter to release Rump Shaker on vinyl, among other third-wave ska classics from Pilfers, Edna's Goldfish, and The Pietasters. The funding goal was met by January 18, 2012, and the records began pre-production in Spring 2012.[7]
On February 23, the band's 2009 collaboration track with MC Lars and The Aquabats' MC Bat Commander, "This Gigantic Robot Kills", was released on Rock Band Network.
On April 3, 2012, the band released its fifth full-length album, Day Job. It includes new songs, four re-recorded tracks from Going on Tour, a collaborative track with rapper Lyrics Born, as well as two Disney covers, "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid and "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" from The Lion King, which have been long-time staples of the band's live performances. In November 2012, long-time drummer Derek Rock left the band to pursue other career options. Reel Big Fish drummer Ryland Steen and former Big D and the Kids Table drummer Max MacVeety filled in on drums between Rock's departure and the hiring of current drummer Edward Larsen in 2013.
The group released its all-Disney covers EP, Dreams Aren't Real, But These Songs Are, Vol. 1, through Rock Ridge Music on October 7, 2013. On March 17, 2015, the band officially announced their next album, Forever in the Friend Zone.[8]
In 2015, Suburban Legends and Roger Lima (of Less Than Jake) recorded with MC Lars to release "Sublime With Rome (Is Not the Same Thing as Sublime)" on his 2015 LP, The Zombie Dinosaur LP.[9]
Klemm, Walker, and former bassist Chris Maurer also currently perform in Personal Satisfaction, a blues/comedy side project.
Retirement from touring [ edit ]
On December 23, 2015, the band announced via their Facebook page that their 2016 US tour in support of Reel Big Fish would be their "last tour ever," while also leaving the possibility to tour again open, stating, "who knows what the future will hold but after this we will be taking a time out from touring."[10]
Style [ edit ]
Suburban Legends' style of music has evolved over time and is different from that of other ska bands. While earlier material being heavily rooted in ska, the 2006 release Dance Like Nobody's Watching brought a different sound took ideas and influence from disco, funk, and pop, some songs on the EP containing little to no ska sound at all. The band furthered its distance from ska with the 2007 release of Infectious, heavily focusing on disco on the record. The band has not abandoned their earlier sound, though, regularly performing older material alongside their current work.
The 2008 album Let's Be Friends combines elements from all their previous releases. In May 2009, the band announced that they would be recording a "full blown ska rock album," not simply a ska-influenced album because they have horns or an album with only a few ska songs.[11] Further supporting the band's transition back to ska, less time was devoted in live performances to songs found on more recent albums, such as Infectious, with the band reintroducing older songs such as "Alternative is Dead," "Gummi Bears," "I Want More," and "Waikiki," all of which were found either on Origin Edition (1999) and Suburban Legends (2001). The band has been playing these songs and other from that era ever since. In 2009 the band also started performing a new ska song, "Open Up Your Eyes", which later appeared on their 2010 Going on Tour EP and their 2012 Day Job album.
Part of the band's claim to fame has been its live shows which often involve dance routines far more complicated than those often found in ska bands, as horn playing usually inhibits movement on stage.
Covers [ edit ]
Suburban Legends are known to perform many live covers, most often when performing at the Disneyland Resort, sometimes performing top 40 and classic pop or rock hits to appeal to the theme park guests outside of the band's usual fanbase. The band has also performed and recorded many songs from Disney films and television shows. They have performed "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid at many of its shows since 2002, and the theme songs from Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears and DuckTales, "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" from The Lion King, and more recently, "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid and "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. Until 2013, only "Gummi Bears", "Under the Sea", and "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" had seen recorded releases, with the first track appearing on the Bomb Squad EP and Origin Edition, and the latter two tracks appearing on the band's 2012 album, Day Job. The band released an EP consisting of Disney covers in October 2013, including "DuckTales", "Kiss the Girl", and others. The band's Disneyland performances have also featured "Build Me Up Buttercup" by The Foundations, "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang, "Higher Ground" by Stevie Wonder, "Rubberneckin'" by Elvis Presley, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" by Frankie Valli, "I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am)" by Gary Glitter, "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond, and an excerpt of "Moves Like Jagger" by Maroon 5 as a segue into the band's own "All Around the World".
Outside of the three Disney songs, cover songs rarely appear on the band's studio releases. An exception is "Dancing Machine", a song originally performed by The Jackson 5, appearing on the 2007 Japan-only release, Dance Like Nobody's Watching: Tokyo Nights, an extended version of the U.S.-released Dance Like Nobody's Watching EP. All other covers have been released as part of compilations, such as the band's cover of "On the Outside" appearing on Dead Bands Party: A Tribute to Oingo Boingo. During Chris Batstone's tenure as lead vocalist, a recording of "Rose Tint My World" from The Rocky Horror Show was made for an abandoned Rocky Horror tribute album (which would have also featured fellow ska artists such as Chris Murray and Pain), and was eventually released in MP3 format by the band. The band began performing The Gregory Brothers' and Antoine Dodson's "Bed Intruder Song" at live performances in 2010, eventually releasing a studio recording on a 7" single backed with "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" by Five Iron Frenzy as part of Asbestos Records' Ska is Dead 7" Club series in 2012.
Lineup [ edit ]
The band has had many lineup changes over the years. Original vocalist Tim Maurer left the band after the recording of Origin Edition, and was replaced by Chris Batstone. Batstone later left the band, and Maurer rejoined. After an album and live DVD, Maurer left again after the 2005 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon to spend more time with his family. He was replaced by former trumpet player Vince Walker, who returned to the band in the same performance, oddly switching roles from horns to vocals. Walker also plays the trumpet and guitar in some songs on stage. Before becoming the band's lead vocalist, he already had provided lead vocals on several songs such as "Desperate", "Blingity Bling" and "Powerful Game". Walker sometimes switches to guitar so that Brian Klemm can take over lead vocals.
Guitarist Brian Klemm joined the band in 1999 and has been with the band ever since. He can also be heard doing lead vocals in several of the band's songs, such as "Desperate", "Powerful Game", "This Cherry", "So Fine", "Love Fair", "I Just Can't Wait to be King" and "Girlfriend's Pretty". After the departure of Aaron Bertram, Klemm started providing more backing vocals live, and this increased even more after the departure of Mikey Hachey.
The band's original bassist, Justin Meacham, left the band in 2000 to join Avenged Sevenfold and replace their original bassist Matt Wendt. He was soon replaced by Chris Maurer, the younger brother of former lead vocalist Tim Maurer. Apart from bass, Chris Maurer also provided backing vocals on many songs live. Maurer left the band in 2004 to marry his fiancée and was replaced by Mikey Hachey, who stayed with the band until 2010, when he left the band to pursue other musical activities, notably becoming the house bassist for Cirque du Soleil's Viva Elvis show at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. He also did many of the band's main backing vocals after Aaron Bertram left, and also occasionally sang lead vocals in "Powerful Game" live. The band's current bassist is Brad Polidori who joined in 2010.
One of the band's early drummers, Jimmy Sullivan, left the band to form Pinkly Smooth and later became known as "The Rev" in Avenged Sevenfold, along with former Suburban Legends bassist Justin Meacham, who became known as Justin Sane during his time with Avenged Sevenfold. After that drummer Derek Lee Rock was with the band from 2000 onwards. He recently left the band in 2012, and temporarily filling in on drums were Max McVeety and Reel Big Fish's Ryland Steen. In 2013 Edward Larsen joined the band on drums.
Trumpet player Vince Walker was with the band until his departure in 2004 to focus on his education. He rejoined the band in 2005 to become the band's new lead vocalist. Aaron Bertram left the band in 2005 to marry his fiancée, but returned to the band in 2009 as a touring trumpet player. In between this, Luis Beza was the band's only trumpet player. Since 2009, Bertram usually performs with the band as their trumpet player, but Chris Lucca often takes the trumpet player role in the band's overseas tours. Bertram was the band's main backing vocalist before he left, and has also provided lead vocals for several songs such as "Gummi Bears", "Rose Tint My World" and "Powerful Game". In 2013, Chris Lucca became the band's official trumpet player. Aaron Bertram still regularly performs with the band at local shows,
Trombonist Brian Robertson is the only member to have been in the band since its inception in 1998. Dallas Cook, who also provided lead vocals for the band's cover of "Rose Tint My World", was killed in 2005, and was replaced by Phillip Inzerillo who left the band in 2006. Since then, Robertson has been the band's only trombonist. He usually only plays trombone, but also sings backing in the song "Blingity Bling" from Rump Shaker.
Keyboardist Dallas Kruse began playing with the band around 2006 after the departure of Inzerillo. While not an "official" member, not appearing on the band's website and not announced by the band, he often performed with the band since the tour at local shows until late 2009. Kruse served as producer for Dance Like Nobody's Watching: Tokyo Nights, Infectious, and Let's Be Friends and Slay the Dragon Together.
Current lineup [ edit ]
Former [ edit ]
Former touring musicians
Byron Panopio - trumpet (2009, touring)
Justin Lewis - trombone (2009, touring)
Ryland Steen - Drums (2011, 2012-2013, touring)
Max MacVeety - Drums (2012–2013, touring)
Dallas Kruse - keyboard, keytar, backing vocals (2006–2009; local shows only)
Timeline [ edit ]
Discography [ edit ]
A majority of the band's material has been self-released, with the exception of the red, blue, and green versions of the Tim Maurer Suburban Legends EP (released by We The People Records) the UK version of Rump Shaker (released by Brand New Hero Records), the Japan-only Dance Like Nobody's Watching: Tokyo Nights (released by Subrange Records), and Dreams Aren't Real, But These Songs Are, Vol. 1 (released by Rock Ridge Music). Some out-of-print and/or rare recordings were previously made available by fans on the now-defunct Suburban Legends official forums in the "Suburban Legends Collection" forum, under permission of trombonist Brian Robertson.
Albums [ edit ]
EPs [ edit ]
DVDs [ edit ]
Singles [ edit ]
"Rose Tint My World" (download only) (unreleased tribute album) (2001)
"Gimme, Gimme" (CD single from Christmas 2004 shows) (2004)
Collaborations [ edit ]
Music videos [ edit ]
"I Want More" (2001)
"High Fives" (2003)
"Up All Night" (2004) - animated
"Come Back Home" (2007) - features cameos by Justin Mauriello (formerly of Zebrahead) and Aaron Barrett (Reel Big Fish)
"Infectious" (2007) - directed by the Fackrell Brothers
"Kiss the Girl" (2013)
"You've Got a Friend In Me" (2013)
Compilations [ edit ]Beavis And Butt-head Return to MTV
NEW YORK (CBS) They're back.
MTV officials announced Thursday that the controversial cartoon "Beavis And Butt-head" will be returning with all-new episodes set to air this summer.
The animated series scored loads of controversy during it's initial run in the 1990s. Parents decried the coarse language and foul behavior of the irreverent duo and cited the show as a bad influence on younger viewers.
Now, fans and even some celebrities are eagerly awaiting the return of Cornholio. On his Twitter page, pop star Justin Bieber tweeted, "Beavis and Butt-head are coming back!!!" Are three exclamation points really needed?
Series creator Mike Judge will be at the helm again for these new installments and will also continue to serve as the voice of the two head-banging roommates. It's not yet clear if the angst-ridden Daria will appear.
And, with the return of "Beavis And Butt-head" on MTV, the question remains if music videos will also be coming back to the network.This is Game 2 of 2 Scum Wolfpack vs Imperials.
(NB; the visuals used are not pinpoint accurate and are merely a visual aid)
ManOfMonkey is in regular type…. This match will be slightly different from the first in that I’m going to take a back seat on the writing, effectively letting Cpt JB take you through his thoughts of how to overcome what just beat him. (If you missed the first game click HERE)
My list as before:
Flying: Scum and Villainy 97pts
Jump master 500- Contracted Scout, Plasma Torpedos, extra munitions, Overclocked R4, Deadeye, Guidance chips.
Jump master 500- Contracted Scout, Plasma Torpedos, extra munitions, Overclocked R4, Deadeye, Guidance chips.
Jump master 500- Contracted Scout, Proton Torpedos, R4 Agromech, Bobba Fett, Deadeye, Guidance chips.
Captain Jacks Butts (Cpt JB) is Italicised.
Flying: Imperial 100pts
Tie Phantom- Whisper, Advanced Clocking Device, Veteran instincts, Fire Control system, Rebel Captive.
Tie Interceptor- Soontir Fell, Push The Limit, Royal Guard Title, Targeting computer, Autothrusters.
Tie fighter- academy pilot.
Tie fighter- academy pilot.
Start of game: ManOfMonkey takes initiative.
Game two
Rock placement and deployment
ManOfMonkey: I was keen to change tactics in game 2 and would therefore be going for the alpha strike approach. I tried to space the rocks out down one side of the board but Cpt JB managed to counter this and we ended up with a staggered diagonal asteroid field running bottom left to top right. I toyed with setting up the left U-boat facing right to tuck in behind the other two with a view to stagger my firing but in the end I set up the U-boats to my right of the board line astern hoping to slow roll and kill off whatever came into the open space.
Cpt JB: This time I put my game face on and made sure that a central approach was not on with rocks as Monkey put his three at range two of each corner. I placed the Tie fighters as before although gave myself room to at least do a two hard turn in if desired. The three contracted scouts placed down facing the Ties in a row. On the opposite flank I placed Whisper and Soontir together facing the Scout’s deployment edge.
I wanted to give myself the option of either flaking with both Whisper and Soontir or peeling off early an move across board.
Turn one
Cpt JB: The two tie fighters moved speed five straight towards the middle whilst the scouts moved forwards with one peeling off to attempt a hard two next turn to sneak through the rocks in the centre to pop shot at anything trying to circle down the flanks.
Whisper and Soontir both moved two straight forwards to allow options with Whisper cloaking. I had the option to use the de-cloak to either de-cloak straight in the following turn with say a three bank to target the lone Loo boat or a left de-cloak with a bank to target the same ship but out of arc. This could leave me vulnerable to one of the other two loo boats if they were to three bank towards the middle.
Turn two
Cpt JB: Time to get clever with the tie fighters so I hard one turned the closest Tie Fighter towards the scouts and barrel rolled left and hard three and barrel rolled with the other to line up potential blocks in the centre for the next turn. The Scouts all moved as I predicted and I had de-cloaked off to the left with Whisper and followed up with a two bank left. I toyed with barrel rolling to my right to take me out of range of the proton scout but this would leave me vulnerable to a plasma torpedo from the flanking one. Having been in this position before I opted to evade.
Soontir did a straight five forwards and then barrel rolled right towards the board edge to get out of range of the flanking scout. I could have target locked to check range but I had a feeling that I would be in range and didn’t want to be restricted to a hard two manoeuvre to turn back in towards the scout.
Shooting was relatively uneventful as I rolled all of one hit with Whisper but this time when the proton torpedo came my way I rolled three evades to the four incoming hits. The ties both striped a shield off the proton scout.
Turn three
Cpt JB: The two scouts on my left had only one route through the rocks so I decided to block it all up with Tie fighters and let Whisper and Soontir attack the one tippy toeing through the middle. Whisper de-cloaked forwards to slip between a couple of rocks whilst the closest tie Fighter to Whisper did a three bank and a barrel roll left to block up the path for the proton Boba scout. The other Tie fighter did a straight 4 and focused.
This caused the loo boats to clatter into the first Tie fighter whilst the flanking one did a straight one and focused. Whisper did a hard one right behind it and for a moment I thought about going offensive and focusing but decided to play it safe and evade. Soontir did a hard one towards it. I had contemplated a hard two but wanted to play it safe on the off chance that he did something a bit unpredictable like an S-loop.
This meant I was currently in the dead zone of the scout’s arc and I was not sure if a straight one boost would get me into range one safety. I barrel rolled left and then did a one bank boost inwards the scout. My back edge of the base still hung out in it’s fire arc so no auto thrusters. Whisper shot first scoring three hits whilst Soontir rolled a hit and two focus so I reluctantly spent that and dropped the scout to four hull.
In return the other two scouts shot at Whisper from range with their primary weapons to no avail whilst the scout at range one of Soontir got two hits and I rolled two evades. one of my Tie fighters shot the rear most scout at range one scoring three hits.
Turn four
Cpt JB: I wanted to finish the wounded scout off so continued to use the two academies as mobile asteroids. I de-cloaked Whisper to the right between the rocks to the nswing back in and either get range on the wounded scout or possibly a shot on the Proton torpedo one. The tie fighter on my left did a three straight and evaded to block the rear most scout from attacking Whisper whilst the Tie Fighter in the middle did a hard one right and evade to cover the Proton Scout.
This worked perfectly as the both bumped into the Tie fighters whilst the badly mauled one on four hull |
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